A complete guide to 5 types of fission gameplay for user growth (Part 2)

A complete guide to 5 types of fission gameplay for user growth (Part 1)

Gameplay 3: Subsidy fission

As the name suggests, subsidies attract users to participate and spread the word through direct benefits. Pinduoduo’s red envelopes and Lian Coffee’s coupons all belong to this category.

There are two points to note here. First, benefits cannot motivate everyone, and those attracted by benefits may not all be your real users. Therefore, you must first determine who your users are and what they lack, and then set up incentive bait.

Second, your gameplay must form a logical closed loop. And you need to have a clear understanding of the user experience throughout the entire fission process.

Let’s take the Lian Coffee we just talked about and break it down. Lian Coffee has two types of group buying activities: old customers bringing in new customers + everyone participating.

Old users can only start a group but cannot join one. New users can directly join a group or start a group.

Everyone can participate: both new and old users can start or join a group.

If the group purchase is successful, the drinks will be directly added to the coffee store. Place an order in the "Personal Center" for drinking.

Failure of group buying: limited to 2 hours. If the group buying fails within two hours, the amount will be refunded in full. And give a clear delivery service scope, as well as time and quantity limits.

If we organize this gameplay into a logic diagram, we can clearly see whether every old customer and new customer can form a closed loop in the fission activity.

Summary of subsidy fission: exquisite logical closed loop, iterative fission gameplay according to the target, and complete the North Star indicator.

Gameplay 4: Free fission

In Zhou Hongyi's book, he elevated free, which is obviously a tactical thing, to a strategic level, and there is a reason for that. Free services will often automatically form a traffic entrance: when we used to do group buying, the first advertisement on the homepage was always reserved for free draws, which actually served as a traffic entrance; everyone is familiar with the example of 360, which acquired a large number of users by offering its antivirus software for free, and then made money from other businesses such as browsers and security.

The "free" strategy is not used casually. It has two important principles: 1. It has value; 2. The marginal cost tends to 0.

Valuable means that it is scarce to the target users, which will lead them to come into contact with you and become your users.

A marginal cost of 0 means that my cost does not increase with each additional user. 360 makes its antivirus software free, but does it cost money to develop the software? It may be a lot, but once the software is developed, each additional user does not add any new cost. This is called marginal cost approaching zero.

When we were working on a K12 education-related self-media, we once wanted to attract parents of elementary school children. How do we do it?

Let’s first analyze what is scarce and valuable to parents of elementary school children, but has zero marginal cost for me? I found a killer weapon, which is the midterm and final examination papers of several famous schools in Beijing, such as the Primary School Affiliated to Renmin University of China. After each exam, we can acquire a new batch of users.

For teachers and parents in other places, the test papers of these famous schools are very valuable, but they are not public and there are not many channels to obtain them. We got them through various means. But for us, the cost of giving an electronic test paper to one person or to ten thousand people does not change. Through this activity, we added thousands of primary and secondary school parent users in just two days without spending a penny.

Summary of free fission: Incentive bait ≠ money and things, highlighting "scarcity" and satisfying user needs, users are still happy.

Gameplay 5: Leverage fission

During this year's National Day, I received an avatar with the "70th Anniversary" and national flag logo, which went viral on social media.

But in fact, you will find that there will be similar screen-sweeping events at every major node every year. Whether it’s the old Christmas profile picture or the military uniform photo. Therefore, taking advantage of the situation is actually a huge bonus of fission.

There is only one key point for this type of fission activity: speed. You must seize the opportunity, take advantage of the trend, and be one of the first to play, so that you have a chance to capture users. Once everyone starts playing, the opportunity will be gone in a flash.

During this year's National Day, Growth Research Institute also took advantage of the opportunity to attract a wave of users. It took us just over two hours from the time we discovered this opportunity to the time we officially launched the event.

Summary of fission by leveraging momentum: Leveraging momentum is also a bonus of fission, and only speed can succeed.

Finally, I would like to emphasize that there is not only one routine for fission, nor is it about blindly imitating others' routines. When you are doing fission, never say "there is no way". This does not mean that there must be a solution for every problem, but when you say there is no way, your thinking stops.

No matter how perfect the design is, a 100-point nationwide screen-sweeping event still requires the right time, place and people, while a 60-point fission event can be replicated in batches. Keep a belief: there will always be a cheaper and more efficient way of doing things than the current one. Keep testing and iterating quickly, and you will always find that breakthrough.