The 10 most popular growth hacking strategies in 2018!

We feel it’s necessary to share with you our research from the past year: Breaking down the 10 most popular growth hacking strategies in China in 2018.

Since 2017, the concept of "growth hacking" has gradually become popular in China, and we are also constantly researching the growth hacking system. On January 1 last year, we released “A Review of the Top 10 Growth Strategies for 2017” . With only 4,000 followers, the article was read nearly 30,000 times and was well received by everyone.

Since that day, our growth community has gathered tens of thousands of people and has gradually become the most cutting-edge and in-depth place to discuss growth.

Today, "growth" is still the hottest word in the Internet circle, and growth strategies are slowly moving away from the "barbaric period" and paying more attention to the product itself and user experience. We think it’s necessary to share with you our research from the past year and break down the 10 most popular growth hacking strategies in China in 2018:

1. Short video traffic

2. Social e-commerce

3. Lucky Draw

1. Course Trial

2. WeChat Ecosystem Matrix

3. Virtual Economy

4. Super Member System

5. Team PK

6. Gamification

10. Question and answer fission

1. Short video traffic generation

Overview:

Douyin’s user dividend is real, but people want to get a piece of Douyin’s traffic because of Douyin’s distribution mechanism: Douyin evaluates the popularity of short videos through data such as classification, viewing time, likes, and comments. No matter you are famous or not, as long as it is a high-quality short video, it will receive a huge amount of traffic recommendations.

In the early days, content that was popular on platforms such as Weibo and WeChat could become popular by turning it into a PPT short video and moving it to Douyin. But now, short videos with real people and novel ideas are more popular. We believe that the effect of short videos in attracting traffic is unquestionable, but the quality requirements for short videos will become higher and higher.

Case 1: Love Bank

In September this year, a short video on Douyin showing a couple running to withdraw money received over 17 million views. The social app Love Bank mentioned in the video received 500,000 new downloads within 24 hours, squeezing out WeChat, QQ, and Xiaohongshu to top the App Store's social category list.

The core gameplay of Love Bank is the concept of "bank": if couples sign in for 365 consecutive days, they can receive a bonus of 1,000 yuan (which is exactly the scene in the popular short video).

We happened to be studying this case at the time. In fact, six months before the viral video, Love Bank had been encouraging users on the App to upload videos of themselves using the App to Douyin in order to share a daily bonus of 10,000 yuan.

Under the #LoveBank# tag on Douyin, it has accumulated 2.5 million views. The popular videos are the result of many iterations of user UGC content.

Case 2: Yinyu

Coincidentally, short videos are also an important means of growth for Yinyue, the most popular social app recently. In the early days, Yinyue also had a karaoke product mechanism, but its main audience was fans of singers, and the effect of promotion on forums and fan groups was not obvious.

Fortunately, Yinyue and the 66 keyboard, which was once popular on Douyin, come from the same team. They found that some users spontaneously spread the silly singing videos of Yinyue netizens, and the response was good.

So I started trying to post short videos on Tik Tok and Weibo, and it really achieved good results. After that, Yinyue started to use cash rewards as bait to encourage users to upload short videos, just like Love Bank . The following are the details of the Yinyue reward activity we saw in the internal test group:

Starting today, as long as you save a video of playing Yinyue’s games and post it on the Douyin short video platform, as long as it gets 10+ likes, Yinyue will give you a red envelope reward! The bonus earning rules are as follows:

1. 2 yuan for every 10 likes, less than 10 will not be counted, the upper limit of the reward is 10,000 yuan; if a single video is forwarded and shared 5 times, you can get a bonus of 2 yuan, the upper limit of the reward is 10,000 yuan;

2. Post a video + promotional copy in Moments, and get 50 likes, and get a reward of 10 yuan for each like.

3. For WeChat groups with more than 200 members, or QQ groups that publish videos and promotional copywriting, RMB 2 per group

4. The video can be funny, but not too funny;

5. Any fraudulent operations are not allowed. Once discovered, the rewards will not be redeemed.

At present, the number of views of the Douyin topic #音遇# has reached 1.35 million, and the most effective short video on Weibo has been forwarded more than 20,000 times.

2. Social e-commerce

Overview:

Pinduoduo, the e-commerce protagonist in 2017, made people realize that the WeChat ecosystem has a sales capacity that is not inferior to Taobao, and a higher distribution efficiency than Taobao. However, Pinduoduo-style group buying has two main disadvantages:

1. There are many categories and SKUs, the prices are generally cheap, and the trust in the platform is low

2. The social pressure of bargaining with others increases, and users become tired of bargaining and other activities

If Pinduoduo's group buying model is a Pinduoduo platform that connects hundreds of millions of users, then the social e-commerce model that emerged in 2018 is an e-commerce platform that connects multiple group leaders through profit-sharing, and then the group leaders radiate to more users. The benefits of this model are:

1. As a small KOL in the social circle, the group leader can endorse the e-commerce platform and products.

2. Group leaders can make money by selling goods, which motivates them to develop new users and maintain user retention and repurchase

Online, social e-commerce has mainly transformed WeChat business, purchasing agents, and daily shopping. Offline, social e-commerce has given birth to the hottest e-commerce track in 2018 - community group buying.

Case 1: Daily Taobao

Daily Tao is a social e-commerce project incubated by MissFresh. It began to gain fame in mid-2018, with its Baidu Index soaring, and completed two rounds of financing totaling US$130 million during the capital winter.

The model of Daily Tao is similar to that of Yunji in the past, and it uses the selling point of "saving money by using for yourself and making money by sharing" to attract users to join. Users need to purchase a 400 yuan entrepreneurial gift package before they can join. The entire distribution system looks very complicated, but it actually mainly consists of two aspects. On the one hand, there is the invitation commission, and on the other hand, there is the sales commission :

Every time a new person is invited to join, VIP shopping guides, consultants, and senior consultants can receive a "training allowance"; when a user places an order, his VIP shopping guides, consultants, and senior consultants can also receive a certain percentage of the reward.

Thanks to this mechanism, Daily One Tao’s sales are doubling every month. But obviously, Daily Tao, like Yunji, faces regulatory issues.

In November 2018, Daily Tao took the initiative to change the joining threshold from purchasing a 399 yuan entrepreneurship gift package to inviting 10 friends, which directly cut off an important part of the user's income. As for order sales commissions, e-commerce prices are relatively transparent. Unless there is a very strong supply chain, it is difficult to give users multi-level commission rewards. With these two revenue items declining, Daily Tao may find it difficult to replicate the growth rate of 2018.

Case 2: Community group buying

Community group buying can be seen as an enlargement of offline scenarios - offline, there are also examples of several aunts going to the wholesale market together to purchase large quantities at low prices, and then dividing the goods among themselves.

Online, community group buying can be seen as the LBS version of social e-commerce. Each community has a group leader, who is usually a mother or the owner of a small store in the community. The group leader then organizes community users to place group purchases and orders through the circle of friends. The ordered goods will be sent to the group leader and then distributed by him.

So far, many community group buying platforms have completed financing of more than 10 million yuan. It is reported that the monthly turnover of leading platforms such as the Niwoni community group buying has exceeded 100 million, and the average number of orders placed by old users can reach 9 times per month.

However, we have also observed that the current entry threshold for community group purchasing is relatively low, and the categories are mainly concentrated in fresh fruits. In order to increase repurchases and allow group leaders to earn enough profits, it is imperative to expand SKUs.

Compared with social e-commerce among acquaintances, community is still a weak social one. If quality control and service cannot keep up after the expansion of SKU, there will definitely be a collapse-like decline, which will be a big test for the supply chain.

3. Lucky Draw

Overview:

In 2018, Weibo produced two popular lottery events: "Payment Carp" and "Wang Sicong IG Championship Lottery". These activities are different from simple lotteries, which only have one form. The focus is on creating huge topic events, triggering the public's mentality of taking chances and following the crowd, and achieving massive user growth in a short period of time.

What’s amazing is that the lottery + event marketing method is not something that has only appeared in 2018. As early as the Yuan Dynasty, in order to solve the funding problem for building palaces and pagodas, monks in temples offered dozens of high-priced treasures as grand prizes and sold bamboo lottery tickets to the public . Finally, they announced the winner of the grand prize through a public lottery ceremony.

In order to expand its influence, temple fairs team up with wealthy and famous people to support the event and act as sales agents. On the day when the grand prize was announced, thousands of people flocked to the temple to watch the lottery ceremony, bringing huge profits and fame to the temple.

This kind of lottery activity in the Yuan Dynasty was called "drawing lots to win profits". It is not difficult to find that apart from the need to pay to participate in the lottery, "Drawing Lots to Win" and the Alipay Koi Lottery are highly similar, both having elements such as "high prizes", "joint release", "event marketing", and "crowd watching".

Case 1: Alipay Koi Lucky Draw

Everyone is familiar with the "Alipay Koi" event, so I will not repeat the rules. The entire event reached its climax during the release and prize drawing stages. The activity was forwarded over a million times in 6 hours, and the final koi "Xin Xiaodai" gained 600,000 followers on Weibo overnight.

In the later stage of the event (after October 6), we captured data from 260,000 Weibo posts and published a set of data on Knowledge Planet: a conservative estimate is that hundreds of big Vs with millions of fans participated in the forwarding of the entire event, but judging from the forwarding relationship chain, more than 90% of the dissemination was first-level forwarding, and there were very few second-level forwarding and above. This shows that the strategy of "lottery + event marketing" is different from "fission" and mainly relies on multi-channel distribution rather than viral transmission.

After Alipay Koi became popular, many companies followed suit in vertical fields, and university Koi and local Koi became popular again. Users' tolerance for Koi is gradually increasing, and new ways of playing need to be expanded.

Case 2: WeChat lucky draw

Koi lottery originated on Weibo, and in the WeChat ecosystem, the lottery strategy also flourished in 2018. The largest lottery app in the WeChat ecosystem, the Lottery Assistant, has more than 50 million users participating in the lottery one year after its release. There are also many mini-programs that imitate lottery assistants, which shows the strong demand for WeChat lotteries.

In addition to the basic lottery function, a lottery traffic-generating strategy has also been derived. When launching a lottery, merchants can add their own graphic and text introductions in the lottery details, and leave their WeChat account, official account, mini program link, etc. The lottery assistant supports users to copy the WeChat account and jump to the merchant's mini program in one go, so the friction of the drainage process is very small.

We found that not only official brands are using lotteries to direct traffic to mini-programs and public accounts, but many personal accounts that engage in purchasing on behalf of others and internal purchases are also using lotteries to increase their personal WeChat followers.

Since the lottery is a way to attract traffic, where does the new traffic come from besides old fans participating in the lottery? After you initiate a lottery, you can contact the official and apply to join the public lottery on the homepage to divert traffic from the public traffic pool.

According to our observation, each public lottery on the homepage has tens to hundreds of thousands of participants, and the prizes offered by the merchants are not expensive. For example, the lottery below was initiated by a Korean purchasing agent, with 3 lipsticks + 2 facial masks, and 140,000 people participated in the lottery. Even if the forwarding rate of adding WeChat is only 1%, it can still increase the number of fans by 1,400, which is very cost-effective.

Moreover, some personal accounts have been doing lottery activities for a long time, and some friends have revealed that the conversion rate of traffic is far more than 1%. In short, the cost of participating in the WeChat lottery is not very high, so you can give it a try.

4. Course Trial

Overview:

In the review of 2017, we introduced the strategy of “distribution rebate”. Knowledge payment is an example of growth driven by rebate. But by 2018, users have become more and more tolerant of course posters. Are there other ways to pay for knowledge?

As we all know, whether it is the Qidian online literature that has been popular for a long time, or the currently popular WeChat Reading, the beginning part of the paid e-books is free, allowing readers to have a process of "inspecting the goods". So we see that many paid courses are beginning to borrow this strategy, offering the first one or two videos/audios for free to attract users to try it out.

On this basis, there is another upgraded way to promote the course trial strategy: use super low-priced basic courses to attract traffic, and then convert users to high-priced advanced courses. The advantage of this strategy is that the ultra-low-priced basic courses not only screen out the target users, but also reduce the difficulty of their purchasing decisions. During the teaching of the basic courses, the trust level can be continuously improved through the community, and users can eventually be converted to pay for high-priced advanced courses.

As long as the conversion efficiency is ideal and the final ROI is positive, you can increase the investment and replicate it exponentially. It can be said that all high-priced paid projects are worth trying this strategy once.

Case 1: Changtou Academy

In September this year, Changtou Academy announced the completion of a RMB 100 million Series A financing, becoming the largest online financial education institution in China. The 9-yuan financial training camp for novices is a core course at Changtou Academy. It is reported that the number of trainees in the camp has exceeded 2 million.

According to our research and estimates, Changtou Academy has published more than 400 official account soft articles in the past month, with a total reading volume of over one million. All of the soft articles were directed to the registration page of the 9-yuan Novice Financial Management Training Camp.

After registration, Changtou Academy provides users with courses lasting more than 16 days through QQ groups, and finally provides discounted places for high-priced paid courses to students in the group (the price after the discount is still more than 1,000 yuan). According to our observations, the conversion rate from novice training camps to high-priced paid courses is as high as about 10%, and the total sales of paid courses at Changtou Academy have exceeded 50 million.

Based on this calculation, as long as the user LTV exceeds the average cost of advertising per person, the investment intensity can be increased and the growth scale can be continuously replicated.

Case 2: Baby playing English

Baby Play English relies on early childhood English enlightenment, has accumulated 300,000 paying users, and has annual revenue of over 200 million. After two years of accumulation, a user path of "7 days of free open classes - friends go to the poster to check in - graduation - paid learning" has been formed.

Unlike Changtou Academy, the open classes of Baby Play English are completely free, but during the 7-day open class, you need to share the poster and check in on your Moments to get the picture book and exercise book gift package. Use the 7-day free trial to enhance user trust and guide them to pay at the end of the course.

In addition to the course trial, Changtou Academy and Baby Play English have another thing in common, that is, a large number of participating students will be converted into community managers of the trial courses, similar to distribution agents. If members of the trial learning community pay, the distribution agent can get a certain percentage of commission, which also maintains the operation of many trial learning communities.

5. WeChat Ecosystem Matrix

Overview:

People often ask, the opening rate of the official account is less than 5%, and the mini program has no retention, what should I do? The solution to the growth black box is to generate your own WeChat ecological matrix within the WeChat ecosystem through three contact channels: official accounts + WeChat groups + personal accounts.

Needless to say, each channel has its unique value. The community is mainly responsible for maintaining retention and connecting fans. Growth Black Box currently has nearly 200 WeChat groups. The group and public account groups update our growth daily report , selecting 3-5 high-quality articles every day to recommend to everyone. It has been pushed for 243 consecutive days. It can be said that we will not take a holiday unless the earth explodes.

Personal accounts, on the other hand, tend to have much better retention, reach and payment effects in Moments and private chats than public accounts. For example, when ofo was having financial difficulties, it released an advertisement for local honey, which was criticized by everyone.

But if you study it carefully, you will find that the QR code at the bottom of the soft article is a GIF dynamic image. Many QR codes switch automatically, and users scan them and are randomly added to different personal accounts. The avatars, names, content, and wording of these personal accounts are exactly the same. This is done just to avoid the WeChat friend limit. After adding friends, reach out to them every day through private chats and Moments to achieve paid conversions.

Currently, Growth Black Box’s official account has nearly 40,000 followers, nearly 200 WeChat groups, and 4 personal accounts with a total of over 10,000 friends. This system of official account + WeChat group + personal account can maintain long-term and high-frequency contact with users, which is equivalent to completing a simple user growth path. Even at a certain stage, users have become our friends. friends.

We even strongly recommend that entrepreneurial teams do not rush to develop products, but instead use official accounts/mini programs + WeChat groups + personal accounts to test the effectiveness of the MVP solution. Not only does it require less R&D investment, but it also allows us to get closer to users and fully investigate PMF fit.

Case: Xing Buxing's quantitative trading

Teacher Xing Buxing is a good friend of ours. His Digital Currency Case: Quantitative Investment course has long been ranked in the top two on the paid rankings in the financial field of NetEase Cloud Classroom.

Quantitative trading is a niche field, and it is important for users to complete the course and recommend it. Compared with the one-way communication mechanism of the official account with one post per day, Xing Buxing prefers to use the Moments and WeChat groups, which have unlimited frequency and higher opening rates, to interact with fans and share relevant content on quantitative investment.

At present, the number of fans of his personal account is three times that of the official account. He has a very complete teaching mechanism: official account + free to personal account, complete pre-sales consultation through Moments and private chats to build trust, and after users pay, answer questions and maintain through WeChat groups, broadcast and attract traffic, and accumulate knowledge on the planet.

Except for quantitative investment, most vertical fields are very suitable for the system of official account + personal account + WeChat group.

6. Virtual Economy

Overview:

Virtual economy is not a new thing. I used Q coins to buy QQ Show and subscribed to Red Diamond membership when I was in fifth grade. There are two reasons why we must list the virtual economy in this list:

On the one hand, there is the rapid outbreak and cooling of virtual currency, leading to a wave of wealth rush but followed by a wave of harvest frenzy. On the other hand, virtual points combined with mini programs have also created some cases of rapid customer acquisition. Many startups have integrated virtual points into their business models, quickly accumulated users, and obtained financial support during the cold winter. For example, exchanging points for items, or buying and selling second-hand items.

Instead of subsidizing users with real money, subsidies from the virtual economy can not only reduce customer acquisition costs to a certain extent, but also increase users' silent investment to improve retention.

Case 1: Step redemption

The most widely used application of the virtual points system last year was the mini-program for exchanging steps for rewards. You can take a look at the top ten social programs in the "Aladdin Mini Program List", and you will find that half of them are step redemption types - even JD.com has made arrangements in this area.

Through WeChat’s built-in step counting function, these mini-programs can convert users’ steps into equivalent virtual points. These points can be exchanged for goods in the mini program mall. The functions they carry are not only to obtain traffic and then monetize it through advertising, but also to serve as a tool for product activation and retention.

For example, the fitness APP "Gudong" launched the "SPC Sports Treasure" mini program for step exchange. According to reports, the number of users exceeded 100 within three weeks of its launch. Among the products redeemed by users are Gudong's own brand of smart sports equipment, which can be linked with the APP. In this way, users of the WeChat ecosystem are settled into its own App system, and self-operated smart devices are distributed at the same time.

Case 2: Second-hand goods

In 2018, the second-hand goods market was extremely hot. There are not only representative companies such as Xianyu and Zhuan Zhuan, but also Duozhuayu second-hand books, Plum second-hand luxury goods, etc. However, there has always been a problem of transaction friction in the transaction of second-hand goods - pricing in RMB will lead to a decrease in users' desire to trade, thereby limiting the conversion rate and commodity circulation rate.

As a result, several platforms have created a model of virtual points + second-hand transactions. For example, Xianwu said: "Little Red Flowers" are used as virtual currency, and the prices of goods are freely set by sellers, but are not linked to the RMB. Users use red flowers to buy other people's products, and they can earn red flowers by selling their own products.

There is also the "Roaming Whale" in the vertical field: using "book fees" as virtual points, at a 1:1 ratio with the RMB. When users sell books, they can receive "book fees" equal to the original price, which is not linked to RMB; when buying books on the platform, 85% of the price is deducted from the book fees in the account, and the remaining 15% is paid in RMB.

Last year, we conducted a detailed study of the above two cases. We will not discuss them in detail here. Please refer to the previous articles at the end of the article.

7. Super Member System

Overview:

As mentioned earlier, given the limited room for new user growth in 2018, more and more people are focusing on improving retention. In traditional industries, the membership system is a classic retention method, but in 2018, users have seen too many marketing tricks and began to prefer lower investments and more benefits. Even if these benefits are not used, the bigger the packaging, the better. Simply points, discounts, upgrades, etc. are obviously far from satisfying users.

Therefore, the platform began to package various rights and interests and sell them as super memberships. The most typical example is Alibaba's 88 membership. Users with a Taobao value of 1,000 or above can pay 88 yuan and enjoy membership services of multiple Alibaba platforms including Taobao, Youku, Ele.me, and Xiami.

Some people say that this is because Alibaba has a lot of resources, not because Alibaba simply can’t do it? Not really. As early as last year, many local public accounts teamed up with dozens of local restaurants to launch foodie membership cards, priced at around 50 yuan. Cardholders can enjoy discounts when spending in dozens of restaurants, which is very popular among people born in the 1980s and 1990s.

We can find that many online growth strategies are combinations and upgrades of traditional and offline strategies.

Case 1: Ali88 Member

Amazon has Prime membership, JD.com has PLUS membership, and even Taobao and Tmall have V membership and T membership systems respectively, but no e-commerce membership has ever been as attractive as this year's Alibaba 88 membership. The benefits of Ali88 members mainly include:

1. Users with Taobao points above 1000 points can purchase for 88 yuan, and users with points below 1000 points can purchase for 888 yuan

2. 5% off on selected items at Tmall Global, brand direct stores, and supermarkets, can be combined with other discounts

3. Youku, Ele.me, Tao Piao Piao, Xiami 4 Apps VIP membership for the whole year

4. Other exclusive product discounts

To be honest, I was also tempted when I saw it, but I just regretted that I didn’t have 1,000 naughty points... The rules of Ali 88 members cleverly take advantage of two psychological points of users:

1. Anchoring Effect

Youku, Ele.me, Tao Piaopiao, and Xiami are all apps that users have rigid demands. The total market price of the VIPs of the four apps is more than 400 yuan. This locks in an anchor price in the minds of users and highlights the price advantage of 88 members.

But in fact, the marginal costs of VIPs of these four apps are far lower than the market price. Add to that the profits from repeat purchases, and selling four VIPs in a package for 88 yuan may not necessarily result in a loss.

1. Loss Aversion

The purchase prices for users with a Taobao value above 1,000 and below are 88 yuan and 888 yuan respectively, a difference of more than 10 times.

On the one hand, this once again reflects the anchoring effect. Users who purchased for 88 yuan feel that they have gotten a great deal in comparison, and not buying would be a waste of their hard-earned Naughty points. On the other hand, there are a large number of users with points below 1,000 who are gritting their teeth, thinking that they have missed out on benefits. What should they do? In the future, buy more things and write reviews on Alibaba, and be sure to accumulate Taobao points, which will in turn promote various retention data.

Case 2: WeChat Reading Unlimited Card Membership

Compared with Ali 88 membership, WeChat Reading’s membership mechanism has added some new features. After purchasing the unlimited card membership of WeChat Reading, you can read published books, audio content, comics and online novels for free, which is also a way to package multiple benefits.

The price of unlimited card membership is 19 yuan per month (automatically renewed on the Android side), but if you don’t read much, maybe 1-2 books a month, you won’t get much benefit by spending 19 yuan to buy a membership. If you are a book fanatic, WeChat Reading allows you to redeem book coins with usage time, and then use the book coins to redeem paid books. The benefits of unlimited membership are not as great as it seems.

But don’t forget that reading is something that people are happy to do and show off, so another important mode of WeChat Reading’s unlimited card is to team up with friends to get a free unlimited card. There are two specific forms:

1. Home page activity, invite five friends to form a team, and you can draw a free unlimited card, with a 100% chance of winning. According to WeChat Reading data, more than 2 million people have participated so far.

2. For the unlimited card given by the official, users only need to share it, and they and their friends can each get an unlimited card.

This unlimited card, which is obtained through social connections, is valid for less than 7 days and requires continuous sharing to obtain. In addition, there is no social pressure in sharing the benefits of reading, so WeChat reading unlimited cards often appear in my circle of friends. This super membership system + social sharing gameplay is also worth learning from.

8. Team PK

Overview:

Is there any project that can suddenly achieve dozens or even hundreds of times growth in just one month and allow more than one-third of the world's population to participate? ————2018 FIFA World Cup.

There were 32 participating teams, each with 23 players, a total of only 736 people, but it attracted more than 2.5 billion viewers around the world. In addition to sports, other categories that achieved significant growth in 2018 by relying on team PK strategies include competitive games (such as Honor of Kings and various mini-games), operational activities (such as Taobao's Double Eleven team PK), and celebrity auditions (such as Idol Producer and Produce 101).

The core of the team PK strategy lies in grasping the three psychological aspects of users: ownership, sense of purpose and sense of accomplishment. These three psychological factors not only make users willing to continue to participate in competition, but also make them willing to mobilize new people to join their team.

1. Ownership: Users need to quickly find their own team. Once they join a team, they will have a sense of ownership and possession of the team, and will be willing to compete and unwilling to fall behind.

2. Sense of purpose: There is only one first place, and it is impossible for every team to compete for the first place, so it is necessary to set different goals for each team and break the goals down into multiple small goals, allowing users to work hard little by little.

3. Sense of accomplishment: When users make a little effort and complete a small goal, they need to be given enough sense of accomplishment to motivate them to continue to complete the next small goal.

Case: Taobao team-up to collect likes

The rules of Taobao's Double Eleven likes collection PK seem simple: form a team of up to 5 people, and the system will randomly match another team for PK every day. Before the PK, both teams will deduct a certain amount of "energy". At 11 o'clock every night, the teams will compete for the number of likes they have collected. The winning team can obtain the other team's "energy".

But under these simple rules, Taobao still has some tricks, such as:

An entry fee is required to enter the PK, and if you fail, you must bear the loss;

The more energy a team has, the more it can enter the PK with a higher entry fee. If it fails, the efforts made in the previous PK may be wasted.

The number of likes collected by both sides is displayed in real time, so you can't help but check the battle situation. If you are overtaken, you need to call your friends immediately.

If the two sides tie, it can be a win-win situation, but the team PK is randomly matched and communication is not allowed. The only way to make peace in disguise is through the team name, which has generated a lot of jokes and has become the material for Taobao to release on channels such as Weibo.

The screen full of messages asking for likes has undoubtedly won Taobao beautiful data, but we also need to reflect on this. Because the activity lasts for a long time, consumes a lot of energy, and is difficult to quit (once you quit, the loss is too great), it is equivalent to kidnapping users in disguise and has generated a lot of negative word of mouth. We recommend that when using team PK for activities, you should provide enough "exits" for users so as not to lose the big picture for the small.

9. Gamification

Overview:

In many people’s minds, “growth = low-cost customer acquisition”. In fact, many well-known growth hackers believe that "retention" is the most important growth link. For example, with the same 5 million users, Company A has a monthly retention rate of 95%, while Company B has a monthly retention rate of 85%. One year later, the number of active users of Company A will be more than three times that of Company B, and the gap will continue to widen.

Gamification is the process of breaking down the strategies in electronic games, which were called "electronic heroin" in the early years, and integrating them into the product operation mechanism. The Octagonal Behavioral Analysis Method proposed by Yu-kai Chou, the author of "Practical Gamification", believes that the eight core driving forces of gamification include: epic meaning and sense of mission, progress and achievement, creative empowerment and feedback, ownership and sense of possession, social influence and relevance, scarcity and desire, non-execution and curiosity, and loss and escape.

The gamification strategy was first applied in overseas markets and achieved amazing results. As we have described in "How did the world's number one online education app grow to 300 million users?" ” mentioned that Duolingo, a foreign language learning tool, cleverly uses gamification strategies such as check-in training, upgrade bars, protection shields, and badge collection to top the overseas education app download rankings, and its retention rate and completion rate are much higher than other education apps.

In 2018, domestic products also began to incorporate gamification elements, with the Skinner box being the most widely used gaming mechanism. The Skinner box itself is a psychological experimental device. There is a mouse that has been fasted for 24 hours and a button in the box. When the mouse presses the button, food will fall with a probability. After a period of time, the mouse learns to press the button all the time, and the behavior disappears very slowly. The mini-game "Pirates Are Coming" is a good example of the Skinner Box mechanism. It makes users "addicted" by constantly spinning the wheel to draw prizes and giving them the chance to upgrade their islands.

Case: Duoduo Orchard

Pinduoduo is currently the most popular social e-commerce project, with more than 200 million users in 2018. We found that an entrance to Duoduo Orchard was added to Pinduoduo’s homepage. Users can water and plant trees in Duoduo Orchard, and after completion they can get a box of real fruit.

In essence, this is still an activity where you complete tasks to win fruits, but because of the addition of gamification elements, it has achieved multiple effects such as retention, attracting new customers, and promoting orders. Currently, Duoduo Orchard has squeezed out the original new customer attraction artifact "bargain and get it for free" and entered the first screen of the ten-square grid on Pinduoduo's homepage.

Similar to the Skinner box mechanism, when a user enters the orchard for the first time, he or she can receive water drop rewards multiple times in a row, and the virtual fruit tree quickly grows to 50% of the progress, satisfying the user's "sense of progress and accomplishment" and "sense of ownership and possession."

To accelerate the growth of fruit trees, users can also complete tasks such as stealing water drops, sharing, inviting friends, browsing products, and placing orders to obtain additional water drops and generate more additional user value. This mechanism is similar to Alipay's gamified product "Ant Forest", but the connection between virtual games and reality is closer. Pinduoduo's application of it to the e-commerce field can be regarded as a stroke of genius.

10. Question and answer fission

Overview:

The first week of 2018 was a growth carnival week for live quiz apps. The download volume of the "Chongding Conference" App exceeded one million in one week, followed by Inke's Cheese Superman, Toutiao's Millionaire Hero, Huajiao Live's Millionaire Winner, etc. The maximum number of online users in a live broadcast was 1.7 million, and the number of people answering questions exceeded 1.3 million.

Of course, live Q&A was eventually banned due to policy reasons. But in vertical fields, the growth strategy of question-and-answer fission has begun to show more and more gameplay. Overseas, an app called TBH (to be honest) suddenly became popular.

TBH will give you a question about you and your friends, then list your friends who have signed up for the app, and the answer you choose will be sent anonymously to your friends. It was such a simple question-and-answer mechanism, coupled with incentives for sharing, that "conquered" 3,000 schools in Georgia, USA in just three days, and was acquired by Facebook for US$100 million nine weeks after its launch.

In China, Qingmang, a third-party mini-program service for question-and-answer battles, completed a multi-million yuan A+ round of financing led by IDG in August. Meituan, Xinhua News Agency, Junwu Sub-Dimension, etc. have all created question-and-answer battle mini-programs through Qingmang.

Of course, based on the question-and-answer fission strategy, Growth Black Box also has some attempts of its own. We slightly modified the format of the Q&A activity and turned it into a Q&A fission strategy for precisely increasing followers.

Case: Growth Hacker Qualifying Competition

In 2017, the poster fission strategy was very popular, and Growth Black Box also carried out several fission activities. We found that although the number of fans increased by fission was considerable, the crowd was not accurate. A large number of non-accurate users actually increased the operating costs.

Is there any way to acquire users more accurately? We thought of the form of "question and answer to raise the threshold + fission to obtain accurate users". In July, we conducted an MVP test of question-answer fission: we published a growth hacker ability test on Questionnaire.com. There were ten questions in total. You could pass the test if you answered more than 7 questions correctly. On the test result page, you would get a score poster to show off.

This question-and-answer event was prepared in 6 hours without any research and development, and was only prepared by Questionnaire.com and WeTool. In the end, nearly 2,000 people participated in it and more than 400 new fans were added. Because of the screening of test questions, the participants are almost all the target population, which fully demonstrates the accuracy of increasing fans through question and answer fission.

With the positive feedback from the MVP test, we upgraded the question-and-answer fission gameplay and created a small program called “Growth Hacker Ranked Competition” (thanks to the Fengling team for their technical support). In order to improve the quality of fission as much as possible on the basis of accurate customer acquisition, we have specially set up the following in the question answering app:

1. Bait: If you pass the test, you can enjoy benefits such as joining the Growth King Club WeChat group

2. National ranking and random test questions: 10 questions are randomly selected from the question bank for each test, and the ranking is displayed in real time to increase the desire to practice questions

3. Admission ticket: Newcomers are given one admission ticket, and they need to share to get the admission ticket when retaking the exam.

4. Exam certificate: A certificate is generated after the exam, which can be used to show off and invite friends

5. Send a ticket to a friend: Invite a friend and the friend will get a ticket

In this way, a closed-loop path of “answering questions - being dissatisfied with the results - sharing to get admission tickets - answering questions again” is formed. Of course, in addition to these mechanisms, the most important thing is that the test questions are attractive to users, so as to obtain accurate users and ensure that users are willing to actively forward them. For example, the theme of the second exam is "In the eyes of programmers, you are a cheating or reliable". Most of the test questions are technical common sense that product operations should be understood, but we have added many work scenarios, and the results are very good. Users said that the company's operation product development is discussed together, such as the following question:

God opened his eyes, and the boss finally agreed to take out a budget to increase his fans to the official account. You have found several channels to recommend your company's official account, and are planning to give each channel a QR code, and count the effect of each channel's fans by scanning the number of codes. Unexpectedly, your idea was ruthlessly rejected by the programmer: "We are a subscription account, and we can't realize it." What he said is:

A. I can fool you, only the subscription account can distinguish the QR code channel

B. Fraud you, and both certified subscription account and service account can distinguish QR code channels.

C. To be honest, only service accounts can distinguish QR code channels

With just two qualifying exams, we obtained 12,000 mini program users, with a sharing rate of more than 40%. Within one week of the exam release, the fission coefficient K>1. Nearly 2,000 friends passed the exam. This number doesn’t seem to be big, but they are all accurate target users who have improved their career information, and were finally deposited into our WeChat group and personal account system.

Source: Growth Black Box