Product Operation: How can products improve user stickiness?

Low-frequency, rigid-demand products have multiple factors such as rigid demand, low frequency, and uncontrollability. Most of them face the problems of low user stickiness and low user retention rate. Below, the author will discuss this issue: How to improve the user retention rate of such products and reduce user churn?

It is the golden job-hunting season of March and April again, and I can no longer hold back my eagerness and am preparing for the interview. The author is targeting the freight sector in the O2O travel field, which is still a blue ocean.

Today we are going to talk about: How to improve user stickiness and retention rate for low-frequency and urgent-need products like the same-city moving and cargo information matching platform?

The product I am preparing to interview for is still in the internal testing stage. Big players in the industry include Huolala, Kuaigou Taxi, etc.

We only think of low-frequency, essential products like moving, transporting goods, and delivering goods when we need them.

It's like: under a certain overpass, there is always a row of trucks, the drivers sit together in groups of three or five playing cards and chatting, or a driver sleeps alone in the cab with his upper body naked. I used to not understand why they hid in their cars all day, especially near old residential areas. Later I found out that they were waiting for users who needed to transport goods.

If you live near a road section with strict controls, or in a more remote area, it may not be available and you can only ask Baidu for help.

Most low-frequency, rigid-demand products face the problem of low user retention rates. Users choose to leave immediately after a certain need of the product is met. When demand arises next time, if the product lacks highlights/core resources, it will often be difficult to come back, which will inevitably affect the order volume.

Today we will analyze: How to improve the stickiness and retention of such products?

1. Characteristics of O2O product user needs

The stimulability of user needs

When it comes to product operation , user needs are indispensable. Different products naturally have different user needs, and the operating strategies will also differ accordingly.

Based on the dimension of "the stimulability of user needs", we roughly divide the needs into three categories:

Needs that do not need to be stimulated:

Most of them are rigid and high-frequency demands for life services. Without too much stimulation, users will spontaneously or even actively look for related products.

Such as: takeaway, social, entertainment (video/news information), etc.

The needs that can be stimulated:

Users themselves do not have such needs or the demand is not high, but it can be stimulated through some operational means.

This type of product has many operating methods and a wide range.

The most typical ones are e-commerce products, such as Tmall, which is dominated by operations. It gives you a reason to spend money almost every day and vigorously markets to promote users' desire to buy.

Unstimulated needs:

Users have no demand at the moment and will use the product only when demand arises.

It should be emphasized that although most of them are rigid needs, such needs cannot be stimulated through operational means and will only appear when users generate them spontaneously.

Moving and transporting goods are low-frequency and rigid-demand products, which have multiple factors such as rigid demand, low frequency, and uncontrollable nature. It is possible that the user will not move for 2 or 3 years, and the time when the user generates demand is often untraceable and difficult to grasp.

Therefore, from the perspective of user demand characteristics: for most low-frequency and rigid-demand products, it is difficult for technical operations to guide user behavior, but it is resources - whoever can get the core resources can capture the users.

Dangdang’s local freight products have truck resources, medical products have expert appointment sources, and the rental platform has good housing resources. It doesn’t matter if the products are difficult to use like 12306.
The user experience formula for this type of product = [Truck density per unit area] [Response speed] [Communication success rate]

2. How to improve stickiness

For this kind of "unstimulating demand" product, if the promoters lack insights into the industry and target user groups, there will usually be a "new customer acquisition cliff" after the new customer acquisition activities. The effect and traffic of a new customer acquisition activity itself are actually quite good, but the number of users who are truly converted into the core services of the product (making appointments for house viewings, making appointments for renovations, medical consultations, etc.) is often bleak and falls off a cliff.

In fact, the reason is very simple. The users who are "pulled back" by attracting new users and promoting activation are often users who have no needs. This type of users can be said to be truly "see and leave".

Therefore, improving the conversion of core services is a crucial step in improving user stickiness for products with low frequency demand.

In fact, we can establish a "strong guidance" between new user acquisition activities and core services to retain users. The positioning of this guidance is "to make users think of you when they have needs." As for what this guidance is, it depends on the specific positioning and resources of the product.

For "products that cannot stimulate demand", such guidance often has the following operational means, which can match different products and have different effects:

1. Points system

“Products that cannot stimulate demand” are mostly low-frequency products, and the point system has no inherent advantages. For example, the rental cycle is about once every two or three years. What is the point of letting users accumulate points? However, travel products rely on the flight mileage system of early airlines and have natural advantages. For example, Fliggy has borrowed this advantage and has achieved good results.

2. Content community

For medical products, it is a more natural approach to put content first and guide the product.

For example: Dingxiang Doctor has tens of millions of fans; SoYoung’s WeChat public account has long been popularizing celebrity plastic surgery cases to attract attention.

These are all good examples.

Another advantage of creating content is that it can also attract new users, which means you can maintain your presence in front of users for a long time.

Community products, such as the patient groups in Haodaifu, can be said to be typical examples of how communities retain users.

3. Marketing activities

For products with paid requirements, marketing campaigns are also a good choice.

Please note that the marketing activities here can easily fall into the misunderstanding of attracting new customers. The marketing activities mentioned here are not about attracting new users (as mentioned above, users cannot be attracted without demand), but about making users form a long-term awareness of "there are discounts here".

The most typical ones are things like: discounted air tickets, discounted housing rentals, etc.

However, it is difficult to achieve the desired effect through one or two events. Long-term subsidies and discounts may be required, which is a considerable expense for the company. Once the discount stops, users may be lost. Of course, you can make slight changes on this basis and add elements such as check-in and sharing.

4. Others

Different products have different attributes, so you can dig deeper into their own product features.

For example, the time attribute of rental products - after the Chinese New Year and graduation are two relatively large cycles. Concentrated marketing activities during these two cycles can also bring good conversions, rather than "doing something" every month.

3. How to improve retention

1. Increase user usage scenarios

The low-frequency and rigid-demand market requires us to explore and even create some scenarios to increase the reasons for users to use it.

Taking renting a house as an example, renting a house itself is a low-frequency demand, but the house management after renting a house - such as the payment and withholding of water, electricity and gas bills, is much more high-frequency than renting a house.

Exploring sufficiently high-frequency usage scenarios to increase stickiness or retention is a method that is currently used more frequently. To create a scenario, the product manager needs to have more courage and perseverance. This requires extremely high creative ability and strong insight to create a high-frequency scenario that can be accepted by users out of thin air.

For example: The initial functions of a real estate APP are only: personal butler, visitor invitation, mobile phone door opening, and mail order.

Although these functions are very practical, they are not necessary for users.

For example: the door opening function using a mobile phone, but in fact most owners use room cards.

The APP has added a community function to guide users to complain, for example:

• Whose dog poop was not cleaned up in time?
• Where are the cigarette butts?

Or, organize fun activities for owners. In this way, through the participation of owners, the activity level can be improved, and ultimately the retention rate of this low-frequency APP can be improved.

2. Help users make choices faster

Taking the home improvement industry as an example, it is necessary to create a relatively standardized "explosive" series in the home improvement field with particularly strong personalization, and be able to fully control its upstream service providers and designers.

3. Help users make careful decisions

For example: Lagou.com, which specializes in online recruitment.

For enterprises, recruiting network talents is very important. This is called prudent decision-making. This is the reason why many bosses and HR like to use Lagou.com to find network talents.

On the contrary, if you want to find a cleaner, just go to 58.com.

When this is applied to the field of home decoration, the designer's professional talents must be brought into play. The designer must help the user make a careful decision based on the user's house and needs.

4. Help users avoid choice phobia

Whenever we go out to eat, we always go to Dianping to find the restaurant. But there is a huge amount of information, and it is very troublesome if you want to search by categories.

Therefore, websites like Enjoy and Chengmi that select limited-edition delicacies have an advantage. They help you make the choice, pick out the best restaurants, and you just eat according to their recommendations. In this regard, the emergence of a Xiaohongshu in the home decoration industry is enough.

So, although it is low frequency, as long as you are professional enough, vertical enough, and humane enough, and can help users achieve personalized matching quickly and accurately, you may be able to outperform those seemingly higher frequency products.

In summary, no matter what kind of product you use, the general direction of improving retention rate is inseparable from increasing the user value of the product, finding the reasons for user churn, and solving the problem of user churn.

The strategy to improve retention is not to constantly add functions/PUSH to increase the burden on users, but to truly treat users as friends and find ways to provide them with better products and services, solve their pain points, and meet their needs.

source: Fat Man