Analysis of WeChat Reading’s user growth strategy!

Even with the support of WeChat, a huge traffic pool, the data of WeChat Reading does not show very good results. Based on this phenomenon, this article analyzes its past and future growth strategies.

WeChat Reading has entered the online reading market for nearly four years. According to data from 2019, the peak monthly active users reached 1 million, and the daily stable level was around 8 million. This data is not exciting, after all, the growth of WeChat Reading in the past year has not been obvious. Compared with other applications in the online reading industry, it only barely made it into the top ten.

The story of WeChat Reading and its user usage path are not complicated. As a moderate user of WeChat Reading, I would like to analyze from the perspective of a product manager what growth strategies it has used and what growth points are worth trying in the future.

WeChat Reading Monthly Activity

Growth Strategy Overview

Growth strategy points

1. Customer Acquisition

1. Social

WeChat Reading’s slogan – “Let reading no longer be lonely” – has clearly revealed its goal of building a reading community. Backed by WeChat's powerful user base, social methods are undoubtedly the easiest way to acquire customers, and WeChat Reading has indeed developed a variety of gameplay based on this.

1.1 Recommended by friends

"Give one, get one" and "Invite new friends and get unlimited cards" are classic friend recommendation strategies. Both the sharer and the person being shared benefit, so users are willing to forward them actively. The main promotion for attracting new customers is:

1) Rule restrictions . The deduplication rules based on the time + user dimensions increase the proportion of old customers bringing in new customers.

2) Favorability . Recommendations/gifts from friends can increase the favorability of new users and increase the chances of new users starting to use the product.

1.2 Team up with friends

In the team-building mode, five people form a team, and after success, they can get unlimited cards randomly. There are also two elements to attracting new customers:

1) Rule restrictions . The size of the reward is linked to the number of new members in the team, increasing the chances of attracting new members.

2) Social virality . It is observed that after the launch of this feature in 2018, the frequency of group status appearing in Moments is extremely high.

Friends Team Up

1.3 Reading Team

The reading team can be seen as an upgraded version of the friends team. While attracting new users, its greater use is to increase user activity and store value. Therefore, this will be discussed in the reading team section of Section 2.4.3.

2. Leverage other products

The products cooperated here are mainly official accounts in WeChat. Articles from public accounts can be opened on WeChat Reading, which is an interesting combination. My considerations are:

1) Increase the number of WeChat Reading users and improve their experience . WeChat Reading is compatible with the public account dimension of article viewing. Public account articles can use WeChat Reading's listening, underlining, commenting and other functions, double kill to enhance the user experience.

2) Complete higher-dimensional product integration planning for WeChat . Public account articles are also a form of online reading, and it can be considered that WeChat has integrated products at a higher level. At the same time, it laid a solid foundation for the emergence of the WeChat Reading 4.0 story module.

summary

Advantages: WeChat Reading fully utilizes its social advantages to acquire users, while leveraging the powerful traffic of WeChat itself to connect with the reading function of public account articles.

Suggestion : Before writing the article, the author himself did not know that the official account article had this operation, so the user perception can be appropriately improved.

2. Conversion and Retention

1. Simplified path and simple operation

Users can log in directly through WeChat, which is a one-click operation. If you really don’t want to log in, you don’t have to. There will be no excessive reminders that affect the user’s smoothness of use, unless the user wants to make comments, purchases, etc. Regardless of whether you are logged in or not, the home page discovery is presented in the form of search and bibliographic cards. You can read by clicking on them. It is simple and easy to operate.

Suggestion : For new users, you can add a learning flow . After entering, users can choose their areas of interest and their reading habits, so as to better guide and understand users.

2. User achievement recognition

2.1 Book Coins

The reading market and book coins are directly proportional. Half an hour of reading = 1 book coin. Book coins can be used to purchase books, thus forming a positive promotion for user usage. For users, accumulating book currency by reading is like saving money, and the sense of accomplishment is self-evident.

Suggestion : The current exchange rules are too simple and quantifiable. Combining book coins can provide more gameplay to promote user use.

1) Build a user growth system. The number of book coins can be used to divide users into different levels (such as bronze, silver, gold, etc.), allowing users to more intuitively perceive the value of book coins and see the growth brought by their own reading accumulation.

2) User level rights and interests. With different levels, different rights and interests can be stratified, such as limited-time discounts on books, gifting book coins to each other among friends, exchanging book coins for rights of other brother software, etc., so that the book coins can be fully circulated and utilized. From my current personal usage, I rely more on the unlimited cards obtained through sharing, and the frequency of using book coins is less frequent. Of course, this is also related to the current stage of the application.

2.2 Reading Statistics

User reading data is counted on a weekly basis, allowing users to intuitively see their reading time and word count. The quantified sense of accomplishment enhances user perception without causing any sense of pressure on users.

2.3 Reading percentage reminder

When users have read a certain percentage, such as 30% or 70%, they will be reminded to recognize their achievement and provide psychological comfort to encourage them, thus reducing the rate of users giving up midway.

3. Activities/Games

3.1 Unlimited card sharing

You can find this card by swiping a few times on the "Discover" button on the homepage. It is a design of traffic IP + book cover. You can get unlimited cards after sharing it. In addition to allowing users to obtain unlimited cards to utilize user retention, personal analysis:

1) Currently, we recommend books to traffic IPs to encourage users to read and reduce the effort required for users to make choices.

2) It is suggested to launch a book list in the future and encourage more ordinary users to participate. The book list can better integrate the books and make them more structured, which is conducive to expanding the operating space of subsequent products. Books - book lists - reading plans is a good development path.

3.2 Flip

Also in the interactive game of discovery, users can randomly obtain books by participating, and can obtain more after sharing, including unlimited cards. The more people share, the more rewards you get. Similar to the unlimited sharing card in 3.1, both of them cultivate the habit of users looking for rewards in Discovery when they need them. Guide users to use more, explore more, discover more, and share more.

4. Store of Value

4.1 Underline, comment, like

The interactions that users have with books during the reading process (underlining, writing ideas), as well as the interactions with other users (likes, comments), will all become value stored in the application.

suggestion :

WeChat Reading is less social and more community-oriented during the reading process. The comments and likes you usually receive come from people who are reading the same book as you. Paradoxically, the comments are also visible to friends at the same time.

This will actually make users hesitate to comment to a large extent. The goal of WeChat is to make reading less lonely, but this positioning should be more targeted at like-minded people, that is, people with similar reading interests, and simply looking at the relationship between friends does not meet this condition to a large extent.

Personally, I think users should have the right to choose whether their comments are visible to friends. On the contrary, I hope that they are invisible to friends and visible to people who are reading the book, that is, in their notes.

4.2 Ranking

Rankings are a common strategy and this is not the first time they have been used in WeChat products. The rankings themselves have an incentive effect on users' psychology, but a better approach would be to combine the rankings with users' actual interests to give users greater motivation to read.

4.3 Reading Team

Reading teams are a long-term solution for user retention. In November 2018, WeChat Reading launched a book coin tiering strategy, which transformed the acquisition of book coins from a simple proportional system to a ladder system. Simply put, as the reading time increases, the difficulty of obtaining book coins increases. The user feedback received at the time was poor, and WeChat Reading canceled this change in subsequent versions.

Today's reading team has adopted the strategy of obtaining book coins in a step-by-step manner, and has further upgraded it by combining book coins, unlimited cards, and mystery draws to make the rewards more diversified and increase user freshness. Ideally, after forming a team, members will have common interests, motivate each other and develop internal motivation.

5. Personalized recommendations

Personalized recommendations are no longer a new feature. With continuous data accumulation and optimization, the recommended content will become more and more in line with users' interests. The cost of reading a single book is relatively high. While making recommendations, we can guide users to express their areas of interest and add them to the recommendation algorithm.

6. Privacy Boundaries

WeChat Reading gives users ample privacy options, such as whether to display bookshelves, whether friends need consent to follow, whether to participate in rankings, etc. The control lies with the users.

summary

At present, there is still a lot of room for conversion and retention in WeChat Reading. The existing incentive methods and value storage can derive more gameplay. The above has been discussed in detail. The three most important points are:

1) Growth level . The rules of book coins can be richer, for example, by incorporating growth levels, with different levels corresponding to different benefits, to enhance user perception.

2) Structured recommendations . Aggregate from the dimension of books to the dimension of book lists, and then to reading plans, reducing users' thinking costs and ensuring long-term operation.

3) Social positioning . Social networking can be a way to acquire customers, but during the reading process, the concept of content community should be more prominent.

3. Monetization

1. Purchase

Before unlimited cards were promoted vigorously, purchase was almost the only way. It is divided into purchase through book coins earned from reading and purchase through recharge.

In November 2018, WeChat Reading launched the function of purchasing books by chapter. I was deeply impressed by this because it was a feature I had been looking forward to for a long time. However, since the book coins earned from reading can basically cover the money needed to purchase chapters, this is obviously not conducive to users developing a habit of paying, so this function was later cancelled...

2. Membership

As a content product, the two most important points are: one is to ensure there is a sufficient content library, and the other is to let users develop reading habits.

From now on, as long as users are willing to go through a little trouble, unlimited cards and book coins are basically enough, and other paid benefits are not attractive enough. The most important reason for video websites to develop membership payment awareness is that members can enjoy rich content, and skipping ads, which requires users to pay, is only secondary. Similarly, if you want users to be willing to pay for reading, you should first differentiate the content.

summary

It can be seen that it is not easy for WeChat Reading to monetize. At the same time, it is understandable that it is currently still mainly in the stage of customer acquisition, conversion and retention, with the focus on cultivating user habits to pave the way for subsequent monetization.

Summarize

Content is king, social sharing attracts more customers, rich recommendations promote conversions, growth levels help retention, and steady revenue growth increases over the long term.

Author: A spoonful of mustard

Source: A spoonful of mustard