Event review: An invitation event that was forced to go offline!

This article will briefly review the APP invitation activity. Why did this activity fail to achieve the expected results and was forced to be taken offline?

Invitation activities are a commonly used means of attracting new customers, and everyone is very familiar with them. If any APP does not participate in this activity, its operation will be regarded as failing. Yes, in the first month of reporting to the new company, this matter was put forward as an operational requirement by the leader, but I messed it up.

When I was independently leading projects in my previous company, I also conducted many invitation activities, and the results were quite successful, such as "Practical Growth Case: Using Gamified Invitations to Generate New Customers". But why not this time? I reviewed it and hope it will be helpful to you.

1. Before the activity

Activity duration: 13 days in total. Because it was forced to go offline, it ended urgently after running for more than ten days, and there was a misunderstanding when it went offline.

Purpose of the activity: To attract new users (to be more specific, the purpose is to increase the number of registrations).

Activity form: User A invites user B by sharing the activity link through the APP (entrance).

• User B completes registration, and user A is awarded 200 points
• If user B completes his first order within 7 days, user A will be rewarded with another 300 points.

Yes, it is a very common activity. In terms of cost control, according to our points redemption ratio, the price for a new user is about 10 yuan, and the price for a new ordering user is about 25 yuan. Compared with the ROI of customer acquisition, the customer acquisition cost of this activity is much lower, so the cost structure seems to be fine.

In terms of risk control measures: the daily invitation limit is 5 people, which means that the maximum number of points that can be obtained per day is 1,000. If you have points, you will have a points mall. Yes, 1,000 points can be exchanged for 2-2.5 physical products in our points mall. In order to balance and control the rapid increase in points brought by invitation activities, the redemption threshold of the points mall has been appropriately raised and controlled between 1.5-1 redemption.

Secondly, I also proposed the need to set a total invitation limit at the beginning, such as 10 or 20 people; because from my point of view, the motivation and popularity of a single user to invite his or her friends (or friends with common needs) to download an APP will not be much, and too much will be a problem.

But from a product perspective, since you are inviting people to register, there should not be an upper limit. Some people can just invite 20 friends, and you can’t let a limit accidentally kill more people, so you don’t add them.

Data: The product requires the background to be able to check the records of this invitation activity, but no specific data statistical indicators are given. This resulted in some data not being able to be queried after the backend data went online; this was an operational error.

2. Activities are online

On the third day of the event, the volume started to increase, including the number of new members and the number of points orders. The operation needed to observe from time to time what behaviors the new members took, whether the registration time of the invitees was consistent, and other small details.

At the beginning of the activity, only IOCN and banner were launched on the APP. The original plan was to push the opening screen, articles, text messages, and PUSH in the future to achieve a wider coverage. However, the activity was in a state of adjustment and tension, so these plans were shelved and could not be carried out.

By the sixth day, there were dozens of points redemption orders every day, which attracted the attention of the leaders, who required proper control and not to give away so much cost just by attracting people to register. Therefore, at this time, risk control added a limit of 10 people for the total invitation limit. After adding the limit, operations must follow up closely to ensure that it is effective. It didn’t work for us the first time.

By the eighth day, there were still a lot of points redemption orders, because the freeloaders could continue to register new users and then recruit others to obtain points for redemption, which could not be prevented by limiting the number of people. Therefore, they began to remove the products with large redemption volumes first, leaving some products with higher redemption thresholds.

By the tenth day, the points redemption orders slowed down a bit, but there were still more than a dozen orders every day. Even if the purchase was in the form of points plus cash, it couldn't stop Yang Yang Yang's enthusiasm. After all, to be precise, they made money. If we only look at it from the perspective of new registrations, we actually didn't lose money. But the key is that new people experience less product functions and even fewer convert orders.

Therefore, they were ordered to go offline because it is meaningless to continue wasting time like this. That day was Friday, and I informed the product that the banner and ICON were being taken offline. However, we discovered over the weekend that there were still orders being redeemed. Everyone was very suspicious, and after checking, we found that an invitation task had been launched in the task list but had not been taken down.

In this awkward situation, thirteen days, including the weekend and Monday, passed by.

3. After the event is offline

Let's take a look at the invitation data during the event: more than 500 people participated in the 13-day event, and more than 2,500 people were attracted. On average, each person attracted 5 new people. The invitation ratio of freeloaders to old users was about 6:4. I don't know how much different this data will be if I compare it with yours.

During the event, more than 500,000 points were issued, and more than 300,000 points were quickly consumed. The cumulative number of points orders was more than 300, which is the sum of the total number of points redeemed in the previous three months. Compared to this, it is really a lot.

About 2% of new users fully experience the product functions, and there are only a few people invited to place orders, which is basically zero. The retention rate gradually drops from over 30% to a few percent. It can be determined that it was old users who shared sincerely at the beginning, and then the freeloaders came.

4. Activity review and reflection

When you see this, you can stop for a moment, try to help me find the problem and summarize it mentally, or think about whether you have ever made such rough and low-quality problems in your operational work?

The purpose of the event is not focused: There is nothing wrong with targeting the purpose of the event on attracting new registrations. But the prerequisite is that I should think deeply about what kind of users my product should attract. If it is registration, it is equivalent to bringing people in. Can the product's operating mechanism retain them? Or can he be transformed within a period of time?

If you can't do either, what's the value? Just like this activity now, it is worthless.

Looking back now, we have chosen half of the wrong activity goals. For start-up products and projects, we would rather add new users slowly but accurately. The time-consuming and costly users to attract should be more targeted users. Allowing more high-quality users to circulate in early products can enhance the value of each other.

The content of the activity is unclear: Sharp-eyed students may have noticed that the activity did not have a start and end date at the beginning, nor was the goal of attracting new customers quantified. Just writing about attracting new customers is a failure. Is it 10,000 or 3,000? Specific figures should be given, and then I can calculate how much it will cost me and how many people I need to attract.

For example, in this event, because what should have been said was not said, everyone was very nervous when the order volume increased, which led to the event ending in a hasty manner because no one knew about it in advance.

Therefore, when the operator has no rewards for activities, if membership, points or other product benefits are to be used as rewards, one should consider and list in advance possible known situations, and fully explain how the activity will be conducted, what will appear, and even the advantages and disadvantages when submitting the activity requirements. Only by explaining in detail can one be well prepared.

The risk control of the event is not comprehensive: only basic precautions are taken on the speed of attracting new users and the threshold for points redemption. The loopholes in the event process and the game between the freeloaders are not fully considered. The overall threshold for redeeming points and goods is not high, so the freeloaders have time to grab the freeloaders. Therefore, you should be cautious when choosing rewards.

Insufficient activity docking: My suggestion is that if the activity is initiated by operations, then you must make it clear to the product and leadership. All UI design, copywriting and other matters are the responsibility of operations to follow up and confirm. Reasonable suggestions should be listened to, and any suggestions that do not conform to your planned plans will be rejected. Do not do half of it and then abandon it. This is a big taboo. You can see it from the above without going into details.

I didn't expect that even though I have been engaged in product operations for six years, I am not always on the smooth road of operations. When someone gives instructions at work, everyone makes mistakes, let alone at work. Now you can laugh at me happily.

at last

I deliberately did not go into a long and in-depth review and finished this article vaguely. Because the more detailed and detailed the explanation is, the more it becomes a template that will fix the reader's thoughts, and the mistakes summarized here should not be made again in the future. But no two jobs are exactly the same. If it can bring inspiration to me, I look forward to your comments. It will be valuable if we can learn from each other.

Author: Mao Li

Source: Operational Growth