APP growth strategy, 6 steps to complete the violent cold start of user fission!

The author of this article combines his own practical experience to share with you how the cold start of user fission is carried out, enjoy~

When it comes to product growth, “cold start” is an entry-level, intermediate, and possibly advanced concept. It has something to do with the product itself, operator experience, strategy, execution, timing and even luck. Apart from uncontrollable metaphysical factors like luck, cold starts are not without traces. I just promised everyone to review the activity that increased the number of users by more than 200,000 in 6 days. It is also a cold start project. The content that everyone is interested in and the content that I want to review are almost completely matched.

So, with this article, I hope it will be helpful to everyone to complete the violent cold start of user fission in six steps.

Theoretical basis - sorting out the concepts related to cold start

As mentioned in the preface, "cold start" is a concept that can be used at a basic, intermediate, or advanced level. How to initiate a cold start, how effective the start-up will be, and what the start-up cost will be are all issues that need to be considered. However, if you really want to complete a cold start well, whether it is a beginner, intermediate or advanced operation, it is very important that you really understand and know the relevant concepts about cold start.

Regarding cold start, this section will be divided into three parts:

Ten elements of cold start Four methods of cold start Five common "pitfalls" of cold start

In order to write each link as detailed as possible, this article is relatively long. I hope you can read it patiently.

1. Ten elements of cold start

Whether a cold start is successful actually depends on ten factors.

①Products

The "product" itself is crucial in the cold start phase. All cold start strategies need to revolve around the product itself. "Product" itself is the first step of cold start, so we must ensure the product experience. Take ourselves as an example. Chuangketie is an Internet product. Before we cold-start each activity, repeatedly testing the fluency and concurrency is the most basic work. If the product itself is not well done, all subsequent cold starts will be in vain.

② Method

There are many ways to cold start, but generally speaking, there are two basic types of cold starts: offline cold start and online cold start.

Offline cold start: refers to the cold start method of guiding target users to understand new products through offline channels and staff, and become new users of the product. The main ways to play include distributing flyers, door-to-door sales, door-to-door sales, roadshows, etc. Online cold start: refers to the cold start method in which online channels and operation teams use activities, pictures, articles, etc. to guide users to understand new products and become new users of the product. The main ways to play include activities, content, fission, etc.

The cold start method may vary depending on the product's characteristics, nature, industry, and attributes. If it is an offline cold start of a physical product, traditional marketing methods and online marketing methods (public account tweets, circle of friends fission, channel placement) may be combined. The cold start of Internet products often needs to be completed through online fission.

Of course, if the budget is large enough, the cold start of Internet products can also try a blanket bombardment of offline publicity. Subway, bus station, and elevator advertisements will definitely have a certain effect if they are flooded for a month or two. However, this article will discuss more about how to achieve better cold start results under limited budget. Starting a business is not easy, so use and cherish your cash flow.

③Strategy

In a cold start, there is a big difference between "strategy" and "approach". As mentioned earlier, "method" refers to "choosing how to do a cold start." The “strategy” is “how to do a good cold start”.

The strategy is mainly reflected in three aspects: creativity, route and conception.

④Time

When to do a cold start is the key to a successful cold start. The cold start time should be closely integrated with the product and activities.

I will definitely not organize Dragon Boat Festival activities during the Spring Festival, and I will definitely not wish everyone a happy Valentine's Day during the Qingming Festival. In the previous article, it was mentioned that choosing the right time is very important, and there are two ways:

1) Create your own hotspot

Those who are best at creating hot topics are our friends in the entertainment industry. If we pay attention to Weibo frequently, we will find that hot searches are often manipulated by celebrity teams. This is one of the ways to create hot topics by yourself. In the marketing circle, the person I admire more is Mr. Zhen Miao. His latest post that went viral on WeChat Moments was “One post in exchange for a Lamborghini.” This is the hot spot he created himself. If you want to create your own hot spots, you must do sufficient research and preparation on user psychology, release time, and strategy.

2) Look through the calendar

You can choose any one according to the manpower situation. When you have enough manpower, I suggest you create your own hot spots. This is the least passive way to play. Alipay’s Koi, Mimi Meng’s team graduation certificate, etc. are all hot spots created by yourself. When manpower is insufficient, looking through the calendar is the safest and most reliable way.

⑤Channel

When I shared with others many times and mentioned promotion channels, many people would tell me "online channels" or "offline channels". But in my methodological system, online and offline are just ways to start and how to play. For the real channels, I will differentiate them according to the resource holders. There are two types: owned channels and external channels.

Our own channels include our own media platforms, official websites, communities, offline stores, etc. As long as they are our own resources, they are called our own channels.

External channels are divided into cooperation channels and distribution channels. The cooperation channels may be obtained through replacement, but the investment is self-evident.

Personally, I think that owned channels and external channels are equally important. The stronger your own channels are, the better the cooperative channels you can exchange them for. If your own channels are not strong, you can only increase costs on the distribution channels.

⑥ Guidance

Guidance is very important, but it does not mean "inducing" or "deceiving" users to click. Just like I wrote in my previous article "Hardcore Disassembly: A Complete Review of the Growth of 1.03 Million Tool Programs in 10 Days", we can prepare for the event in advance, such as preheating in advance, to attract users' attention, and let users participate in the event at the appropriate time.

⑦Self-propagation

The success of self-propagation is determined by the product or activity concept. For example, you have an idea for a great campaign, but your product has a lot of bugs and the concurrency is not done well, so users will be lost and you will be criticized. Similarly, if your product experience is great, but the activity idea is terrible, users may need to attract 1,000 new users to earn 1 dollar (this is just an example, don’t worry about it), which probably won’t work. Therefore, creativity and experience are indispensable.

⑧Cost

Costs include explicit costs and implicit costs.

Explicit costs are what we can see, namely the funds, physical objects, personnel, etc. that we mobilized for this activity. Hidden costs are brainpower, time, favors, etc.

We often say "achieving hundreds of thousands of users at zero cost", but in fact we are ignoring the hidden costs. Because it is really hard to measure, it is hard to say how much a friend is worth when he or she reposts a Weibo post or posts a circle of friends for you, but it may be the key to leveraging the activity.

⑨Uncontrollable factors

The uncontrollable factor is that we need to be prepared that "this event will have some unexpected events", which requires us to put in enough effort in product planning. For example, the case I am going to analyze today is a growth of 200,000 in 6 days. In fact, I would tell the technical department to be prepared for an increase of 500,000. With an increase of 500,000, the number of visiting users may be around 1 million or even 2 million. If I tell the technical team that the estimated growth is 100,000 people, then when the number of visitors reaches its peak, the page may be inaccessible and the idea will be ruined.

⑩Rule factors

When it comes to growth, I pay a lot of attention to “rules”. Each platform has its own rules. The previous "White Koi" event was launched on the WeChat public platform. The WeChat public platform does not like to induce attention and inducing forwarding, so we should not do it. Not trampling on the bottom line of the platform is the key to the survival of the event.

The above 10 factors can actually be divided into: controllable factors and uncontrollable factors. If you are interested, you can try to classify it yourself, what are controllable and what are not.

1. Four methods of cold start

Regarding cold start, I personally summarize four startup methods:

① Smash the content

The team can start the cold launch by producing high-quality content, which is actually the approach with the lowest explicit cost. A good piece of content is enough to attract great attention and promote the growth of content followers.

② Smashing activities

Activities need to generate core value together with content in order to attract more attention. Just like "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou", if there are no great tweets, it is just an event, and it is unknown whether so many people will pay attention to it. Similarly, if a great article is not combined with activities, what will grow is "fans" and "content followers". We see good campaigns that are a combination of tweets and events.

③Smash the channels

Naturally, both owned channels and cooperative channels must be developed, and all available resources must be used. If this cannot be done, then there is something wrong with the planning or concept of the activity itself.

④Impress the media

If you can attract media attention after doing the first three things well, that would be the best thing. The communication power of the media cannot be underestimated.

1. Five common pitfalls of cold start

The five common "pitfalls" of cold starts can actually be described as "pitfalls that I have encountered and almost encountered repeatedly."

The first is whether there is junk traffic on paid channels. To avoid the influx of spam traffic, we generally choose minute-level monitoring and adjust the release time of the activity to observe the effectiveness of the channel. The second is the choice of channels. "Vertical" channels are definitely the best, but many non-vertical channels may also bring us great growth. It is important to decide the channel based on the activity itself. The third is that cooperation must have a clear division of labor. It is difficult for one person to complete the entire growth plan. If there is no clear division of labor and no one is assigned a person in charge of each link, then when an accident occurs, you can only stay where you are. The fourth is that ab testing is necessary when doing a cold start. "We thought" that it might not work well during the cold start phase. Just like the New Year’s Eve dinner activity mentioned in my previous article, it was originally a “cartoon family portrait”. We are very optimistic about the “family portrait”, firstly, it is a concept of reunion, and secondly, it is simpler to operate and has less content. However, out of caution, we made two demos, "Family Portrait" and "New Year's Eve Dinner", and gave them to our seed users for experience. In the end, we chose to respect the users’ choices and prepared a “New Year’s Eve dinner”. The last pitfall is to never leave anything to chance. "It should be fine" often means "something should be wrong". It is also important whether the event materials, fonts, and content can be used commercially. This sentence comes from me, who has received claims letters from font and image libraries.

Activity review - violent cold start of 200,000 activities in 6 days

The activity I want to review this time is an activity that grew by 200,000 in 6 days, and it is also a practical review of the "Truth, Goodness and Beauty" methodology - "What are you made of?"

1. Event Overview

Start time: September 21-27, 2018

Activity mode: Mid-Autumn Festival fun h5 test

Activity logic: The mini program is the only entrance. Enter h5 to answer test questions related to the Mid-Autumn Festival, obtain and share the results

Activity preparation: interesting tweets, community warm-up, mini program entrance, h5 design and development

Involved teams: product, development, UI, brand, operation

1. Activity Practice

(1) Preparation stage

My preparation stage is after the plan is completed. Because after the activity plan comes out, we actually know which teams to find and what to ask them to do. So I held several meetings with them separately, and then created a group and put everyone in it. The purpose of holding separate meetings is to take up as little of everyone’s time as possible.

Let me also explain to you why my manuscripts are sometimes in English and sometimes in English. The main reason is that I will have separate meetings with everyone - when meeting with product and UI, English will be used more often, because they have a lot of abbreviations to use, so it will be much more convenient for them to use English when writing requirements and manuscripts. When it comes to market operations and branding, we basically use Chinese.

(2) Review of meeting manuscripts

Below I will give you a practical review based on the manuscript. Why? Because my handwriting is so ugly, if someone who took notes with me during the meeting was not there, they would probably... not be able to understand it...

Chinese is for operations and marketing:

I always emphasize that " h5 is the carrier and content is the core ". So it's in the middle of the picture.

There are three major forks:

The first is time, which is the timetable on the left, which states when and through which channels the promotion will be carried out. You can see that "community" appears three times.

The second fork is "Gameplay", which is the small piece in the upper right corner. We will need the cooperation of content and channels. The content needs to be produced by the new media department, and the channels are both our own channels and cooperative channels. Own channels include self-media, social groups and circles of friends. The channels for cooperation are friends circles and communities. There are many ways to play in the community through own channels, including preheating, morning newspapers, poster push, etc. The cooperation channel is much more boring, it is just a coded poster.

The third fork is the active path and precautions. There are three points in total, from left to right: entrance, core, and purpose. Actually, we have to look at it from the right side. But why did I write from left to right? Because I was making a summary during the meeting, and in order to leave enough space for writing, I started from the right. (This is to leave room for the keyword extraction on the right)

We have two purposes for doing this event: to attract new users to the mini program and to test our methodology of truth, goodness and beauty.

The core of the activity is content + truth, goodness and beauty.

Entrance: Entrance to the mini program homepage.

As you can see, the keyword extraction results on the far right are: growth, community, content, and methodology.

Next, let’s look at the next manuscript, which is written for the product and UI, with a total of three pages of sketches.

The first one is the startup page. In fact, there is a loading page before the startup page, but I can’t draw it, so I just dictated it. The second one is the question and answer page. Because it is a test mode, it is QA+graphic design (the GD I wrote is not a big star). In fact, the design of this page will not change, only the copy will be different. The last one is the results + sharing page, which will have test results and QR codes.

This seemingly simple test actually involves the joint efforts of product, technology and testing professionals.

(3) Execution and routing

①Execution

Our execution is divided into three major parts: content, community, and technology.

In terms of content, on September 21 (before the Mid-Autumn Festival), the new media team used a subscription account to push the article "Ranking of Weird Mooncakes in 2018, Ten-Nut Mooncakes Are Out".

The content lists various strange mooncake fillings, including Fengyoujing mooncakes, which leads to our test "What is your filling":

Since then, almost all of us have participated in this activity. Afterwards, the community leader distributed his test results to the group, which attracted everyone's attention and guided more people to participate in the test.

②Route

The activity route I planned is roughly as shown below, that is, no matter what, users will enter the mini program:

I think the path couldn’t be clearer and simpler, because accessing, authorizing, and becoming a user are very simple and crude ways of playing. We only set up the h5 entrance in the mini program, and the forwarded messages are all mini program cards.

Why not just develop and complete the test in the mini program like "New Year's Eve Dinner"?

Because there was no time, the original plan was to complete the test within the mini program. But I joined Chuangketie on August 27 last year, and the event was launched on September 21. Before that, I was on a business trip and gave several speeches. So we didn’t call everyone for a meeting until early September. The time was too tight, so we chose the second best option - using the mini program as the entrance and h5 to implement the operation.

(4) Speech skills

For an event, the wording is very important. There are several key points to a good wording: concise, straightforward and clear.

Just like the screen-sweeping advertisements of Earl Travel Photography and Boss Direct Hiring, they are actually very good rhetoric - during the period of rapid growth, I don’t need users to fully know and understand our corporate culture, but users need to know what we do. The same goes for events. Why should users participate in your event? And what you can gain from participating is very important.

According to the time nodes, I made a plan for dialogue: before the event, during the event, and after the event.

The main focus before the event is warm-up, mainly through articles on subscription accounts, telling everyone what the strange mooncake fillings are and attracting everyone's attention. During the activity, we were guided by the results of psychological tests. 15 completely different mooncake fillings, representing 15 different personalities, are the communication skills themselves. The wording after the event is not actually "I am going to say" but "I will see what users are saying". From this perspective, I can extract the trend of users posting on WeChat Moments, and then I will know how to post on WeChat Moments if I want to do a cold start on WeChat Moments next time so that users will be more receptive to it.

(5) Monitoring

Since both our internal and external channels were used for this event, we placed different channel codes in different channels during the cold start phase. We have also planned the time for push notifications, including which channel will be used for push notifications from what time to what time, and there is a table for all of that. We will monitor this channel and the overall data on a minute-by-minute basis.

I have said before that minute-level monitoring in paid channels can avoid the influx of junk traffic, while in cooperative channels, minute-level monitoring can effectively determine whether the channel is high-quality or not. If you meet a high-quality partner, it is entirely feasible to develop deeper cooperation.

(6) Review of the details

This activity was not completely successful. In the actual implementation process, because I did not review it carefully, the QR code of our sharing page directly jumped to the h5 test page! ! ! This has led to the loss of many mini program users - scanning the code takes you to an h5 page, which has little to do with the mini program! ! ! This is a very low-level mistake, please don’t make it! ! ! Because of this incident, I punished myself with three cups of full-sugar hot milk tea! ! ! (Ah, it tastes good)

1. Activity Effect

In the end, the number of visitors to h5 reached nearly 5 million... and the number of new users of the mini program was 200,000.

The largest number of new users of mini programs come from these two directions. The order of rank is very strong according to the number of sources:

Community source: We forwarded the mini program in our own and cooperative communities to allow users to directly participate in the activities. After the test was completed, the users found it interesting and shared the mini program. Search Sources: This was our most unexpected source. Because in fact, there were not many implantations of MakerTie in the whole activity, only one logo was implanted (but our logo had the brand word). This means that many users searched for our brand terms after participating in this fun test! We analyzed that perhaps users wanted to do more psychological tests. But sorry, we are actually a drawing tool.

We reflected on this for a long time at that time. If we had enough time, we could have achieved more growth and avoided the loss of h5. At the same time, if I review it more strictly, the effect may be better if the QR code on the shared page is scanned to enter the mini program.

1. Activity Feedback

We also received a lot of user feedback about this event:

The combination of interesting results and human character has won the resonance and recognition of users. At that time, we had special mooncake fillings such as pearl milk tea filling, flower filling, ice cream filling, durian filling, spicy hot pot filling, etc., representing different personalities.

Among them, the result of durian filling made many test users cry. The test result is roughly like this: "You, the durian-filled person, may be liked or hated by others. But you must believe in integrity, beauty and warmth. The people who stay with you must be the ones who understand you the most."

In fact, our test questions and question bank are planned based on some psychological tests, rather than being made up on the spur of the moment. Therefore, the results will likely not exceed the user's psychological endurance, and the effect will naturally be better.

Reusable experience summary

In fact, all the reusable experiences of this activity are listed above. If I must summarize, content is the core and social media is a very important channel. Also, for all activities, you must be cautious, careful, and cautious, leave enough time, and test more. Otherwise, even if there is growth, but a large number of users are lost, it cannot be said that this activity is 100% successful.

above. If you find the article helpful, please give me a like and bookmark. Your recognition is my motivation to continue to output. Grateful for the encounter. This article is exclusively written by Hysterin based on his work experience at Chuangketie. Reprinting must indicate the author and source, and commercial use requires authorization.

Author: Hysterin

Source: Hysterin