How does product operation achieve user fission?

Invitation is one of the ways to achieve product fission, and it is also a low-cost way to achieve self-fission. There are many businesses on Douyin that buy advertisements to promote their apps. Most of these apps have not developed their own fission capabilities and are busy pinning their hopes on advertisers, buying bubble traffic that is not targeted at their customer base.

1. Where to go - behavioral path

Why do you write "where" the invited new guests will go in the first link? Because the first thing you need to understand is what you want the new users to do on your platform as a product. Do they want to browse articles to earn advertising fees, or browse products to generate purchasing behavior? The design of this kind of connection path is crucial for conversion. Therefore, it is best to arrange the path for new customers before carrying out new customer acquisition activities to avoid the situation where the new users cannot generate conversions and waste traffic.

In fact, inviting new users is not the goal but a means. This is why many activities just for the sake of attracting new users may look good on the surface, but the conversion rate is pitifully low when you simply look at the table of the number of new users.

So how do we plan the behavioral path for new users? To understand the habits of the platform's target audience, it is necessary to find overlapping users with the same labels among existing users, and then use the funnel method to analyze the global path map of such users to explore the user psychology and product usage habits behind them.

Let’s take a case study to improve the sharing rate of invitation activities:

Hope: Home page - banner (get a gift upon entering) - event details page - share with friends

Question: The UV click rate of the event details page reaches 80%, but only 30% can be shared. What should I do?

Solution:

1) Based on the user behavior path reflected by the embedded data, analyze the reasons for the low sharing rate by customer group;

2) Analyze the psychology behind user behavior paths based on customer groups;

3) Make different product improvements for different psychological users

1. For those who ignore the activity (not tempting enough/not touching enough) - you can improve the threshold of impressing users by optimizing the copy + rewarding; result - click rate increased by 5 points
2. Targeting those who just take the gift and leave - after users enter the page and quickly jump out of the page, they will automatically enter the page where they will be given a 9.9 product if they sign in for a month continuously, which attracts users in the long term; result - the final click increased by 10 points

In summary, to analyze the user's behavioral path, we should observe the conversions and losses of each path, lock in the loss users by clicks, locate the causes and screen out convertible users, outline the bifurcated paths in product design, and "prescribe the right medicine" for different psychological driving factors.

2. Who to invite - User analysis

1. How to select users

The second step is to identify the target audience to invite and attract new customers based on your expectations for product conversions. In other words, you need to rely on the product's business model and identify a certain group of people in the app's demand customer base.

If you are a shopping platform, you may focus on inviting users who are inclined to receive rebates. If you are a women's community like Mayu, you may focus on inviting users who have a demand for maternal and child products. Alternatively, the customer base can be defined based on the business model. For example, platforms like Qutoutiao that sell advertising traffic will attract lower-income people with plenty of free time.

2. How to choose bait

The importance of customer base lies in that it directly determines the form of the bait. The form of the bait can actually refer to the value theory in my previous article "How to Build a Growing Membership System", which can be divided into monetary value, functional value, and psychological value.

Most invitation mechanisms now design bait based on monetary value. For example, for vertical customer groups such as mothers and babies, the bait is rewards for mother and baby products. For "small town youth", a certain amount of cash rebate is given.

Like Crazy Novels, the benefit of inviting friends: collect 10 diamonds to get a Huawei P30pro. Another example is Shuabao Short Video, the fastest growing online money-making app in November. Benefits of inviting friends: You will get 100,000 points on the day of invitation. After the invitation is successful, friends will get 20,000 points if they watch videos for three consecutive days. If friends continue to watch videos every day, they will get 260,000 points. Each friend can help you with up to 260,000 points, with a maximum of 380,000 points.

This feedback path is mixed with long-term control of user psychology. However, many people only copy the surface form when imitating it. It is impossible to replicate its successful model by simply imitating the details such as the animated invitation button and the scrolling marquee. Only the bait selected by the target customer group is extremely attractive.

The design of the psychological value of users’ sharing behavior is what is lacking in most of the current friend invitation activities. The user base attracted by a single monetary value is mostly money-sensitive users. This type of users can be used as a tool to increase traffic and harvest advertisers' profits. However, if there are long-term expectations for customer quality and conversion, this blind conversion method may not be effective.

So how can we shape the psychological value of sharing among users and make them willing to share?

3. How to shape the willingness to share

If you want to design a sharing activity that satisfies users’ psychological values, the best way is to analyze the content that is widely shared in the WeChat Moments, a circle of acquaintances. Socializing is a need for beauty. The spontaneous psychology of sharing comes from the emotional connection and the self-need to show off. Such as the "Scallop Check-in" friend invitation activity, or inviting friends to win Python learning tutorials to attract new content.

Why does no one write restaurant reviews on word-of-mouth platforms, but the review rate on Dianping is so high? Because most of the reviews on word-of-mouth platforms are about fast food chains. Who would review KFC, Starbucks, or Yonghe King?

Why do loan apps have high rewards for inviting friends but low participation? Because the process of inviting friends will expose their own borrowing needs. Everyone wants to share good and show-off content, but who would be willing to share their own loan needs? In fact, the invitation activities of loan apps can share some financial management skills, policy trends, and even the secrets of selecting low-interest loan platforms, etc. This will reduce the resistance of the invited users and enhance the target audience's willingness to spread the word.

In a word, the content shared should either be useful to the person being shared, or help shape the image of the sharer in their circle of friends. Our landing page should also take this psychology as the primary factor in designing the sharing mechanism.

3. Where does the traffic come from?

From a traditional perspective, the sources of inviting friends are actually six forms: WeChat, QQ, face-to-face invitations, QQ space, Weibo, and copy link.

It is worth noting that channels, that is, the source of traffic, should not only be selected based on customer groups, but also take platform preferences, platform policies, and review mechanisms into consideration. Whether it is attracting new customers or selling advertising, you need to understand the differences between the platforms. Is it to carry out community fission on the WeChat platform, or to infiltrate thematic Q groups?

If sharing on the WeChat platform can only be displayed in the form of a link or simple pictures and texts, it is better to convert the link into a "business card" for dissemination. Even Credit Manager has a special module for generating pictures and texts. Referring to Credit Manager’s friend invitation activity, a user business card generation function has been designed separately, as shown in the figure below.

(The Black Fish, Borrow Some Money, and Credit Navigation on the left are link-based sharing, while the Credit Manager on the right is image-based sharing)

In summary, the design philosophy of inviting friends is a "three-step" strategy. The first is to clarify the behavioral path of new users invited. The second is to select users accurately, select bait and create a willingness to share after understanding their psychology. The third is to spread content in the form of rich, cutting-edge and interesting content.

If you are a product manager who is hesitant about whether to invest in advertising, please try using this three-step strategy to create product fission. Are you sure you don’t want to try this precise and efficient method?

Author: Advertising Idle People

Source: Advertising Idler