Three basic operating modes for members!

In the current Internet environment, user operation has unshakable value and significance. When it comes to membership operations, if we want to extend the user life cycle and maximize user value, we must first clarify the basic types of members.

Everyone has been working on user-centric work for a long time, and it has recently been given many new concepts, such as growth, aha moment, user segmentation, etc.

Of course, the overall environment has also led to user operations becoming the focus of Internet product development in the next 3-5 years.

From 2010 to now, it has been nearly ten years since the product manager bonus period. Product manager skills, theories and even standard products have been standardized. The worst case scenario is to copy the industry leader.

After the sharing economy and short videos divided up the last wave of 4G blue ocean, there are basically no blue ocean vertical divisions in all walks of life. The situation in the past where a large number of users flocked in as long as technology and products were invested is gone forever. With the entire Internet user group being almost divided up, retaining existing active users, extending the user life cycle as much as possible, and increasing user value have become important means of survival at this stage. Although the ticket to the 5G and IOT era is still unclear, retaining the current users will always give you a better chance of success when the next wave comes.

When talking about user operation, we have to mention the terminal of member operation - members. No matter what product, no matter how to extend the user's life cycle, in the end there must be a terminal to realize the user's value. A system with endless capital investment and no profit output is unhealthy.

This time let’s talk about the common membership forms:

1. Independent service package

Provide unique information, content or services to users in the form of service packages. This form of membership service essentially provides information, content or services that have relatively high production costs and cannot be provided free of charge. This service package can be sold separately to obtain certain material returns. From another perspective, we can understand membership as a marketing form for this type of service package in the special environment of the Internet. With fixed production costs, greater marginal benefits can be obtained as the number of members increases.

The membership model of content-based products, tool-based products and common social products is this kind of packaged service model. The key point of this membership model lies in cost control and expansion of membership scale to obtain maximum marginal benefits.

1) Content-based platform

For example, Tencent Video and Get. There are many ways to control costs, some are to increase revenue, and some are to reduce expenditure. Content platforms often reduce content costs at the upstream of the industry through methods such as self-production of content and self-investment in the industry, so that content sold at the same value can obtain better returns. Sometimes, the content operators of these platforms must also be good at discovering high-quality PGC teams within the platform, finding good content IP, and obtaining higher premiums.

2) Tool-based platform

Such as Baidu Cloud Disk, Thunder, etc., these services themselves have relatively high storage costs and bandwidth costs. Therefore, the bandwidth for uploading and downloading a large amount of resources is limited, and the cost sharing brought by the membership system can better alleviate the cost surge caused by the surge in user scale.

Typical examples are Tinder and TanTan. You can think of social software as a tool-type product with a layer of skin. In fact, the cost of social products mainly comes from invisible things such as anti-spam services and IM communication services provided by third parties. Its application layer is the interaction between people and the membership of social software, which mainly builds membership rights by constructing various gameplay scenarios. There are many means, including props that can improve social efficiency, super exposure, and special likes; you can view things that ordinary users cannot see, such as the other party's information, the other party's tags, and who likes me; there are also some special identity tags to show your personality in a social atmosphere.

In summary, memberships sold in the form of service packages are basically non-discriminatory membership mechanisms. Paid users can choose to purchase a membership for a certain period. After the service period expires, the privileges disappear and anyone can purchase it.

2. Stored value membership

This type of membership is common in offline scenarios, such as the well-known Starbucks Rewards Card, supermarkets, Internet cafes, and major barber shops where Tony teachers frequent. Recently, Thunder also launched a lifetime membership card. Stored value membership actually means exchanging stored value for discounts, forcibly binding consumption scenarios and ensuring multiple visits at the expense of single service benefits.

Stored-value membership is particularly effective when service providers are unable to reach users. It ensures that users will think of your service scenario when a specific low-frequency demand arises. Among Internet products, what I know is that Miaojie’s 365 card is a stored-value VIP system. As a product of Intime, Miaojie combines online and offline scenarios, so it is not difficult to understand why this form was chosen.

As a service provider, whether it is a supermarket, Internet cafe, barber shop or shopping mall, the idle cost is not low. When there is no customer flow, there is still a high cost. Just like those 10% off air tickets, the plane will fly back regardless of whether there are people sitting on it or not. Moreover, due to the limitations of space and number of employees, there will not be a large enough marginal benefit even if the flow of people is at full capacity. Therefore , sacrificing some interests through stored value and member discounts in exchange for a stable passenger flow level and a comprehensive price-benefit balance is a very delicate and difficult to control system.

The cost of stored-value membership is generally higher, and users are required to advance a sum of money to obtain different levels of benefits. On the premise of binding the user's multiple visit behaviors, other services are infiltrated every time the user visits, and the profits from the loss of membership are made up by increasing the average order value of each user visit.

3. Points accumulation type

Another form of membership is the points growth system, which selects users with different behavior patterns and provides them with different operation strategies, especially providing different services to those users with higher user value. In theory, this strategy is applicable to products with high-frequency key behaviors or high single-time consumption. Common examples include the points system of Alipay, airlines, hotels, and game recharges.

I personally use this formula to roughly estimate user value:

Let me explain the above formula briefly:

1) Channel weight

In fact, this is a user-initialized score, and the default weight is 1 . From the perspective of cross-BU and cross-company cooperation, for some high-quality channels, such as users from products of sister departments, we can directly obtain the performance of these users in other products through interfaces, such as whether they are very active in sister products and have the potential to pay. In theory, they can get some better starting points and enter the main field of user operations more quickly.

2) Key Behavioral Standard Value

A very important process here is to first define the standard usage path characteristics of a certain type of user through scenarios. First divide into groups, then into layers, and cross-compare to find correlations. When technical students perform clustering, they never only obtain isolated feature points for research. The more detailed the link data is and the longer the link is, the better. After the characteristics of the entire link are clear, select several key points on the link to form a clearer user behavior portrait. From the perspective of product functions, there is no type of user who will definitely not use a certain function. There is only a difference in the degree to which a certain type of user uses a certain function. These are the manifestations of user characteristics at the functional nodes.

For example, taking Xiami Music as an example, we describe two types of users with behavioral characteristics based on behavior (number of times/day):

• Logger users: Start (6) → 30 songs a day (1) → Collection (1) → My collection (7);
• New users: Start (5) → Recommended playlist (8) → Favorite (12) → Guess you like (5) → Favorite (24);

It can be seen that although they are all music listening users, the scenarios included in their commonly used paths are different and their roles are completely different. The most common way for lumberjacks to expand their list is through daily recommendations, and most of the time they are immersed in the melodies they are familiar with. Pioneering users have a wide range of ways to expand their circle of friends. They browse a lot of recommended playlists and also listen to personalized radio stations. Their key behaviors lie in discovering new content and using tools.

Of course, this data is not all. The pioneering users may include some data of the logging users, or even higher, such as repeatedly listening to a song that has just been collected. To study users thoroughly, you can only do so by linking them together and treating them as individuals. It is easy to fall into a dilemma if you only focus on the usage of a certain function, that is, the user group that performed very well in the last activity will not be useful the next time.

Let’s go further. Among the pioneering users, according to the length of time they use the app, there are also:

• New users: Start (1) → 30 songs per day (2) → Favorites (2) → Recommended playlist (1);
• Mature users: Start (5) → Recommended playlist (8) → Favorites (12) → Guess you like (5) → Favorites (24) → My Favorites (28);

From a commercial perspective, as a music app, functions that facilitate the promotion and publicity of new songs are more beneficial to the development of the entire ecosystem, and they will receive a relatively high behavioral weight. This means that the key behaviors of pioneering users will focus more on these weighted bonuses.

3) Activity/marketing/sales weighting

It refers to a part of users who actively participate in platform activities and purchase products in the activities, and their value will be weighted. No matter what type of user, there will always be some who are particularly interested in official activities, while others will ignore you no matter what you do. Sometimes, choosing active segments can often make the evaluation of the results more objective.

4) Attenuation parameters

The significance of this part is that all our tracing of the value of user behavior is within a certain cycle. For example, if a user does not make any payment within one month after the first payment, the platform's service priority for him will decline, and resources will be concentrated on providing services to users with higher cycle value. Of course, the attenuation period and attenuation amount should still be designed according to the business characteristics.

Ultimately, we can quantify changes in user habits based on changes in the usage of certain features, or we can track changes in a certain user group based on comprehensive usage, convert them into quantitative values, and then evaluate the effectiveness of a certain activity.

Generally speaking, capital understands user value as the market valuation of a product/number of monthly active users , which is a basic expectation. Whether the user value is higher or lower than this value, their significance to the survival of the platform is different. The final quantitative result of user value is divided into levels according to capital expectations to divide users into levels. The point system is also a common discriminatory system.

Of course, the most important part of the points system lies in its design. Points issuance rules and points recovery methods. We guide user behavior through points, and achieve cost control, cost sharing and points recovery through operational means and rights design. The issuance of points also involves the expression of rights, user membership awareness, etc. I will summarize this part separately and will not expand on it here.

The above are the three basic membership models that I personally summarized. You can try to apply them to the membership of the products you often use to see what type of membership he is and why he chooses this type. If there are types that I have missed, or if you have your own opinions on the types I listed, you are welcome to leave a message so that we can learn from each other.

If you think what I shared is good, please like it to encourage me. In the next issue, I will talk about the expression of membership rights.

Written by: Casdale

Source: Castare