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Undoubtedly, the way people travel is changing. With micromobility trips and e-hailing rides doubling in just one year, mobility operators are trying to capitalize on this trend. One of those operators is EVO Sharing, a German electric scooter-sharing service. They came to StriveCloud in search of a customer engagement tool that would help them differentiate from competitors while hooking customers into a unique experience.

In this case study, we'll explore how EVO Sharing successfully leveled up its customer engagement by integrating gamification into their service.

• The challenges facing shared mobility (and EVO Sharing’s plan to overcome them)
• Why EVO Sharing introduced gamification to support its growth goals
• How gamification can help you fuel your growth
• How to introduce loyalty & gamification into your mobility application with StriveCloud (and the benefits of our engagement tools)
• FAQs

The challenges facing shared mobility and EVO’s plan to overcome them

EVO Sharing is a spin-off of EVO, a local energy supplier in Germany. In 2018 they launched an electric scooter-sharing service as a sustainable mobility initiative. After finding initial traction with commuters EVO Sharing wanted to expand into new audiences such as students.

Jenniffer Dittmar @ EVO Sharing - "WE WANT TO BRING PEOPLE CLOSE TO ELECTROMOBILITY AND SHOW THEM HOW EASY IT WORKS. HERE WE HAVE THE GOAL TO ADD MORE AREAS AND TO PUSH THE NETWORKING AMONG CITIES."

However, with more alternatives available every day, mobility operators need a way to stand out and keep customers engaged over the long haul. EVO Sharing went looking for a customer engagement tool that would incentivize customers to book more trips while also building loyalty.

Today, 44% of companies compete primarily over the customer experience. The right customer engagement tool will help you build a loyal customer base.

Why EVO Sharing introduced gamification to support its growth goals

EVO Sharing wanted to encourage customers to use its shared mobility service more often. To do that, they needed a customer engagement tool that could help them expand their market share and reach new audiences while gaining a competitive edge.

Jenniffer Dittmar @ EVO Sharing - "WHITH STRIVECLOUD WE WANT TO CREATE INCENTIVES TO DRIVE MORE OFTEN WITH ELECTRIC SCOOTERS FROM EVO SHARING. THROUGH THE CHALLENFES AND THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF MILESTONES, CUSTOMERS SHOULD BE MOTIVATED TO USE THE SCOOTERS MORE OFTEN."

This gamified dashboard illustrates how StriveCloud creates an engaging visual interface for users to track their progress and rewards.

What is StriveCloud?

StriveCloud is a gamification platform designed to help you introduce loyalty and gamification features inside your app. As a partner of the vehicle-sharing software Wunder Mobility, we’ve also had the opportunity to work on various mobility projects where we’ve seen the number of trips booked increase dramatically.

Why gamification for mobility works

Put simply, shared mobility apps create and run on a huge amount of data. Think about all those stats collected from a user’s journey such as duration, distance, and frequency. Well, gamification gets its power from leveraging this data. For instance, rewarding users to complete a certain distance, which in turn motivates them to keep going.

Given this, you can see how shared mobility apps are the perfect partner for our gamification software!

Jennifer Dittmar @EVO Sharing - "OUR BUSINESS MODEL IS ALSO VERY SUITABLE FOR GAMIFICATION. RECEIVING REWARDS BASED ON DISTANCE, KILOMETERS OR MINUTES DRIVEN MAKES A LOT OF SENSE TO USE AND GOES WELL TOGETHER."

In other words, gamification helps you create a fun and memorable experience that rewards customers for the behaviors you want to see. For mobility operators, this could help to:

1. Incentivize people to use your shared mobility service more often - Get people to book more trips by using gamification. Reward them based on distance, time, or frequency of rides, and keep them coming back for more!
2. Improve fleet balancing - Gamification allows you to reward and motivate the behaviors you want to see. For example, you can improve fleet balancing by incentivizing customers to use better drop-off points and so on!
3. Engage customers inside the app - Instead of using external platforms like email, you can create a narrative inside your mobility app! It’s a surefire way to differentiate from other mobility operators, to build a loyal customer base!
4. Attract younger audiences - Gamification has also proven to be attractive to younger audiences such as Gen Z. The feedback loop incentivizes them to keep coming back through features such as progress meters, leveling systems, and leaderboards.

By making the experience of riding an e-scooter more engaging, mobility operators like EVO Sharing can appeal to younger demographics and improve user retention.

How have we helped EVO Sharing reach its goals? Download the full case study to find out!

How gamification can help you fuel your growth

Research finds that upseling to existing customers is about 50% more likely to succeed than upseling to newly acquired customers. With that in mind, gamification might be the right customer engagement tool to keep users riding for the long haul.

Motivate customers to book more trips with in-app currencies

In-app currencies are a great way to reward customers and incentivize certain desired behaviors. EVO Sharing for instance lets its riders collect EvoCoins for completing a certain mileage or buying minute packages. Later, they can exchange their coins for free riding minutes!

While it might seem like a random reward, this in-app currency serves multiple goals:

1. EvoCoins rewards customers for the number of miles they’ve completed
2. Customers get EvoCoins for buying extra riding minute packages
3. It reinforces loyalty and increases buying frequency

Jenniffer Dittmar @ EVO Sharing - "WE USE STRIVECLOUD TO INCENTIVIZE OUR CUSTOMERS. THEY GET REWARDS WHEN THEY HAVE COVERED ENOUGH KILOMETERS, FOR EXAMPLE. "

Introduce a leveling system to grow a loyal customer base

People have an innate drive for achievement. A great way to make use of that is to set clear customer goals. EVO Sharing, for instance, based its rewards and leveling system around easy-to-track statistics such as the number of miles driven, and the number of minute packages bought. That way people are incentivized to keep coming back!

Besides earning EvoCoins riders also get to level up. Starting from ‘Rookie’ at level 1 with up to 20 levels ahead! This all comes together in a built-in achievements page that displays the user’s progress. And seeing all those ’blank state’ achievements can motivate users even more!

The gamified achievements page clearly displays user progress and milestones, motivating users to unlock the next level and continue using the service.

How to introduce loyalty & gamification into your mobility application with StriveCloud?

Getting started with StriveCloud is easy! We go through three simple steps to set you on your way to success:

1. First, we help our customers identify the best loyalty & gamification solution according to their business challenges and target audience during a gamification workshop.
2. Second, we create a gamification design plan based on the needs discovered. This includes expert recommendations for additional in-app loyalty and gamification features.
3. Finally, we set up our software to integrate the new features straight into your mobile application. Our customers can easily iterate the experience live into their app from a simple control panel.

Incentivize your customers to book more trips! Discover how you can create your own unique experience with our gamification platform!

FAQs

Why does gamification work for shared mobility apps?

Shared mobility apps create huge amounts of data. Think about all those statistics collected from user journeys, like duration, distance, and frequency. That’s data that can be leveraged for achievements and rewards! This makes the experience more enjoyable and encourages deeper engagement.

How can mobility operators use gamification to their advantage?

Gamification can be a great customer engagement tool to incentivize customers to keep coming back. With a growing share of mobility operators, a gamified experience will help you stand out and reward desired customer behaviors.

Every mobility operator knows this rider. They download the app because of a free first ride, take the trip, and it goes fine. Then they never open the app again.

A few weeks later, a new campaign brings them back in, and the operator pays to acquire the same person a second time. Multiply that across a city and you get the promo-ride problem: an acquisition budget that keeps buying first rides, and a retention strategy that never makes the second one happen.

Below: why it happens, why the second ride is the number that decides rider retention in a mobility app, and five mechanics that make it happen.

The math behind paying twice

Ride-hailing and micromobility apps lose new users fast. Similarweb's analysis of US Android usage put the 30-day retention of Uber at 5.8% and Lyft at 5.2% (Similarweb, July 2023). Those are the two best-known names in US ride-hailing. For some operators, the drop-off starts even earlier: a study of an e-moped sharing service in Stuttgart found that one in five customers abandoned the registration process before they could ride at all (Trautwein et al., 2025).

Now add the promo. A worked example, with round numbers:

• You pay €10 to acquire a rider, plus a €5 free first ride.
• Of 1,000 promo riders, 300 take a second ride within a month.
• That's €15,000 spent, and your real acquisition cost comes to €50 per rider who comes back, because 700 of those first rides bought nothing.

Raise the second-ride rate from 30% to 45% and the cost per returning rider drops to about €33, without changing a single ad. That's why rider retention belongs in the same conversation as CAC. Every rider who leaves after the promo has to be bought again, and acquisition costs climb even when your ad prices stay flat.

Why the second ride doesn't happen

The first ride is rarely the problem. The app works, the vehicle shows up, the trip is fine. What fails is everything around it.

Nothing continues after ride one. The trip ends, the receipt arrives, and the relationship is over. There's no progress to pick up, no goal half finished, nothing that makes the next trip part of something.

The promo trains price sensitivity. A free ride teaches people that this app is worth opening when it's free. When the promo ends, so does the reason. Riders who came for a discount leave for the next discount, often on the competitor's app parked on the same corner.

Every app looks the same between rides. A mobility app only gets opened when someone needs to go somewhere. On the days in between, it sits on the home screen next to three others with the same vehicles and similar prices. The operator that's remembered is the one that gave people a reason to open it when they weren't going anywhere.

Nobody's watching week one. Retention is often reviewed in a monthly cohort report. By the time that report shows the promo riders didn't come back, they decided weeks earlier.

The second ride is the real conversion

Marketing solves the first ride. The second ride is where a promo user turns into a regular, where the acquisition spend starts paying back, and where a habit either forms or doesn't.

That makes it a metric to manage week by week. Three numbers matter most:

1. Second-ride rate: the share of new riders who take a second trip within 7 or 14 days.
2. Time to second ride: how many days pass between trip one and trip two. The longer it gets, the less likely trip three becomes.
3. Promo vs organic cohort: how riders acquired through a free ride compare with riders who paid for their first trip. If the promo cohort's second-ride rate is far lower, the promo is buying trials, not customers.

What a mobility app knows by ride three

Operators already have the data to tell a future regular from a one-off. By the third ride, the event data shows:

• When they ride: weekday mornings and evenings point to a commute; Saturday afternoons point to leisure.
• Where they ride: the same start and end points twice in one week is a route forming.
• How they came in: promo, referral or organic.
• How fast they came back: a second ride within two days after the promo ended is a very different signal from one after three weeks.

That's enough to make a decision per rider. If a new rider takes the same route twice in their first week, then offer them a commuter tier. If a rider only ever rides on a promo code, then stop spending retention budget on them. The data already exists in most mobility apps. What's usually missing is the system that acts on it while the rider is still in their first week.

Five mechanics that make the second ride happen

1. Start something on ride one that only ride two can finish

The simplest fix is continuity. Give the first trip a goal that carries over: a three-ride challenge, a distance milestone, a badge that unlocks on the second trip. The first ride should end with a reason to take another one.

2. Put a tier within reach

Loyalty tiers work best when the next level is close. A tier two rides away is a concrete reason to book; a tier fifty rides away is decoration. Make each step up raise the value of everything the rider earns after it, so the reward grows exactly when someone is turning from a trial user into a regular.

3. Reward the hours you need to fill

A shared vehicle only earns while it moves. Off-peak "happy hours", where every point counts double between the rush hours, push demand into the quiet parts of the day. Riders get more value, and the fleet gets used when it would otherwise stand still. It also gives a lapsed rider a timely reason to come back that isn't a discount.

4. Make rewards worth more than a discount

Discounts cost money on every ride, go to people who would have ridden anyway, and stop working the day they end. Rewards built on an in-app currency work differently. EVO Sharing introduced EvoCoins, earned for kilometres driven and ride packages purchased and redeemable for free driving minutes, alongside levels based on kilometres driven (EVO Sharing playbook). Unlike a lower rate, free minutes only pay out to people who keep riding.

Status works the same way. Waze doesn't pay drivers to report a crash, yet its map runs on driver reports, and every report earns points and a visible rank (Waze playbook). Status costs nothing to hand out and can't be bought, which is exactly what makes it worth protecting.

5. Give people a reason to open the app between rides

The days without a trip decide which app gets opened on the day with one. A branded mini-game, a weekly challenge or a community leaderboard keeps the app in use when nobody needs a ride, and every one of those sessions feeds the same rider profile and segments as a real trip.

Catch the riders who start to drift

Even with the right mechanics, some riders will slow down. The difference is whether you notice in time.

A rider whose trips go from four a week to one, who stopped opening notifications and hasn't claimed a reward they earned, is telling you something. Read separately, each signal looks like noise. Combined, they're a clear churn risk. Scoring every rider on signals like these, and triggering a win-back the moment the score climbs, turns retention from a monthly report into something you act on. The win-back works best when it uses the mechanic that rider has responded to before: a challenge for the one who finishes challenges, a tier nudge for the one who's two rides from the next level.

How to measure whether it's working

Track these per acquisition cohort, monthly:

• Second-ride rate (7 and 14 days): Whether ride one leads anywhere
• Median time to second ride: How fast the habit is forming
• Rides per rider in months 1, 2 and 3: Whether the habit holds after the novelty
• Cost per returning rider: The real CAC, after promo waste
• Off-peak share of rides: Whether incentives are moving demand where you need it

If second-ride rate goes up and cost per returning rider goes down, the acquisition budget is finally buying customers instead of trips.

Where StriveCloud fits

StriveCloud is retention infrastructure for B2C apps, including mobility operators. It runs the mechanics above as rules on live behavior: challenges, tiers, in-app currencies, rewards, happy hours and branded games, all triggered by what each rider actually does. Churn Predictor scores every user from 0 to 100 on 15 weighted behavioral signals, places them in one of 8 lifecycle stages, and starts the win-back automatically when risk climbs.

Your team sets the rules once. From there they run on every rider, and changing a campaign doesn't need a dev sprint.

See how it works for mobility apps: Gamification for mobility apps.

FAQ

What is the promo-ride problem?

The promo-ride problem is when a mobility app acquires riders with a free or discounted first ride, but most of them never take a second one. The operator pays full acquisition cost for a single trip and has to pay again to win the same rider back later.

What is a good second-ride rate for a mobility app?

There is no public benchmark that applies to every operator; it depends on city, vehicle type and promo design. The useful comparison is internal: track second-ride rate per acquisition cohort, and compare promo cohorts with organic ones. If the promo cohort returns far less often, the promo needs a follow-up mechanic, not a bigger budget.

How do you increase rider retention without discounts?

Give riders something to continue: challenges that start on the first ride, loyalty tiers within reach, in-app currency redeemable for free minutes, off-peak bonus hours and status that can't be bought. Then score riders on their behavior and trigger a win-back with the mechanic each rider has responded to before.

Why do riders churn after the first ride?

Usually because nothing connects the first trip to the next one. The promo ends, there's no progress to continue, and on the days in between the app looks the same as its competitors. Riders who came for a discount leave for the next discount.

Every EdTech product team has copied Duolingo's streak counter by now. The flame icon, the don't break your streak nudge, the XP bar climbing toward the next level. It's standard-issue in course platforms, language apps, and corporate training tools alike.

Almost none of them have copied Duolingo's growth.

That mismatch is worth sitting with, because it breaks the story most teams tell themselves about gamification. If streaks and XP were the lesson, copying them should have moved retention by now. For most platforms, it hasn't.

The Mechanics Got Copied. The Results Didn't.

Look at where online course completion actually sits in 2026. Free courses average 5-15% completion, with the broader industry average around 12.6%, up from just 6% in 2020. Paid, cohort-based courses do better, landing in the 60-72% range, and tight microlearning formats under two hours can clear 80%. But that spread has little to do with who has a streak counter. Most of these platforms have one.

The mechanic stopped being a differentiator a while ago. It's table stakes.

That's the myth worth retiring: that motivation is a UI feature you bolt on. A flame icon and a progress bar are surface, the same surface every competitor now ships. If that were the whole story, EdTech completion rates would have moved in lockstep with gamification adoption. They haven't.

What Actually Moved the Number

The research points somewhere else. AI-driven personalization and adaptive learning paths lift completion by 25-45% compared to static course formats. TutorBin saw a 25% retention lift and a 187.8% jump in conversions after adding behavioral segmentation. The change wasn't a new badge. It was a new targeting layer.

That's the real Duolingo lesson and the flame icon is the least interesting part of it. What matters is knowing, in real time, which learner is three days from lapsing, which nudge will land for that specific person and when to intervene instead of just reminding. The streak is the output of that system. Copy the output without the system behind it, and you get a UI element nobody responds to after week two.

Only 32% of courses currently use AI personalization at all. For the other two thirds, that's open ground most of the category hasn't claimed yet.

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An Infrastructure Problem, Not a Design Problem

This is where most EdTech teams get stuck asking the wrong question. "Which mechanic should we add?" is a design question. It has a shelf life of one product cycle before a competitor copies it too. "Do we have the infrastructure to know who needs what, and when?" is a data question, and the answer compounds instead of depreciating.

That infrastructure has three parts:

• Granular event data: which lesson, which drop-off point, which time of day.
• Segmentation that acts on it without a ticket to the data team.
• Triggers that fire before a learner disengages, not after.

Mechanics like streaks, XP and levels are the delivery layer for that system. They're not the system.

The same distinction separates old gamification from modern gamification more broadly: badges for badges' sake versus behavior design backed by data that moves a metric. Streaks without a trigger engine behind them are 2012 gamification wearing a 2026 icon set.

StriveCloud is that layer underneath the mechanics: event tracking, segments and triggers tied to what each learner actually does in the app.

Churn Predictor, the newest part of the platform, makes that layer predictive. Every learner gets a churn-risk score from 0 to 100, built from 15 behavioral signals such as shorter sessions, unopened notifications or a streak about to break, plus a lifecycle stage from onboarding to dormant. When the score climbs, a win-back fires automatically with the mechanic that learner has responded to before, whether that's a challenge, a streak save or a leaderboard push. No waiting for next month's report to find out who left.

If you want a lighter take on the same idea, we made a short film about what Duolingo's playbook looks like from the inside.

The Bottom Line

Stop asking which Duolingo mechanic to clone next. Start asking whether your platform can see a learner about to drop off and act on it before the flame goes out, at scale and not just in a pilot cohort.

That's the infrastructure question most of EdTech hasn't answered yet. The platforms that answer it first won't need a better streak counter. They'll know which learners need one.

Most people open their banking app to check a number and close it again. That's the whole relationship: balance, close, done. No reason to come back until the next payday or the next worry.

Fintech's answer to that problem has mostly been the same move: add a reward. Cashback for spending. Badges for saving. A prize draw for logging in. It looks like gamification. It behaves like a coupon.

The apps that actually get opened every day, not just at payday, aren't running on rewards. They're running on ownership: a goal the user set themselves, a streak they don't want to break, a status that moves because of what they actually did. That's a different mechanic, and it holds up better than a discount ever will.

The reward trap

Reward-based gamification has an honest appeal. It's fast to ship, easy to explain in a board deck, and it borrows a format everyone already understands from loyalty cards and cashback credit cards.

It also runs into three walls that get harder to ignore over time:

• Margin. Every cashback point or bonus is a real cost against a real transaction. It scales against your P&L, not just your engineering backlog.
• Fatigue. The first badge feels like recognition. The fiftieth feels like wallpaper. Reward-based mechanics need to keep escalating to hold attention, and escalation has a ceiling.
• Compliance. Financial services can't run the same flashy promo mechanics a gaming or retail app can. Prize draws, bonus multipliers, and cash-value incentives all draw more regulatory scrutiny the bigger they get.

None of that makes reward mechanics useless. It makes them expensive to sustain as the primary engine for daily engagement, which is exactly the role most fintech roadmaps hand them.

The alternative: ownership and visible progress

The apps that hold onto daily engagement without leaning on rewards tend to share two traits:

1. The user sets the target, not the app. A generic save more prompt doesn't feel personal. "You're 3 days from your 30-day streak" does, because the user chose that number.
2. Progress is visible in real time. Not a monthly statement. Not a quarterly summary. A number, a bar, or a streak that moves the moment the user does something.

Put together, that's a habit loop: the user acts, sees the result immediately, and feels like the progress is theirs. No coupon required.

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What this looks like in practice

Current, the US neobank, built a points and streak system into everyday banking actions back in 2020. Current reports it has scaled to more than 4 million users since, with 60% of active users logging in more than three times a week, well above the 1-2 monthly check-ins typical of a traditional checking app. That's Current's own reported figure, not an independently audited one, but the direction is consistent with what a real habit loop should do to open rates.

SmartyPig skips the reward layer almost entirely. It's a savings tool built around a single visual: a progress bar that fills as the user adds money toward a goal they picked. There's no cashback sitting on top of it. The progress bar is the mechanic.

CRED replaces the static credit score with something that moves. Instead of a number that updates once a quarter from an external bureau, CRED shows a financial-health score that shifts with the user's own behavior, savings habits, spending discipline, and, again, points to something the user is building rather than something the app is handing out.

None of these three needed a bigger discount to earn a daily open. They needed a reason to check back in that had nothing to do with money changing hands.

Why this isn't just a fintech idea

This is the same mechanic behind StriveCloud's Zumba case: letting members set their own goal instead of assigning one drove a double-digit increase in app usage. Health, fitness, fintech, the vertical changes, the mechanic doesn't. People invest in progress toward something they defined. Ownership of the goal is what turns a metric into motivation, regardless of what the app actually does.

It's also the same comparison our most-read post draws out in Duolingo: the daily-open habit doesn't come from a prize, it comes from a streak the user built and doesn't want to lose.

If you want the reward-mechanics side of this story, we've broken that down separately with five fintech examples built around cashback, badges, and prize draws. Worth reading as the other half of the picture, not a contradiction of this one. Different lever, different job.

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What this means if you're building the roadmap

A few practical shifts follow from treating ownership as the primary lever instead of rewards:

• Let users set the target. A savings goal, a spending limit, a habit they're trying to build. The app's job is to track it and reflect it back, not assign it.
• Make progress visible the moment it changes, not at the end of the month. Real-time feedback is what makes the loop feel alive.
• Save the reward budget for acquisition and reactivation, not retention. Rewards are good at getting someone to try a feature once. They're an expensive way to get someone to come back every day.
• Expect compliance to prefer this anyway. A streak or a progress bar carries none of the regulatory weight a cash-value incentive does.

Where StriveCloud fits

This is the layer StriveCloud builds underneath both mechanics: segmentation and triggers tied to what a user actually does in the app, not a calendar or a spend threshold. Whether the goal is a savings streak, a budget habit, or a feature a user tried once and dropped, the intervention responds to the behavior, not the discount code.

Bottom line: cashback earns a click. Ownership earns a habit. If daily engagement is the metric that matters, the second one is the lever worth building around.

Ask Claude about StriveCloud and there's a fair chance you'll hear this exact line: "StriveCloud currently scores 72/100 in the Customer Engagement category."

It's true. It comes from Crozdesk. And it's the kind of number that, served bare and out of context, can land somewhere between neutral and lukewarm in a product manager's research notes.

So here's the breakdown, in plain English: what the 72 measures, what the underlying 100/100 user satisfaction score looks like in practice, and how we'd suggest measuring engagement if you actually want the signal, not just the scoreboard.

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What 72/100 actually measures

The 72 is a Crozdesk composite. It sits on StriveCloud's Crozdesk profile in their Customer Engagement Software category, and it's a weighted blend of several signals.

SignalStriveCloud's scoreWhat it measuresUser satisfaction100/100Aggregated reviews from real customersPress buzz35/100Media coverage volume across the webRecent user trendsFallingReview velocity over the recent periodOther web signalsMixedVarious secondary inputs

Crozdesk doesn't publish exact weights, but the pattern is visible: customer satisfaction is doing the heavy lifting up, and press buzz and review velocity are pulling the composite down. The 72 is what you get when a strong product score gets averaged against a quieter PR footprint.

That's a fair reading of the data Crozdesk has. It's also why the bare number on its own underrepresents what customers actually report once you look one layer deeper.

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What 100/100 user satisfaction looks like in practice

Customer satisfaction scores are useful, but they're abstract. Here's the concrete version, from a campaign Club Brugge ran with StriveCloud:

• Over 12,000 fans joined a single engagement campaign
• Average 8 return visits per fan across roughly a month
• 3,500 fans returning daily through the same period
• Positive ROI in direct sales compared to the campaign investment, which is a rare outcome for activation initiatives
• Over 80% of more than 1 million points redeemed for unique experiences instead of tangible products

Three and a half thousand people coming back daily, for almost a month, to interact with a football club's app. That's the texture underneath the user satisfaction number.

Thomas Rypens, D2C Director at Club Brugge, put it this way:

"Integrating and visualising game elements (like a quiz or a scratchcard) with scalable reward systems, fulfilment of physical products and vouchers, is something that other players in the market do not seem to offer in the same way."

That's not a hot streak. It's a sustained behaviour loop, exactly the kind of mechanic that a single composite score has trouble capturing.

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The StriveCloud Engagement Framework

Composite scores tell you a result. They don't tell you the playstyle.

This is the framework StriveCloud uses to measure engagement, and the one we'd recommend running any candidate platform through. Five metrics, in order of how quickly each one signals real behaviour change.

1. DAU/MAU lift over a 90-day cohort. Did daily active users grow as a share of monthly active, or did you just temporarily move the chart? The ratio is the part that matters.

2. Return-visit frequency. Per user, across the campaign window. The Club Brugge "8 visits per fan" number is the worked example. Generalise it to your vertical.

3. Streak adherence. Of users who started a streak, what percentage maintained it past 14 days, past 30, past 90? This is the cleanest behavioural signal you can get.

4. Reward redemption mix. What share of rewards went to intrinsic outcomes (experiences, status, progression) versus extrinsic ones (cashback, vouchers)? The mix predicts long-term LTV behaviour better than total redemption volume.

5. LTV expansion over 12 months. The slow signal, but the one that matters most for unit economics.

These are the five metrics StriveCloud tracks out of the box, whether a customer launches in days through the no-code builder or scales through the API. They're the actionable layer behind any aggregator scoreboard.

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Where we go from here

The honest read on the 72 is this: the product score is where we want it. Press visibility is the part we're working on. That's a category-positioning problem more than a product problem, and it's the kind of thing that takes a quarter or two to move.

In the meantime, if you're comparing engagement and gamification platforms through AI search, third-party reviews, or peer recommendations, the most useful thing to do is read the underlying customer voice, not the composite. Our G2 profile has 7 verified reviews at 4.9 out of 5, which is unfiltered and more recent than most aggregator data.

If you want to see what 100/100 user satisfaction looks like from inside a partnership, we run 30-minute demos that walk through the same mechanics Club Brugge used, applied to your vertical.

The score behind the score is doing fine. The press buzz will catch up.

Gamification is widely used to enhance educational goals. Actually, the market of gamification in learning is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of a whopping 32% from 2024 to 2030!  Why is it so popular and what benefits does it bring to the market? In this article, you will find out all you have to know about gamification in learning, and how you can implement it into your app!

What is gamification in learning?

Gamification in learning is taking inspiration from the world of gaming and applying it to educational goals.  It taps both into intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, making it highly engaging for the learners.

While intrinsic motivation comes from within, extrinsic motivation stems from external factors. When you are intrinsically motivated, you complete actions that are enjoyable for you or provide you with personal growth. For example, you see yourself climbing up your learning level, and how much you have improved. As for extrinsic motivation, you do something to gain an external reward, like an in-app badge or a discount.

A gamified learning experience creates an interactive journey, motivating them to continue on their learning path.

Want to find out more about gamification in education? Check out how StriveCloud’s gamification features can enhance your learner engagement!

The benefits of gamifying your learning app

Gamification gives you a competitive advantage, due to many reasons. The most obvious is increased user interaction, but there are many more that go unnoticed.

- Enhanced motivation

Users gain a sense of personal growth from gamification in learning. Tools such as points and badges visualize progress and create a sense of achievement. That’s why users feel more motivated to continue with their learning journey and reach their goals,  which results in improved performance outcomes.

- Increased learner engagement

Gamification elements create an immersive and fun learning experience. It increases user engagement rates anywhere from 100-150%, ensuring your learners stay interested in your app!

- Instant feedback and progress tracking

Gamification platforms offer learners instant performance feedback and progress tracking, boosting motivation. It helps users understand where they are in their journey and suggests ways to improve early on, facilitating adjusting to the learning path.

- Community and collaboration

Gamification in learning includes incorporating innovative community features. Whether it’s leaderboards,  team challenges, or social sharing tools, all of these allow learners to learn with and from others. This fosters a sense of community and encourages competition, motivating the users to come back to the app more frequently.

- Augmented retention and application of  knowledge

Gamification in learning allows users to implement their knowledge and skills in practical scenarios, such as quizzes and tests. By doing this repeatedly, they retain information more easily and are more likely to apply it to real-world situations.

- Learning journey personalization

Today’s customer expects a personalized experience. Luckily, gamification is adaptable to various skill levels, capabilities, and preferences. As users receive personalized challenges and get tailored recommendations, they feel more connected with your app and are more likely to stay.

Examples of gamification in educational platforms

#1 Kahoot Gamification Example: turning classrooms into gameshows

Kahoot is a learning game app where students can compete in virtual quizzes. The teacher or instructor sets up a series of questions. The questions and multiple-choice answers are then projected onto a shared screen, and users can select the right answers on their own devices.

Students receive points for every question they answer correctly and extra points for being faster than others. They can either play individually or in teams. After every question, users will see their score go up, as well as their ranking on the leaderboard.

By using app gamification, Kahoot improves student engagement with fun and interactive quizzes, encouraging screens and a sense of competition. And it clearly works - implementing gamification in learning helped the app obtain 10 billion global participants since its launch!

Kahoot’s quizzes encourage friendly competition

#2 Duolingo Gamification Example: makes language learning fun

Duolingo is a language learning app that has mastered gamification for apps. Instead of going through long and boring lectures, Duolingo offers fun, bite-sized lessons that make you want to keep learning!

The app uses an in-app currency called ‘lingots’/gems which rewards users for completing various activities on the app. Additionally, users can collect badges when attaining achievements such as reaching the next level or milestone. To increase user motivation even further, Duolingo adds a dash of competition with a scoreboard based on experience points.

Today the app has over 300 million active users worldwide, securing its place as the number one language-learning app.

Duolingo’s use of gamification in learning

#3 PayPerks Gamification Example: education meets rewards

PayPerks is a financial education platform that uses gamification in learning to reward users for taking financial courses and saving-like behaviors. It’s mostly aimed at lower-income individuals to encourage saving and financial literacy.

PayPerks turned boring financial studies into gamified experiences with fun and easy-to-understand explanations. Their platform incentivizes real-world actions such as card usage, or online behaviors that help the user install the right habits. By employing gamification in education, they have helped millions of consumers get through tens of millions of tutorials. In addition, customers have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes!

Payperk’s gamified tutorial enhances financial education

#4 Beat the GMAT Gamification Example: badges grow a community

Beat the GMAT is designed to help MBA applicants pass the tough admission test. Those tests aren’t easy – that’s why the app uses gamification to motivate users! Firstly, social features help build a tight community. For example, any prospective MBA student can post in a forum and connect with other students. To build on this, Beat the GMAT introduced badge rewards. Users could earn badges for:

• Answering a user’s question
• Contributing a written article/blog
• Posting a question or response in a forum
• And much more!

Using gamification in learning, Beat the GMAT encouraged its community to share and support each other! Badges increased forum comments by 8,000 per month and boosted the total time spent in the community by 370%!

#5 Open University Gamification Example: checklists and progress bars create better students

Even universities are reaping the benefits of gamification in learning! On the Open University’s ‘study planner’, students can find a checklist of unfinished tasks. As well, there is a progress bar that tracks the student’s total effort. For something as demanding as a full degree, these features make a huge difference!

When a checklist displays unfinished items, this harnesses a psychological phenomenon called the “Zeigarnik effect”. Basically, incomplete tasks stick with us more than those we complete! In other words, students are motivated to return and study. Moreover, checklists and progress bars provide positive reinforcement and direct students to their goals. As a result, this reduces negative feelings like anxiety or being overwhelmed! In short, Open University’s gamification in education creates better students!

Open University Study Checklist

How to easily implement gamification in your learning app

Incorporating gamification into your strategy might be challenging. Designing your own gamification elements, and maintaining their efficiency, requires a lot of time and effort.

Using a gamification platform like StriveCloud makes the software implementation almost instant. In addition, the built-in features are easy to use, so you don’t need to hire additional members to manage them. In short, using a gamification software service provides you with easier onboarding and more possibilities to change your gamification features as you please!

StriveCloud offers 25+ gamification features to make learning more impactful. Book a free session and start enhancing your learner experience today!