Pinduoduo’s tried-and-tested fission activity, why can’t you make good use of it?

Seeing that Pinduoduo's fission business is booming, are you tempted? Regarding the problems in fission activities, the wool party is undoubtedly a headache. How to avoid the wool party and play fission well?

November is the busiest time. Are you suddenly contacted by your ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, elementary school classmates, long-lost friends, or colleagues who have suddenly become popular?

But don't worry, they are not starting to do micro-business or sell insurance, nor are they asking for wedding gifts, but Double 11 is coming!

After Double 11, I have always wanted to write an exclusive interview with an operator. Unfortunately, during this period, everyone was busy achieving year-end performance, and everyone was rejected no matter who they asked. So today I will change the topic and talk about the fission routines that have been popular in e-commerce in those years.

In 2016, Pinduoduo, a monster in the e-commerce industry, showed us the true power of fission for the first time. Since then, fission has become one of the important criteria for evaluating operators.

The current fission mainly revolves around the WeChat ecosystem. People who do fission have a very advanced term called "traffic pool thinking", which emphasizes how to convert traffic more effectively and use a group of existing users to find more new users. To obtain the lowest-cost traffic, the way is very simple, that is "fission".

The essence of fission is to grab the last bit of traffic dividend of WeChat with the lowest cost and the most ingenious method, and to make the most of it in an era when the demographic dividend is disappearing.

Fission! Fission! How powerful is fission?

Because of fission, Pinduoduo has gained 300 million users in just three years, with a market value of nearly 40 billion US dollars!

In less than 24 months, Qutoutiao has gained 180 million users, with daily active users reaching over 10 million!

Mint Reading launched an activity to read 3 original English books in 100 days, and its revenue reached 50 million in 2 months!

NetEase’s viral course dyed the circle of friends red, attracting 130,000 people to sign up and pay within 12 hours of its launch, and the final number of learners exceeded 210,000!

Lian Coffee launched the “1 Yuan New Product Group Buying” function in its mini program, which received 5 million PVs in one day and consumed a month’s worth of raw material inventory in just 3 hours, so it had to be temporarily offline!

The data speaks for itself; fission is becoming the core competitiveness of the new generation of operations.

So, as an operator, have you also started to follow suit, or group fission, or assisted fission, or invited fission, or shared fission, no matter how they change, they basically all belong to these four types of gameplay.

But why is it that nothing you do works?

Why can’t we learn the fission of Pinduoduo and Qutoutiao?

The editor also comes from an operations background, so he has repeatedly tried to open up Pinduoduo's fission-like traffic channels, hoping to get a share of WeChat's 1 billion traffic pool, but most of them have not been very successful. For example, common template messages were blocked, push interfaces were blocked, mini-programs were warned, etc. We once blamed it on the fact that we were not the children of "Tencent Dad". But to be honest, these small setbacks are definitely not the root cause of failure.

The real reason is very simple: conversion fission requires subsidies, subsidies will attract freeloaders, and with freeloaders, there will be gain and loss points, and the involvement of interests will induce a variety of related results.

Questions such as:

1. When the freeloaders are testing the platform’s cost bottom line, can the platform provide enough subsidies to maintain the attractiveness of fission?

Let’s take Pinduoduo’s group buying as an example. It is really stress-free for it:

• Pinduoduo's customer unit price is very low, about 5 to 50 yuan, and the tail goods, workshops, and C2B-driven end supply chain ensure that the procurement cost is low enough;
• Low prices of course mean low quality. Everyone knows that Pinduoduo’s products are cheap, and everyone is also clear about their quality. However, the same products may not be priced low when placed in a bargaining group.

Compared to Pinduoduo, the educational platform that the editor used to work on offered video courses, which were 1:1 actual payment. In addition to the cost of the platform, there is also the tuition fee for the instructor, and the average customer price is basically above 400-500. The few low-priced goods that can be sold are also hard currency with clearly marked prices. They are used for group buying, which is really naked and infinitely transparent.

In this case, if the difficulty of group buying is similar to that of Pinduoduo, the cost the platform has to pay will be several times higher than that of Pinduoduo; if the difficulty is raised, almost no one can participate.

Pinduoduo focuses on a low-end and opaque supply chain, controlling the unit cost of social fission to the lowest in the industry. With low costs, the difficulty of completing fission can be controlled, and Pinduoduo's "group buying culture" can be formed.

1. Among the freeloaders, can we screen out enough qualified traffic to support the KPI of this event?

The core of the fission propagation gameplay is "sharing" - user A sends an invitation code and invitation link to other users, user B successfully registers through the invitation, and user A obtains corresponding rewards; user B obtains certain incentives and is transformed into the role of active initiator A again to carry out the cycle. Even if the process of acquiring user B is interrupted, there will be countless substitute operations of A giving birth to B. Of course, this is the ideal way of playing.

How do the opportunistic wool party members play the game?

First of all, in order to facilitate profit, you first need a convenient tool - equipment card. Next, register a large number of accounts through tools such as cat pools and equipment farms, and then, based on the different reward models of different platforms, the ones that play fission are currently e-commerce and content information platforms as well as the emerging online earning apps. These platforms are also the hardest hit by freeloaders. The problems and forms of cheating encountered in other industries may overlap or fall somewhere between them.

Let's take these three platforms as examples for analysis. The following two types of cheating often occur, but the methods of cheating in different industries are slightly different, as follows:

1) The old users bring in the new users, which produces cheating users

It is common in the e-commerce industry. In the false fission scenario of e-commerce platforms, there are usually the following four roles: platform, old user A, invited new user B and real user C.

The relationship between these four is: old user A obtains a large number of accounts through batch registration, participates in invitation activities (which may be bargaining, group buying, sharing, etc.), sends discounted products purchased at low prices to the designated address for collection, and then resells them to real customers at a higher price through its own distribution platform to make a profit. The real users here are usually called "wool-collecting parties."

At this point, we see that the cheating chain of marketing activities is as follows:

Old and new gameplay, cheating link diagram

Of course, with the development of hard-working people's unlimited brain power, some smart wool-gathering parties will play it like this: wool-gathering parties collude with merchants, participate in invitation activities, obtain subsidies issued by the platform, and then manipulate a large number of fake accounts to purchase merchants' products, helping merchants to brush orders while defrauding subsidies and completing cashing out.

At this time, a gray industrial chain has emerged between merchants and the wool-gathering party, and between the wool-gathering party and the platform, which we figuratively call the "black industry." The profits of the black industry are the difference between reselling prices and the preferential fees subsidized by the platform, which is double the value.

This will bring hidden dangers to the platform. For example, in the short term, inventory may be occupied and ordinary users may be unable to purchase discounted products, leading to customer complaints; in the long term, it may cause user loss and affect the platform's brand and credibility.

2) The mentoring/distribution model generates cheating users: often seen on news information flow platforms and online earning apps

① News information flow platform

The "master-apprentice" system was made popular by news information flow platforms such as Qutoutiao, which can be called the "Pinduoduo" of the information flow industry.

Users who convert, consume, and retain due to fission are mostly gathered because of rewards rather than demand for products. The master-apprentice system is actually a simplified distribution model. "Master" (old user) can not only get cashback rewards for inviting "apprentices" (new users), but if the "apprentice" invites "grand-apprentices" (other new users) to join the platform, the "master" can also get tribute rewards.

A new form of cheating will emerge, namely the account chain relationship - A invites B, B invites C, C invites D... and there are almost no derivative invitations at all the nodes in between.

At this time, the marketing activity is presented as follows:

Master-apprentice gameplay, cheating link diagram

② Online Earning APP

In the era of "traffic is king" on the Internet, a large number of subsidies, red envelopes, lotteries, etc. have given rise to a special industrial chain - online earning APP. Online earning APPs build promotion channels for advertisers, and then use the online earning groups to earn promotion fees. Most online earning APPs will also build a "disciple recruitment system" to form "traffic fission" through the method of users independently developing downlines, and obtain high advertising commissions.

The scenario and problem we often encounter here is: the promotion funds that could have been used for a quarter only lasted less than a week?

Little do they know that their promotional expenses have actually fallen into the pockets of the black industry. There is a group of lawless elements roaming around online money-making apps, who cheat and increase the volume of traffic to obtain promotion fees from advertisers at a low cost, and at the same time fleece regular online money-making companies.

So how do they cheat?

In fact, their cheating methods are also based on the "recruiting new disciples" mechanism and the reading income mechanism. The profits from the apprentice's reading can be fed back to the master, and the master's operation of "recruiting new apprentices" itself also brings direct benefits. At this time, there are many script developers in the industry chain who make profits by developing automatic reading and batch registration scripts, and spreading them through sales or recruiting disciples (free of charge if you fill in an invitation code).

Their cheating chain is as follows:

Summarize

To sum up, let us review again the group of people who come to get bargains: as the name suggests, people who come to get bargains are here to get bargains. This group can sacrifice a lot of time to pursue the slightest profit. They have no resistance to bargains and are extremely insensitive to quality.

From this point of view, the "wool party" itself is the user group of Pinduoduo, Qutoutiao, and online earning apps. To put it bluntly, wool is just a part of their supply and demand relationship. The failure of most imitators is also because they do not have the ability and resources to digest and undertake these wool parties, but is this your user base?

Therefore, in the fission activities that we imitate, the ones who come to play are not the target users, but the wool parties that we want to avoid. The subsequent conversion rate of these freeloaders is extremely poor, and I believe that the supply chains of many companies will be disrupted. As a result, the greater the fission, the greater the loss, the unit ROI cannot support a closed loop worth replicating, and the final result is only failure.

The promotion expenses spent by enterprises cannot really promote sales conversion and brand enhancement. Instead, the beautiful data has created a "false prosperity". Don't the responsible persons have an idea of ​​the real effects and data?

However, as the editor mentioned before, fission has become one of the ability indicators for assessing operators. No matter you are doing it for KPI or because you are brave enough to try and fail, you still have to use the method of fission, it is indispensable.

This is why there are still people who keep trying. Another reason is that during the operation, we are unable to identify which customers and data can produce real and effective results. An activity seems to be effective but also not very ideal, but where exactly is the problem?

We are constantly trying and making mistakes, trying to find the answer: "I know that half of the expenses are wasted, but I don't know which half and where they are wasted?"

Based on the editor’s previous experience in operations, how to solve the above problems is nothing more than judging the real users through continuous trial and error, continuous “optimization” and “adjustment” of rules, but what is the final result of setting too high an activity threshold?

When I was doing operations, I was once affectionately described by lovely users as "the most difficult event planner in history." The following is one of the scenes where I often talk to the company's product and technical guys:

Actually, now I think I was too young back then. Marketing activities are nothing more than cheating starting from the registration entrance. We can strengthen the risk control management of registered accounts and enhance business resistance capabilities from the source. This can be achieved without having to use our own technology.

Such as current software products specifically designed to prevent cheating, device fingerprints, verification codes and other products. For example, Dingxiang's "SaaS Risk Control" has the function of preventing fraudulent activities such as freeloading, scalpers reselling, etc. in marketing activities such as cash red envelopes, coupons, and flash sales, and most importantly, it is free.

In order to solve the problems caused by the "wool-pulling party", we must cut off their possibility of "wooling the wool" from the entrance.

Author: Financial Guest

Source: Financial Customer