How user incentives enhance user stickiness

A very important point in publicity is to promote your own brand. When others have a certain understanding of your product, you need to consider the fans' loyalty or stickiness to your brand. So how to enhance user stickiness and improve brand promotion effect? ​​User incentives are the only way to enhance user stickiness, but there will be many obstacles in the implementation process. How to achieve the purpose of enhancing user stickiness through user incentives? What are the shortcomings of using user incentives? Let's see how this article analyzes the application of user incentives in various promotional channels.

First, let’s understand how to use the rules of user incentives:

Step 1: Clarify what role the user should play?

There are two purposes for building a product incentive system: the first is the superficial goal, which is to motivate user behavior; the second is its fundamental goal, which is to maintain the healthy form of the product and prevent the phenomenon of bad money driving out good money, which leads to the collective withdrawal of users. Therefore, the first step is to clarify what role the user needs to play in order for the product to maintain healthy development.

For example, in a content community, you not only need users to become content contributors, but according to the 2/8 principle, you also need to encourage the vast majority of users to become content consumers; for example, in a game product, you not only need to encourage some users to become paying users, but you also need to guide the remaining large number of free users to continue to be "passersby" in the game and let paying users abuse them or reflect their sense of superiority.

This step is actually the process of classifying and profiling product users. It is necessary to clarify how many types of users are needed in a healthy product ecosystem, what roles they play, and what value they bring to the product. Once you have identified different user roles, you can focus more on building a user incentive system.

Step 2: Which user behaviors should be incentivized?

We have drawn a user portrait in the first step. Next, we need to analyze which user behaviors are valuable to the product and should be encouraged based on the core value of the product; and which user behaviors are harmful to the product and should be stopped or punished. Many products believe that the incentive system is used for motivation. In fact, if you make it clear that the incentive system is to maintain a healthy product ecosystem, you will understand that the incentive system needs to have clear rewards and punishments.

For example, on Weibo, logging in, interactive behavior, and following relationships are all user behaviors that should be encouraged in a healthy community environment based on the core value of Weibo as a product. However, spreading rumors, slandering, attacking others, and even not logging in are all harmful to the product. Even in Weibo's product form, if the rumor-mongering behavior cannot be well curbed and cleaned up, it will affect the survival of the product. Therefore, this type of user behavior should not only be discouraged, but also have certain punishment measures. Therefore, Weibo has measures such as banning, blocking, and credit deductions to punish behaviors that harm the product ecology. Only with clear reward and punishment measures can we prevent bad money from driving out good money.

Step 3: What incentives can stimulate users to produce the behaviors we want?

This step will involve our regular medals, points, levels, material rewards, user behavior constraints, etc. When building specific incentive methods, we can refer to human nature to design them: Which ones help users show off and satisfy their vanity? Which ones can help users reduce usage costs to satisfy their laziness? In this step, we will find that there are many means available, including taking advantage of human nature to snoop on privacy, lust, greed, laziness, vanity, arrogance, etc.; I quoted the picture below "Marketing Strategies Taking Advantage of Human Nature" (the original source has not been verified). This picture makes a basic functional classification from the perspective of human nature to correspond to the corresponding human weaknesses, and the means of satisfying incentives are also the same.

Let's categorize them so that they can be implemented in a more organized way. The three most common product incentives are:

1. Spiritual satisfaction;

2. Material satisfaction;

3. Graded satisfaction at the product function level.

The first two are very easy to understand. For example, satisfying users' vanity and arrogance is on the spiritual level. Many products are also very mature in this regard, including points, levels, medals, certifications, etc., all of which are for users to show off and are a way of expressing virtual achievements. For example, prize-winning activities, member points redemption, free trials, etc. are all on the material level, giving users some real benefits. This is a user (customer) incentive method that has continued from traditional industries to this day. I won’t go into details here. Instead, the third type, the graded satisfaction at the product function level, relatively few product operators are aware of the means at this level, or they are using it unconsciously, but they are not aware of it or incorporating it into the entire user incentive system for planning.

For example, Tieba requires that users must reach Level 7 in the forum to use the one-click sign-in feature for multiple Tieba forums. This part stimulates users to produce the behaviors we want (keep users active daily and contribute UGC content) through the graded experience in product design. Another common practice of using punishment to ensure the incentive system: community products prevent users from registering fake accounts to spread rumors and swear, or prevent spam accounts from registering and affecting the overall community environment. They limit low-level users to browsing but not speaking, or not being able to interact with other users. This seemingly restrictive measure is actually an incentive for real users, and sometimes knives are more effective than roses.

Step 4: Choose the appropriate incentive method and formulate reasonable incentive rules

This conclusion is entirely derived from the analysis of the previous three steps, combining what users want and what products want, and then matching what the product can give, and then choosing the appropriate incentive method based on the proportion of user behavior models required for a healthy product form. Different incentive methods will achieve different results. For example, one-time medal incentives such as medals are not suitable for continuous incentives, while points and levels are more suitable; and points and levels generally need to be used in conjunction, levels cannot be consumed, but points can be consumed, in order to increase the value of the incentive and improve the incentive effect.

If you are interested, you can study QQ's incentive system, which is a very complete combination of punches. Its incentive application scenarios are wide (such as different privileges of various types of diamonds for multiple accounts), various incentive means assist each other (such as accelerated membership level), and a combination of multi-faceted incentive means at the functional level of spiritual and material products (top ranking, increased download bandwidth, commission-free financial management, etc.), etc. Especially as a social product for acquaintances, QQ has reached the pinnacle in the implementation of product function grading incentives: for example, customized avatars and magic expressions linked to level upgrades, increased friend limits, group creation restrictions, etc., superimposed product function grading on rigid product needs, motivating users while commercializing.

User motivation is not a department's business.

In addition to the incentive methods mentioned above, there are also many invisible incentives that users cannot perceive, which require cooperation and communication among multiple departments such as product, operation, marketing, and business to achieve. Here are two practical examples:

For example, WeChat. As a high-demand product, WeChat, like making phone calls or sending messages, seems to “not require user motivation.” In order to make it more enjoyable for users, WeChat has cooperated with some local operators to launch data packages, so that users can use WeChat data free when using operator packages. This requires the joint efforts of the business department and the operations department. Through this method, WeChat DAU (daily active users) can be kept from declining at the end of the month due to insufficient data.

For example, Weibo, as a social media platform, the demands of regular users are still to publish and obtain information. Certification, levels, medals, flying red envelopes, etc. are all incentives that users can perceive. However, the most important incentive to guide users to release information is to ensure that the information can reach the information recipients efficiently and smoothly, and to send the right information to the right person's feed in the shortest time. This is the most difficult, but it is precisely the fundamental demand of users for the Weibo product form. Therefore, this requires joint efforts from the operations department, product department, data analysis department, technical department, etc.

Ultimately, user motivation is not the responsibility of one department, nor is it just the work of a product or a certain operation. Rather, it is the responsibility of the entire team in every aspect of the positioning, development, optimization, correction, and regression of the entire product ecosystem. In every version optimization, function design, and event planning, we must always keep our original intention in mind and clearly define what user needs the product should solve. Before building a positive user incentive system, we might as well think clearly about what role users should play in a healthy product form?

In fact, publicity is a very hard job. If you want to do a good job in publicity, you really have to learn how to do marketing. Those who do marketing also need to learn user psychology. But once you have learned it, it will be a very interesting thing, because in today's Internet age, it is easy to form a butterfly effect. Why do I say that? Public relations is also a kind of publicity, and good public relations can even influence public opinion. The user incentive rules we talked about today are actually used more in our lives and even work, but they have been strengthened or promoted in the Internet era. I hope this article will be helpful to you.