How to do user operation well? You need to understand these 3 logics!

We need to think about what we want from users, time or money? Is it quantity or quality?

We also need to think about what we can give to users in return so that both parties can maintain a balance? Is it knowledge or service? Is it a commodity or an honor?

Only when there is give and take can there be frequent exchanges. This has been the civilization of mankind for thousands of years.

If you search “What is user operation ?” on Baidu, you may get 10 different definitions from 10 authors. Someone tells you about the AARRR model; someone tells you about the RFM model; someone lists a bunch of data models for you and shares with you the importance of user tags.

But if I may be frank, for most startup company operations professionals, 70% of the methods may not be suitable for the local environment. There aren’t that many data points, not that many tags, and even the product doesn’t support targeted PUSH, so when you read the article you can only think “Wow, that’s awesome”, and that’s it.

This is like asking a top student how to get good grades? A more reliable academic master might tell you: "I get up at 5:30 in the morning to study English because my mind is clearer at this time; and for math, the best way I have concluded is to do the last big question and constantly break through my own thinking... I believe you can do it too."

But even if you have strong execution ability and completely copy his methodology, your results may not necessarily improve. Because you only learned and imitated the "technique" but did not learn the "Tao" behind it.

Lao Tzu said in Tao Te Ching: Tao is the rule, the law of nature, and the highest. Dharma is method, legal principle, and the middle way. Technique is a way of doing things, a method, and it is of inferior quality. "Using Tao to control magic" means using Tao to carry wisdom and magic. Enlightenment of Tao is higher than practicing magic. "Skills" must be combined with "Laws", and "Laws" must be based on "Tao". Only when all three are combined, can the best strategy be made.

Based on my limited experience, I would like to try to analyze user operations from these three levels to see if I can help friends who are new to operations gain something.

1. User Operation-Tao

It is said that the truth is simple. If we return to the essence of user operation, we can find from the literal meaning that user operation is the operation of people.

When it comes to the management of people, there is nothing more than a saying that has been used from ancient times to the present: "It depends on the person."

Yes, it varies from person to person and this is a universal rule from ancient times to the present.

When you see a vain girl, you might as well praise her beautiful bag; when you see an unconfident boy, you might as well say that the products he designs look great. To your best friend, you give 5,000 yuan as a gift, hug her and say, "Don't treat yourself badly after getting married"; to your more casual girlfriends, you just give a phone call and say, "The company has too much overtime and we can't make it. The 2,000 yuan red envelope is our small token of appreciation."

See, we are born user operation experts. Of course, as users, we are being operated all the time.

If we view the earth as a large system, then we are the users being operated. In order to better control us, the earth begins to operate us from the moment we are born, and we are also creating our value for this system according to the established trajectory while being operated.

We are labeled by the system with various labels, different backgrounds, ages, genders, hobbies, different learning abilities, ambitions and desires, thus forming our own portraits.

The purpose of the Earth is to allow every user in this system to develop within the tolerance range of the system. Therefore, it will allocate different social resources to us based on our portraits and expose us to different living conditions, thus realizing user stratification operations.

To put it in a smaller context, the company itself is also a system. The company assigns different work content to each employee based on each person's previous experience. Then, based on your performance and behavior in the company, we decide whether to use a salary increase to motivate you to continue working, or use 996 to force you to resign.

But both the users of our planet and the users of our company are irresistibly individualized.

2. User Operation – Law

You give different red envelopes to different friends. Why do you do this?

The boss will give different incentives to different employees. Why does the boss do this?

Society will give different development paths to different groups of people. It is difficult for most people to escape from it, and counterattack has always been an exception. Why?

In my opinion, legal principles that vary from person to person are all intended to maintain a state of balance.

When your best friend of 10 years gets married, you will match the gift with a red envelope commensurate with your friendship based on your own financial status. This is to keep the friendship going. If you take 200 yuan, it may destroy the balance of your relationship.

Excellent employees will be matched with different expectations as their abilities improve. At this time, the boss motivates outstanding employees in order to maintain the balance of outstanding employees, make them feel that their efforts are rewarded, and thus embark on a new journey. If you don't provide motivation and the employee's value far exceeds his salary, this will disrupt the balance between the employee and the company and will lead to user churn.

Therefore, in actual operational work, we must be able to find the "balance point" we need. Let me give you an example:

User A registered for your APP through one of your new activities. For A, the current action trajectory is as follows:

The balance point here is whether the product's functional points match the user's interests. As for user operations, we need to find ways to enable users to perceive the points of interest as quickly as possible, so as to achieve a balance.

Assuming that user A finds something that interests him and stays there, and uses the APP normally, then only normal maintenance is required at this time. Until the imbalance occurs again, for example, user A is defined as a lost user. If you want to recall A at this time, you need to analyze what the imbalance point of A is.

Here we assume that our APP is for teacher training, so let's analyze the possible reasons for loss:

• She is no longer interested in the things she was originally interested in - User A decides not to be a teacher, so she will definitely stop using your product.
• Doesn’t the content on the APP satisfy her interests anymore? - For example, if the platform offers courses for junior teachers, but Teacher A has reached the level of a senior teacher, the platform can no longer meet her needs and the balance between the two parties is broken.
• There are similar apps to choose from - for example, a similar teacher training platform has come out, and the quality of the content on that platform is much better than yours.
• …

There may be many reasons, but you have to find the one that belongs to user A, find the point that destroys the balance, and comprehensively consider the current situation of your own APP to see whether you can solve this imbalance.

It should be noted here that the foundation for all successful operations is based on good products. If your product itself cannot meet A's needs and it is difficult to achieve a balance between A and the product, then no matter how many operational actions you take, they will be meaningless.

Well, at this stage we know that the principle of user operation is “different for different people”, and the method of user operation is to “solve imbalance”.

Now our thinking framework has been built. The following part will introduce some commonly used user operation models, that is, user operation techniques, so that you can quickly match the corresponding methods according to your needs.

3. User Operation – Technique

1. AARRR Model

The AARRR model is very popular now, which involves the user's life cycle.

This model was originally proposed by Sean Ellis, founder and CEO of Qualaroo. It is a scientific and effective way of growth, referring to the five stages of the user life cycle: acquiring users, activating users, improving retention, increasing revenue and spreading recommendations.

Acquisition: It is also called new user acquisition and is the first step in the AARRR process. It is the process from user cognition to understanding and then to becoming a product user.

Activation: Activation is the motivational process that guides users to discover the value of the product and repeatedly use its features. In fact, what we do at this stage is to retain new users, which is the most important part to some extent.

Improve retention: refers to all indicators that can help retain users. After acquiring users and doing targeted retention work, the remaining users become old users and are no longer affected by the previous two steps. The next step is to retain these old users.

Increase revenue (Retention) : refers to the realization of cash income through certain means of traffic. The prerequisite for monetization is to have a sufficient traffic base and certain monetization methods. Therefore, the above three links are very important.

Referral: also known as self-propagation, or viral marketing. Refers to a way of acquiring new users by leveraging the social influence of existing users. User referral marketing is one of the most sustainable and effective ways of growth. It is a highly measurable and scalable growth model. A good product must have its own spreading gene, otherwise the product may face death.

Let’s take the first step, Acquisition, as an example to see how to integrate the first and second parts into the specific execution:

Acquiring users is the primary goal of many companies. The size and growth rate of the company can be reflected in the company's financing. It can be said that user growth determines the company's development to a certain extent.

So what should we do in the user acquisition stage? In other words, how do we find the imbalance points of our potential users?

This requires that you have a very good understanding of your products and users, and you must clearly know the core competitiveness of your products and the greatest needs of your users.

Let’s take the example of a teacher training product to review the key points of user acquisition:

Our product is a teacher training APP, and our users are teachers and people who want to become teachers.

The balance point between our users and products: Teacher training APP can provide teachers with the knowledge and skills they need.

Then we can reversely infer what our acquisition channels are. What we need to do next is to decide what acquisition method to adopt based on the characteristics of the product and the company's strategy. As shown below:

It should be noted that there is no best way to add new features, only the most suitable one.

2. RFM Model

In the beginning, RFM analysis was a method of segmenting customer value based on customer activity and contribution to transaction amount.

R (Recency): The interval between the customer's most recent transaction time. The larger the R value is, the longer ago the customer transaction occurred, and vice versa, the closer the customer transaction occurred.

F (Frequency): The number of transactions made by the customer in the recent period. The larger the F value, the more frequent the customer's transactions, and vice versa, it means that the customer's transactions are not active enough.

M (Monetary): The amount of transactions made by the customer in the recent period. The larger the M value, the higher the customer value, and vice versa.

As for the specific usage of this model, many experts have conducted in-depth analysis on Renren, so I won’t go into details here.

One thing that needs to be mentioned here is that this model is not only applicable to e-commerce. The most important function of the model is to provide you with a framework and ideas for analysis. For RFM, operations staff can redefine it based on the business model of their own products. For example, if you are a consulting platform, you can have the following definition (just an example):

• R: Last login time
• F: Number of posts and comments in the recent period
• M: The number of times the ad was clicked and purchased in the recent period

Back to the model itself, according to the above discussion we can know that the key to user operation lies in "balance". For me, the most important significance of this model is not only that it stratifies users, but more importantly, it provides me with a "balance point".

For a user, the balance point is when the RFM is proportional. That is, if my RFM remains consistent, it proves that the user's use of the product is healthy, then I only need to maintain the original operating status, as shown in the following figure:

Many people may ask, among so many users that need to be managed, which one should I focus on first?

This needs to be done in conjunction with your stage goals. If your main task goal this month is to "achieve sales of * million", then you need to identify people with high M values ​​to do it.

However, it should be emphasized that turning a user from a potential customer into a high-value customer cannot be achieved through operational actions alone. This depends on your product system. We must admit that operations cannot change the world.

IV. Conclusion

Many people say that the core of users is fission, stratification, and grouping. This may be correct, but these are just methods.

It is certainly good to know methods. At least during the interview, you can come up with a lot of models and look very professional.

But I have to say that if you only stick to the method, then you will be one of the thousands of editors with less than 500 readers, you will be the one who was sent out to do useless work when the leader asked us to create a Douyin account, and you will be the one who cannot get a good result in the year-end assessment after working for a year.

After all, if you are asked to get up at 5:30 in the morning, you may waste the whole day; you currently have only 80 points, but you are obsessed with the last big question, it will be difficult to gain anything.

The study method taught by the top student may not be suitable for you. What you can refer to is his top-level logic, which is to find the time when you are in the best mental state to tackle memorization. Challenging some questions that are slightly beyond your ability can enhance your perception. The reason you didn’t get a good grade in the exam was not because the top student lied to you.

Author: Jianghu Xiaodao

Source: Jianghu Xiaodao