From the perspective of user motivation and long-term value, analyze how to retain users?

 This article analyzes how to retain users from the perspectives of user motivation, finding target paying users, and long-term value management.

At the current stage, the cost of acquiring customers for enterprises is getting higher and higher. Retaining users has become a more cost-effective thing than attracting new ones. Today we will talk about how to retain users.

Retention, to put it simply, means keeping users. But if we think about it more carefully, we can actually break it down into two questions:

• Why do users stay? This is a question of user motivation.
• The question is how to satisfy the user's expected value in the long term so that he can stay.

It can be said that as long as these two problems are solved well, user retention will come naturally.

1. User motivation problem: The scene is wrong, everything is wrong

Let’s start with the first question, which is user motivation. Different users often pay attention to your product based on different scenarios, different purposes, and different concerns. This directly determines what kind of value users hope to get from you and will get from you in the long run.

For example, one day you launched a fission customer acquisition activity, and users saw through their friends that they could get a free live class by downloading the app and participating in the activity.

At this time, the user downloaded the app in order to get this live class. However, when the user has finished listening to the corresponding course, you hope to use products with higher profit margins within the app: for example, when you try to convert users with a homework set, the user's payment rate will not be very high.

Because in the user's perception, the reason why he comes to the app and the value he believes the app should provide him is the course.

If a user wants to buy a set of homework books, his first choice may be platforms like Taobao and Tmall , because he trusts such platforms more. If you want to re-establish purchasing trust for users in a new scenario through your platform, the cost is often very high. It is like a communication platform that insists on selling delicious food to users. These are two businesses with relatively low coupling. Although delicious food is a high-frequency and rigid demand, users do not trust or are not used to your food recommendations on your platform .

It can be said that any operating platform has its own unique boundaries. A common misunderstanding in our operations is that we think that once we acquire a user, we have acquired everything about that user. In fact, you just get the user's solution to a certain problem. When the user makes decisions in other scenarios, he may have a better solution.

So, when you retain users, if users come because of your A motivation, but you keep promoting your other value-added services, in the eyes of users, it may just be an advertisement.

Recently I've been hearing a concept that a product often has good user experience and retention in the early stages, but as the user base grows and reaches a bottleneck, the platform begins to increase commercial exposure. Not only does commercial revenue not increase, but user experience declines. Many loyal users even turn from fans to haters and no longer pay attention to this product. At

People have lamented that commercial revenue and user experience are like the two ends of a scale. If you focus on one, you will lose the other. The key lies in how to strike a balance. But is this really the case?

Do you think there are few advertisements on Taobao Tmall? But why don’t you feel disturbed when you are “browsing” in Taobao Tmall stores? Do you think there are few advertisements on Qutoutiao? But why do you have such a high tolerance for advertisements when you are browsing Qutoutiao, and even actively browse advertisements to make money?

A more important question here is: What is advertising?

My understanding is that information and products that users do not need are advertisements. If what is provided is what the user really needs and eagerly desires, then it is a high-quality service, not an advertisement.

When you are shopping on Taobao Tmall, what you want is to buy what you want. At this time, you will not regard any product pushed to you as an advertisement, but as a product that you may need and click on it to take a look.

But if you see this product information while watching a TV series, a movie, or listening to music, regardless of whether you need the product or not, you may habitually click the "x" first. Sometimes you even click and then look back and realize: Hey, I think I was about to buy that product.

So, if the scene is wrong, everything you do may be wrong.

So if the scenario is right and the problem the user wants to solve is indeed a solution that your product can provide, will the user definitely stay?

2. Retained users do not equal paying users

Find your target paying audience and use the right marketing method to achieve the desired effect (convert retention value into business assets)

A company that sells hairy crabs advertises on TikTok. In order to better attract people's attention, the company constantly packages various image shows and expression shows of hairy crabs, hoping to leverage the "curiosity" to attract more people's attention and thereby increase the payment rate.

In the eyes of this company, everyone has a need to eat hairy crabs, so in theory, as long as I can get more people to pay attention to my hairy crabs, sales will naturally increase.

As a result, the company did attract a lot of users to become fans of its Douyin app, but only a few people actually placed orders in the end.

The company was very surprised, so they tried to understand how their competitors did it. When they learned about their competitors' practices, they were even more surprised.

Because they found that the competitors only used the simplest method, without any packaging or techniques: they only showed the origin of the hairy crabs, the production process of the hairy crabs, and a hook to guide users to buy, and the users placed an order.

Why does this happen? Because: there is still a gap between whether a user is willing to stay and whether the user is willing to pay. He may be willing to stay because he thinks the way you promote hairy crabs is interesting and he hopes to see more related content, but it does not mean that he will definitely place an order . Users who do not want to buy may not make a deal in the end no matter how you persuade them.

The most critical factor here is to influence those users who may or may not buy the product and let them make a purchasing decision.

If you show him an entertaining version of hairy crabs, he may just watch it for fun and not make any impulsive decision to buy it.

However, when these users who "may choose to buy or not" see one tempting food picture after another, the high-quality reviews from other users after their purchase, as well as the high-quality water source and excellent production technology from the place of origin, the users' purchasing impulse will be aroused.

This is consistent with a concept in economics called the "median principle". That is to say, in an election, what really affects the success or failure of the election is not those who lean to the left or those who lean to the right, but how a group of people in the middle are influenced to make decisions.

This principle is relatively applicable in scenarios where users need to "spend money" to make decisions.

In addition to choosing the right scenario, you also need to know how to target the right group of people and use the right marketing methods to achieve the results you want (converting retained value into commercial assets).

3. Long-term value issues: the importance of user expectation management

After solving the entry problem of user motivation, the next more important question is why users want to stay for a long time. In fact, this question is related to the first question to a certain extent, because in order to retain users, we must first start from the perspective of user motivation. Why users come also determines why they are willing to stay. Therefore, how to provide users with value based on their needs in the long term is the key to user retention.

At this time, some companies will say that some of the publicity was too exaggerated when they first attracted users. With the current product status, it is difficult to meet some of the functional points that were advertised at the time, and users feel disappointed. What should we do?

Let’s look at a case first:

Due to lack of experience, a company discovered at the end of the year when it was time to distribute year-end bonuses to employees: it could only give employees one month's year-end bonus at most, although it had previously promised to pay at least three months.

Therefore, the company's HR issued an announcement: Due to the company's poor management, this year's year-end bonus may not be distributed to everyone. However, the company promises to give a guarantee to every partner who works hard with the company: we will absolutely, absolutely, absolutely not lay off any employees.

When everyone was discussing the matter and feeling worried, the company issued another announcement the next day, saying: After careful consideration by the company and the outstanding contributions made by each colleague to the company this year, the boss has decided to give everyone a one-month year-end bonus (the boss will pay for it out of his own pocket).

Upon hearing the news, everyone in the office cheered. They felt that not only were they not at risk of being laid off, but they even received extra money. No one has forgotten that the year-end bonuses promised by the company for several months have been lost, and everyone's satisfaction has improved.

From this case you can see that sometimes the actual situation is one thing, but the user feels it is another.

How to manage user expectations is sometimes more important than what is actually given to users.

This is like investment, some companies have good performance but their stock prices are not outstanding, because in the eyes of investors, there is limited room for further growth in performance, so expectations are limited. Some companies are still making losses, but everyone feels that the company's future development prospects are unlimited, so the company's stock will continue to rise.

Therefore, when your product is not strong enough, you should learn to guide users through some expectation management methods.

For example, although the ultimate solution in the minds of users has not yet been achieved, it allows users to see the progress of the product step by step and that it is getting closer to their expectations, which is something that many users can accept.

Many products like to say that they try their best to meet user needs, but did you know that user needs are also constantly changing? What a product needs to do is to constantly guide user needs and at the same time create an atmosphere that allows users and products to grow together. This process may be more important. The way you work hard to meet user needs will itself convert many users into fans of your product, even though your product may not perfectly meet their needs at this time.

In fact, in the actual business process, all products will face a process from 0 to 1, from imperfection to perfection. Therefore, in this process, it is particularly important to use expectation management to allow users to participate and grow together with the products, and even become partners of the products.

4. Long-term value question: Will your product proactively communicate with users?

Of course, if your product fails to meet user needs after a period of time, users will eventually leave.

Just like investing, no matter how much you exceed expectations, it can only last for a period of time, and eventually the price will converge with its value. Therefore, using your product to solve user needs in the long term is the key to retaining users. At this point, because the tones of different products are different, we will not go into too much detail. But there is one common point here: product strength.

Good products speak for themselves:

For example, if the same software is used for memorizing words, software A can customize the frequency of word occurrence and the method of word memorization that suits you according to your habits and methods of memorizing words, and will provide feedback on your every step. Software B just mechanically repeats according to the existing rules without considering the way and behavior of your memorizing words.

It is certainly predictable which software the user will choose in the end. Good products are produced through operations, and the operation begins not after the product is completed, but when the product begins to be designed. The key to product design here is how to implant some mechanisms for communicating with and guiding users into the product to form product strength, so that the product itself can communicate with users, rather than just being a functional and cold product. This is crucial for a product.

Products and operations are inseparable. I understand that the essence of this sentence is that products and operations are one and the same. Products are operations, and operations are products. A button that a user clicks to interact is of course a product, but the placement and design of the button itself is also a way of communicating with users. If we insist on regarding the design of a button as a product and the text of a button as an operation, and separate the two, we may end up with a product whose text and product don't quite match, and there will be no way to talk about the overall tone of the dialogue with users, and it will be impossible to form product strength.

Having said so much, let me summarize several core arguments of this article:

User retention requires solving two problems: one is the motivation for users to enter, and the other is how to continue to satisfy their value after they are retained.

User motivation is highly correlated with user scenarios. Although users may have needs that need to be met in multiple scenarios, the perception of your product in the minds of users is only an ecological niche in a certain scenario. As long as your product can meet the service value to users in this scenario, it is already a very successful product. If you want to expand to other scenarios, the user trust cost is very high.

If you already have a very successful and mature product and want to further expand into other fields, then the first thing you need to consider is the coupling of the product between this field and your current field. The higher the coupling, the lower the trust cost for users to accept, and the easier it is to convert.

User retention does not mean user payment. Only by identifying your core paying group, rather than the retained group, and using the right marketing scenarios to make conversions, can you convert the retention value into commercial revenue. Of course, sometimes the retained population and the paying population are the same group of people, such as some experiential consumption scenarios (such as knowledge payment, membership consumption), but not all products are like this. You need to analyze your retained and paying population based on the characteristics of your product. Don’t take it for granted that user retention is a pre-funnel for user payment.

Expectation management is very important. Most products cannot meet user needs all at once and require gradual optimization and iteration. At this time, it is very important to "tame" users through expectation management and allow users and products to grow together.

In the short term, it depends on expectations, but in the long term, it still depends on value. The key to product design is how to implant some mechanisms for communicating with and guiding users into the product to form product strength, so that the product itself can communicate with users, rather than just being a functional and cold product. This is crucial for a product.

I hope that every product person and operator can gain something from the retention issue and better solve the retention problem of their own products.

Author: Wang Yuting

Source: Wang Yuting