How to acquire customers online? 5 key core touch points!

If I don’t tell you, 80% of people would probably think that most of a product’s users are organic traffic, and they actively come to seek services.

After all, users learned about this product through other media, portal information websites, and recommendations from friends. After careful study, they felt that it was useful to them, so they downloaded it and used it.

What a beautiful, free and democratic fantasy.

In fact, except for a few national applications of giants, users of most products come from paid promotions. When the cost of acquiring customers is high, everyone is competing on how to accurately acquire customers and improve conversions at the lowest cost.

As I said, the essential things are the simplest and closest to the truth.

The skills don't need to be fancy, as long as they are useful. Below I will introduce some essential yet easily overlooked details in the current customer acquisition process in the market. Please enjoy them carefully.

The differences between the three major channels of H5, App and Mini Program

Before fully understanding growth, I think it is very necessary to understand the differences between the three major growth channels (H5, App, and Mini Programs). Including many students who have experienced product, operation, and promotion, in fact, many people are still relatively vague about the application of these three channels.

1. H5

The full name of H5 is HTML5. You don’t even need to know any other explanations about it. You only need to know that it is not a technology, but a standard. The browser displays the content of the web page by decoding HTML. It is the cornerstone of the initial rise of the Internet.

The biggest advantage of H5 pages is their strong cross-platform compatibility, fast development speed, low cost, and low technical cost requirements for development. It can be said to be a very flexible solution.

For users, its usage cost is very low, and they can access it without any distinction as long as they have a browser. But its shortcomings are also fatal. When the network environment is not good, the user experience is poor, the running speed is relatively slow, and it is unable to save local user data, making it difficult to retain users in a targeted manner.

Therefore, most of the current H5 pages are used as one-time landing pages for on-site activities, off-site activities, etc. For some App functions, if the short-term iterations are frequent, we will choose to use H5 pages as a transition first.

2. App

App refers to application, the abbreviation of Application. Now it generally refers to mobile phone software. The operation of the software depends on the operating system of the mobile phone. Currently, there are two mainstream systems: Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

App page is also called native page. Its advantages and disadvantages are just opposite to H5. The interactive experience of native page is the smoothest and its running speed is the fastest among the three. Moreover, apps can more effectively utilize the underlying functions of mobile hardware devices, such as cameras and microphones.

Its fluency and experience are unmatched by H5 and mini programs, but its usage and maintenance costs are troubling. Each iterative optimization requires a release and review, and can only be released for download after approval by the app store. A solution usually has two versions at the same time, and Android also needs to provide different version packages for different stores.

Secondly, the cost of use for users is extremely high. They need to download and install it manually, and also have to pass four or five permission interception screens. However, once users download the product, as long as the product is valuable to them, they generally will not abandon it easily, and the retention effect is good.

3. Mini Programs

Mini Programs usually refer to WeChat’s mini programs, which do not need to be downloaded and installed. You can open the app and use it by scanning or searching in WeChat. The types of entities that are open for registration include: enterprises, governments, media, and individuals.

The emergence of mini programs is actually to neutralize the advantages and disadvantages of App and H5, and to better complement each other's strengths and weaknesses.

In terms of compatibility, there is no need to consider mini programs. As long as they are compatible with WeChat's mobile phone system, mini programs can be seamlessly compatible. In the WeChat ecosystem, the user usage cost of mini programs is extremely low. Many times, to attract new users of the mini program, only one authorization is required and all user information will be synchronized, because WeChat has already collected the information of these users in the early stage.

Secondly, although the interactive experience of the mini program is slightly inferior to that of the App, it is indeed much better than the H5 page, and it also supports calling the hardware functions of the mobile phone.

To summarize, what kind of products each channel is suitable for:

• If the medium- and high-frequency products have high requirements for usage scenarios and experiences, and products that need to carry a lot of private information, especially social, community, and financial products, it is more suitable to use an App to carry them.
• If the tool-type products focus on efficiency and timeliness, and have fewer private attributes and stronger activity attributes, especially products such as food delivery, e-commerce, search, and inquiry, they are more suitable to be carried by mini programs.

As for H5, it is used to assist apps and mini-programs, and is not sufficient to carry a product.

The above are the differences between the three major customer acquisition channels. Once you are familiar with the differences between these channels, in many cases, you can judge for yourself what method is suitable for effective customer acquisition in what circumstances.

2. Five key core touch points

There are five steps from the time a user comes into contact with a product to the time they actually use it. We call these five scene touchpoints because these are the points where we have the potential to "impress" customers. If we miss them all, it would be a waste.

Below I will discuss these five touchpoints in detail and then list the most important influencing factors:

Step 1: Off-site channel placement

Off-site channel placement basically refers to paid promotion, because the population of this channel is relatively concentrated, so there is value in paid advertising. At this step, the exposure of our ads is closely related to the money we pay.

In this step, we look at the number of ad impressions. Generally, this value can reflect how many times the ad has been exposed. As it stands, mobile advertising is much more expensive than web advertising.

Step 2: Creative display

In the first step, we purchased the advertising space. In this step, we will place our advertising creative materials in this space. Most of the materials will be text and pictures, and some will also appear in the form of videos.

In this section, what we are most concerned about is the click-through rate CTR (click/impression), which reflects the degree of attraction of the advertisement itself to channel users.

The most direct way to increase CTR is to adjust the way the advertisement is expressed. As for the psychological performance of users when receiving advertisements, I have introduced it in detail in the article here: "Why you work diligently to promote your product every day, but still get little results".

Step 3: Landing Page

The landing page here mostly refers to the registration landing page. After all, users who can come to this page have been attracted by your advertisement. They have the intention to learn more and even have the possibility of conversion.

In order to collect as much user information as possible for secondary marketing, the landing page is usually treated as a registration process. At the very least, users will be asked to leave their valuable mobile phone numbers. This page usually plays the role of a store salesperson.

This is a very important page, and it is also a page that displays pain points. This pain point problem should be closely related to the content of the previous creative display part. Whether it can satisfy users and promote registration depends on the relevance of the content.

At this time, we mainly look at two indicators: the page’s UV and bounce rate. The former is mainly determined by the previous CTR. The size of the UV directly affects the subsequent related conversions, while the latter is related to logical expression.

If the content in Step 2 and Step 3 lacks logical relationship, or the page content structure of the landing page in Step 3 is too complicated, users may not understand it, or even be unwilling to spend time to understand it. At this time, your page bounce rate will be very high.

The potential customers that we worked so hard to attract were turned away because of the bad salesperson.

Step 4: Registration success page

According to previous statements, this should be the location of the auxiliary conversion page, but now it is becoming increasingly difficult to acquire customers, and most products have moved the registration process forward to the landing page.

At the same time, many products are well aware that they have not been able to fully and temporarily reveal the user pain points in Step 3, the landing page (there is a learning cost), so many people simply "cheat" the users through other small offers, and then use the mobile phones left by users when they register for secondary marketing. This is also a product of the continuous evolution of the times.

Therefore, the use of the registration success page is becoming more and more extensive. Often, registration is only the first step in the core process. After registration, users need to experience the core process as soon as possible to complete the business conversion, and the registration success page is the medium for this part of the transition.

The most important thing here is to look at the CTR of this page to the next page. (The next step may be to jump to download the app or jump to the off-site process)

Step 5: Product conversion

This step means that the user has already registered, found an organization, or downloaded the app and is willing to give it a try. We should not set too many obstacles and let users enter the core process as early as possible.

If the user experience is still not smooth or there are bugs that cannot be circumvented at this time, then it is very likely that the "long" preparation of the first four steps will be wasted and all efforts will fail.

On this page, what we mainly look at is the overall conversion rate of the core process. For financial products, it is the investment conversion rate; for hotel reservation products, it is the room reservation conversion rate, etc.

3. Division of labor in the entire customer acquisition process

In companies with a clear division of labor, Step 1 and Step 2 are usually handled by the promotion department. They are familiar with the attributes and preferences of market channels and choose appropriate placement locations and timings.

Step 3 and Step 4 are both the responsibility of the operations department. They need to make a series of plans for attracting new users, event copywriting and publicity for the landing pages. The goal is to attract as many new users as possible through this channel.

The final Step 5 is the focus of the product manager. All business conversions and user value realization depend on this. At the same time, from the beginning of Step 1 until the user enters Step 5, the product manager needs to track the entire process.

Based on my understanding of the abilities of students in charge of Step 1-Step 4 in the market, you need to constantly fill in the gaps, patch up problems, and analyze data for them.

Of course, there are also some amazing ones.

Author: Jacob

Source: Jacoblab (ID: jacoblab)