Review: How did the tool-type mini program grow 1.03 million users in 10 days?

Contents of this article:

1. What does 1 million mini program users mean?
2. Why choose to grow during the Spring Festival?
3. A complete review of the "Ji Hai Plan"
4. Activity summary and reusable experience

What does 1 million mini program users mean?

Perhaps for many companies’ mini programs, especially C-end mini programs, a growth of 1 million is not a happy figure, but for tool-type mini programs like ours, 1 million is of great significance.

How big of a deal is it? Our first mini program, “Drawing Tool Maker Post”, was launched on February 14, 2018 and started to accumulate users. Until December 2018, after 10 months, the number of users obtained was only over 2 million . Therefore, growing more than 1 million users within 10 days is a big challenge for us.

The challenge goes something like this. On January 1, 2019, our team began to implement the ork working method. A relatively "arrogant" growth target was set, one of the indicators of which was to achieve a million-level increase in mini program users within the first quarter . That is, at least one growth of close to 50% of the current level must be achieved.

Growth of this magnitude is not an easy thing for us. If we pursue growth in the same completely Buddhist way as in the past, even if we can gain brand exposure and high-quality fans, they may not be converted into mini program users.

After all, our previous route was like this:

As to why the official website does not flow back to the mini program, this is determined by our product concept.

For us, the services carried by the PC are the most important, and the mini program solves the productivity of the mobile phone - use the computer to solve the problems on the computer, and use the mobile phone to solve the problems on the mobile phone. Hard backflow between them is unnecessary. Therefore, our user base must achieve spontaneous hardcore growth through mobile devices.

Why choose to grow during the Spring Festival?

Let me break down our task keywords and arrange them in order of importance: In the first quarter, the number of mini program users increased by 1 million . Good planning is half of successful growth, and good timing is half of successful planning. So we must find the right time and then make the right plan.

How to find the best time? A smart way is to create your own hotspot, and a stupid way is to look through the calendar. It is not difficult to create a hotspot by yourself, but it requires a lot of manpower. After evaluating our team’s manpower, we decided to use the stupid method - checking the calendar. After looking at the calendar for the first quarter, we decided to choose the Spring Festival period for growth.

There are three reasons:

(1) A high degree of match between user needs and product characteristics . During the Spring Festival, users will have a large number of social needs, and "sending blessings" accounts for a large proportion of these social needs; our tools can "provide users with blessing cards and greeting cards."

(2) The growth timing of mobile terminals during the Spring Festival. During the Spring Festival, due to the long holiday, mobile traffic will surge, which is very suitable for completing mobile growth tasks. As a mobile product, mini programs have seen rapid growth during the Spring Festival. Seizing the opportunity during the Spring Festival is crucial to increasing mobile users.

(3) To achieve OKR goals. When one of our first quarter indicators was "doubling the number of mini program users", it meant that we must be able to seize every time node and try to achieve growth. The Spring Festival is the golden period of growth, so it must shoulder greater responsibilities.

A complete review of the "Ji Hai Plan"

Once the time node is determined, event planning becomes the focus. Because the lunar calendar of 2019 is the Year of the Pig, and we also completed the growth task during the Spring Festival, this growth was named the "Ji Hai Plan." We sorted out the manuscripts and blackboards first. There were dozens of them. They were quite messy and my handwriting was ugly. They looked like this:

To make it easier for everyone to understand, and because the actual implementation plan is clearer, I will give a complete review below.

1. Ji Hai plan summary

Mission: Grow existing users by nearly 50% — 1 million — between February 2 and 11, 2019.

Participating departments (in order of participation):

• Marketing Department: Propose ideas, prototype activities, plan activities, and execute activities
• Brand Department: sort out the activity value, various time nodes, and crowd targeting analysis
• Technical Department: Provide technical support and testing
• Design Department: In the first draft, I planned the Design Department as part of the “Technical” category.
• Finance Department (but because all partners were on holiday during the Spring Festival, the payment channels were declared invalid, so they were ultimately unable to participate)

Operational strategy: event planning, self-growth, and data orientation.

Strategic deployment:

• First half: February 2nd - February 4th New Year's Eve dinner + greeting cards
• Second half: February 5th - February 11th Spring Festival customs cards

1. Operational Record

(1) New Year’s Eve dinner + greeting cards

Combat strategy:

Blessing cards meet users' basic needs and are in the form of exquisite pictures + templates + card drawing, and can be shared through mini programs. You become a user by receiving the card.

Greeting Card:

Greeting cards are actually a process of user self-growth, which goes through 8 steps in total:

1. User A creates a greeting card, generates a work and chooses to send it out;
2. User A forwards the complete work to User B. The landing form of the work forwarded by the user is a small program.
3. User B received a greeting card generated by a small program;
4. User B clicks to receive the greeting card. At this time, the user will get a complete card receiving ritual experience - pulling out the card and flipping it over.
5. User B becomes a user of our mini program;
6. User B thought this was a good experience, so he made his own greeting card through our app.
7. User B forwards the finished product to user C...
8. A closed loop of user self-growth is formed.

Similarly, New Year’s Eve dinner is also a strategy for self-growth of users. It solves the user's interest needs and can be shared on WeChat Moments. By generating pictures, you become a user.

The New Year’s Eve dinner meets users’ fun needs and can be shared on WeChat Moments. You can become a user by generating a picture.

(2) Spring Festival customs

Operational strategy: targeting B-end and C-end groups.

• Side B: Output fun during the Spring Festival and avoid weakening the sense of presence.
• C-end: Understand cultural customs, and a lot of different little-known facts are brought out by the templates.

Through the New Year customs template, we have exported our design power and let users learn more about the customs of the Spring Festival. Including the do's and don'ts of each day during the Spring Festival, everything is simply presented. Therefore, we are called "New Year's Artifact Maker" by users.

Data Report:

• First half: New Year's Eve dinner actually increased (635,000)
• Second half: New Year customs actually increased (399,000)

The growth task completion rate was 103.4%.

Experience: In the second half of the growth, when it reached 370,000, we were expecting it to break through 40. However, the final 39.9 reminded us of the fear of being dominated by Thunder and KuaiBo. (Can today’s friends get this joke?)

1. “Ji Hai Plan” Growth Methodology

In fact, the growth methodology of the Ji Hai Plan is "data-oriented".

There are four key points in total: data orientation, data supervision, data guidance and data management.

One of the things that needs to be shared separately is data guidance.

Just as the previous article shared the "Marketing Philosophy of Truth, Goodness and Beauty", we continue to try to use "warmth and kindness" to build our brand texture, and continue to summarize experience through successful activities. The criterion for judging success is data. Data does not lie, especially when monitored at the minute level. Good data growth plus good word of mouth equals the success of the event.

We will extract the elements of successful events and organize them, and replicate the experience the next time we need to do an event. This is also the issue of the “life cycle of an activity” mentioned earlier. A good activity will always survive, which is what it means - it will continue to guide our work.

Activity summary and reusable experience

In the activity summary and reusable experience module, you can share a picture like this:

Among them, the most worth sharing points are:

（1）User experience first

You will find that whether it is the New Year’s Eve dinner, greeting cards, or templates, it is “users spontaneously promoting” our mini program and “users choosing to become” our mini program users. This is the main direction in which the technical and product teams contribute. Experience is the key to growth.

(2) Abandon the “traffic mindset” and choose the “growth mindset”

Many people who only think about traffic will tell you what will happen if you have 1 million users a day. But if we completely ignore user retention and traffic quality, does such growth make sense?

Yes, at least it’s a good promotion case. But as a business entity, when we are pursuing growth, is the goal just a promotion case?

No, what we want is subsequent sustained growth and long-term use by users. Therefore, we must abandon the traffic mentality and really treat every user as a living person rather than just "a bit of traffic." This is also the "empathy" that I have repeatedly mentioned. Don't do activities that you cannot accept, and don't do activities that you don't like.

(3) Do the right thing at the right time

This point is actually very important. The right time, the right place and the right people, the right time comes first. At the same time, sometimes, the failure of a project may just be due to the wrong timing, rather than the project being bad.

(4) Comply with platform rules and regulations

This is the key to the success of the event. Each platform has its own rules, and to survive on the platform, you must abide by these rules. The law is the bottom line that cannot be violated. Only by adhering to these two bottom lines can we provide good service.

Looking forward to exchanging and communicating with you all.

Source: Baidu Business School