How to build an effective user incentive system?

How to guide users to take action? How to promote interaction between users? It is very necessary to build an effective user incentive system .

After 2018, knowledge payment has become the fourth largest digital content sector after consulting, entertainment, and games, and has begun to become increasingly integrated with people's lives.

Even if you have never asked questions on Getai or Fenda, or bought "Speak Well" or "Emotional Intelligence Course" on Himalaya or Qingting FM, you must know about products such as Qianliao and Knowledge Planet that are based on the WeChat entrance.

As more and more companies enter the field of knowledge payment, operations in this field have also become more detailed. Payment for knowledge is no longer as simple as a single sales model of “selling online courses”, but has shifted to a compound form of “content + service”. With services, there is a need for user operations.

1. Why do paid knowledge products need to provide user incentives?

As mentioned earlier, any knowledge product consists of two major parts: "content + service". For paid knowledge products, high-quality content is the core, but what is actually provided to users is mainly service.

At present, most Internet knowledge products present three rings from content to service: the core is high-quality content; the middle is the action mechanism to promote users' own actions; the outer ring is the interactive community where users interact with each other.

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The trend from content to services shows the importance of user operations, but the current situation is that many paid knowledge products are sold more but used less. Often from the moment users purchase, users are constantly lost, ultimately causing losses to both buyers and sellers.

How to enhance user engagement? How to guide users to take action? How to promote interaction between users? It has become a problem that many knowledge-based paid products must face.

2. Analysis of the Business Model of Knowledge-based Paid Products

1. Usage scenarios of knowledge payment users

• On the way to the bus;
• Lunch break/before going to bed at night;
• When you encounter a problem and need help;
• Fragmented time in other scenarios.

In a closed knowledge product, the videos and audios provided by content creators/lecturers are its long-term value, that is, the core of the content, while the information conveyed in specific scenarios is the short-term value of the product. If the scenarios cannot be deeply segmented, the short-term value cannot be stable.

1. Business model of paid knowledge products

Most paid knowledge products do not have external advertising and mainly make profits by collecting commissions from the income of content creators/lecturers. This is a business model in which users are not willing to pay, but the frequency of use after payment is relatively high.

This type of profit model is relatively simple and requires a large increase in the number of users and willingness to pay to drive revenue, which means that there must be a large traffic entrance to attract more users.

In summary, the problems with most paid knowledge products on the market are:

• The knowledge payment scenarios have not been deeply segmented, and the short-term value is unstable;
• The content format is relatively thin (one-way interaction between lecturers and users), and fails to generate long-term value;
• The profit model is single and a complete product ecosystem has not yet been formed;
• The quality of users varies greatly, the community environment is relatively messy, and so on.

3. Analyze the reasons for low user retention and activity

Imagine the path that users take when using the product: Log in - Consume knowledge (including asking questions to teachers, learning courses and other long-term value) - Share (maybe, may not) - Browse information, interact with other users (short-term value in the scenario) - Feel positive motivation - Log out - Log in again (maybe, may not)

Each node may become the reason for low user retention and activity, such as: users are unwilling to log in, they have low motivation to learn after logging in, there is no recall mechanism after user loss, etc.

Therefore, different solutions should be proposed for each existing node.

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4. Clarify the specific behaviors that users are encouraged to take

This solution is the underlying logic of the entire incentive system. On this basis, more specific ideas for guiding user behavior are proposed.

In the past, the focus of mass communication, media, books, and courses was on delivering information and knowledge, and focusing on the profitability of the audience. Now, paid knowledge products must strive to guide users' actions and create a sense of user participation.

Why are more and more paid knowledge products closer to a community?

——Mainly to create a space for interaction and communication among learners.

It's like a cafe, it provides coffee and space, but the most important thing it provides is the opportunity for interaction between users. When we go to a coffee shop, high-quality coffee is essential, but what we really buy is not the cup of coffee, but the atmosphere of chatting with friends.

In a good community atmosphere, users can complete the closed loop of viewing, producing, and sharing content, thereby promoting the self-propagation of the product on the user side and continuously attracting more people.

5. Create an incentive plan

Incentive options:

• Material incentives: vouchers, red envelopes
• Spiritual motivation: points system, medal achievements, community activities, rankings
• Human nature triggers: vanity, greed, loss aversion

For one-time behaviors : such as logging in or joining a community, you can obtain different identities; for example, for payment, you can get different coupons and red envelopes based on the user's payment level.

For continuous and coherent behaviors : such as actively sharing one's own high-quality learning experience, actively participating in topic discussions, sharing one's own learning results with others, and other behaviors that improve UGC content, you can set up activities such as in-group incentives, achievement achievement, fan accumulation, and active list listing.

For repetitive simple behaviors : log in and sign in every day, punch in for study time, you can set up login to receive points, punch in to receive gold coins (points or gold coins can be circulated and used within the product).

The recall mechanism can be used in conjunction with the incentive system, such as red envelope or voucher recall, sharing or spreading incentives.

Under this incentive system, the user's usage logic will be divided into the following three parts:

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So the final incentive result is:

• Users are more motivated to log in, and their activity is improved;
• Build a closed-loop user ecosystem to connect the relationship between users
• New business logic can be explored, such as user content transactions, valuable community activities, etc.

For knowledge-based paid products, the main point of consideration for the user incentive system is: How to create a high-quality ecosystem where users are willing to stay and interact with each other? This requires the support of high-value PGC content, and the incentive system can only be icing on the cake.

However, the weak point of most paid knowledge products is that they have excellent content, but services are often overlooked. Whether this service coordinates the interaction between users and authors or between users, there is always a lot of room for improvement. Improving user participation, guiding user behavior, and promoting user communication can better combine knowledge and practice, thereby greatly enhancing the value of paid knowledge products.

Related reading:

1. Review: How to effectively build a user incentive system!

2. Advanced operations: Analysis of the underlying logic of the user incentive system!

3. How to build a user incentive system to enhance stickiness?

4. Random draw, an addictive way to motivate users!

5. Case analysis: How to build a user incentive system?

6. From an operational perspective, let’s talk about the user incentive system of financial products