Event operation: Taking advantage of the Spring Festival red envelope event, analyze the core framework of the event!

The red envelope activities for products worth hundreds of millions during the Spring Festival are a unique sight in the industry and are worth careful consideration.

1. How to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign

The key to evaluating whether an activity is good or not is whether it achieves the expected goals and whether it improves the key indicators of the product . Whether it goes viral or not, whether it has a good reputation in the industry, etc., are not the final criteria for judgment, but just phenomena.

Take the Spring Festival red envelope activity as an example: for products like Baidu app, Toutiao, and Douyin, the goal of the activity is definitely DAU, which is the final judging criterion. In addition, there will be auxiliary indicators, which will also have an indirect or partial improvement effect on the product.

For example: importing contacts or adding friends to build social relationships; Toutiao products divert traffic to Duoshan and replicate new products in its own ecosystem; when withdrawing cash, guide card binding and real-name authentication; Baidu relies on video and novel content to promote its own mini-programs, etc.

1. What indicators should be considered during the execution of the activity?

DAU is the core and the first-level indicator. However, you cannot just look at this when executing an activity, because DAU is a comprehensive indicator that includes multiple sub-indicators and will also be affected by other factors. Therefore, the secondary indicators are new users and secondary retention, DAU secondary retention, and the cost of single user activity or new user acquisition. You can refer to these and see the specific situation of the product.

Among these three sub-indicators, for products like Baidu and Toutiao, the proportion of millions of new users in the DAU of hundreds of millions is too small, and has little impact on the ultimate indicator. Therefore, DAU retention rate determines success or failure.

Cost is only a limiting indicator that must be considered. Generally, each company will have its own standards, such as how much it costs to attract new customers and how much it costs to promote activation. This standard is usually consistent with the channel's standard.

Looking back at the DAU retention rate, this goal was unreasonable during implementation. For example: yesterday the DAU was 3, and Zhang San, Li Si, and Wang Wu came. If we look at the DAU retention rate, we can find a way to get Zhang San, Li Si, and Wang Wu to come again today.

But before yesterday, there were also Tom and Jack. Should we take care of these two people? If you only look at DAU retention, you won’t pay attention during execution.

Therefore, when the activity is executed, the DAU retention indicator needs to be further broken down. Converted into the number of active days of users per unit time, that is, increasing the frequency of user visits. The more frequently users visit, the higher the DAU will be. For example: 100 people are active for 10 days, and the highest number of days they are active is 100 people * 10 days = 1000 days, but these 100 people are not active every day, so the actual situation is likely that the 100 people are active for 600 days in 10 days.

By organizing activities, we can increase these 600 days to 800 days or even 1,000 days, thereby increasing the number of active days of users per unit time and indirectly increasing DAU retention. In fact, what we often call promoting activation is this concept.

1. How to view activity effectiveness indicators

The indicator of activity effectiveness depends on the comparison between before and after the activity. In other words, the indicators after the event are better than those before the event, which shows that the event is valuable.

The above picture is reproduced from 36Kr's article "The Spring Festival exam is over, and we got the report card of Douyin, Kuaishou and Weishi", which shows the DAU trend of Duoshan before and after the Spring Festival activities. It can be seen that the effect after the event is lower than before the event. To a certain extent, it can be explained that the Spring Festival event did not bring sustained activity to Duoshan, and the effect of this event was not good.

This data comes from QM. You don’t need to pay too much attention to the absolute numbers from third parties, but you can use the trend as a reference. I list this picture not to criticize Toutiao’s Spring Festival activities, but just to use it to illustrate my point.

The most ideal activity effect is that the data after the activity is higher than the data before the activity, which means that the growth brought about is not temporary, but it truly pushes the product functions to users, guides and educates users to discover product selling points, and cultivates users to form usage habits. This is the value of the activity to the product.

Therefore, the ultimate goal of the activity is to take your several core indicators, compare the differences before and after the activity, and pay attention to the subsequent sustained effects.

1. There should be targeted retention strategies after the event

Since the revenue of an event depends mainly on what happens after the event ends, there must be a targeted retention strategy. Otherwise, it is impossible to expect to drive user activity after the event is offline.

Subsequent retention strategies are formulated based on the measures of the activities. For example: the activity guides users to import their address books or invite friends to join, which brings about social relationships. The subsequent retention strategy is to make the social relationships "move in motion."

Just to mention two strategies, you can extend the social relationship and use red dots as reminders to encourage users to follow friends of friends; or when users A and B newly establish a social relationship, when A posts the first piece of content, he can push a notification to B. For another example, Baidu can continue to recommend the types of content that interest new novel or video users during an event in its feed, thus creating a closed loop from events to recommendations.

There must be a retention strategy following the event, otherwise the event will be a waste of money. For some companies, the difficulty lies in the fact that activities are done by operations or marketing, but retention strategies are usually done by products, which involves cross-departmental collaboration.

1. Activities that are separated from products are not good activities

If the activity is not directly related to the core functionality of the product, it is not a good activity. We should pursue a high degree of integration between activities and products, the closer the better, so that it will be valuable.

I have seen many activities before, which is to embed an H5 in the app, but it is completely different from the product. The product is to promote content, and the H5 activity is just to draw prizes and give out red envelopes. Users participated in this event but still didn’t know what the product was for.

Take Toutiao’s Spring Festival event this year as an example: Toutiao itself is a content-based product, and allowing users to consume content is the core of the product. We can see that they have linked the card drawing event with the content and set up a "Spring Festival Card Issuer." The celebrities who issue the cards are Kai-Fu Lee, Lei Jun and Li Guoqing, and self-media can also issue them.

Such event planning can enable the Spring Festival activities to drive content consumption, drive the attention and traffic of Wei Toutiao, and drive the ecology of Toutiao, which are the core of the product. Don’t underestimate this detail. It is very difficult to actually implement it. It involves the collaboration of multiple departments. The people who operate the event certainly don’t have big V resources, which shows that Toutiao has thought it through clearly from top to bottom.

Looking at Baidu's Spring Festival red envelope activity, it is also closely connected with product functions. When promoting its own mini-programs, we can see the logic of "using red envelope activities to drive product functions" from the activities.

However, the overall structure of Baidu's activity is rather messy, with the main and branch lines complicated and unclear. At first glance, you can see that all kinds of demands are coming from all directions. After all, spending so much money to participate in the Spring Festival Gala is a top priority for the company. There are many bosses and demands involved. At this time, the people planning the event probably have no say in the matter and can only passively accept the demands.

The activities of Toutiao and Alipay are much clearer. You can feel that when the activity is planned, it spreads outward from a center to various functional modules. For example, Alipay's Huabei, Ant Forest, Yu'ebao, in-store payment, etc. can all receive proceeds from the Jifu activities without affecting user understanding and operation. The overall plan is clearer.

1. Not every product is suitable for activities

Many times when we organize activities, we do it just for the sake of doing it. When we see others doing it, we want to do it too. Otherwise, what is the point of supporting these operations?

Before you start an activity, think about these four questions:

1. What is the purpose of the activity and what benefits does the product provide?
2. Which specific indicators to use for evaluation and how to evaluate;
3. Calculation of activity costs and how to ensure cost-effectiveness;
4. What is the follow-up strategy for the event?

Except for the cost, these four questions are all mentioned in this article, and the answers are given.

Activities are actually relatively peripheral things, the core is still the product. If your product has achieved 80 points, it is okay to use activities to promote it; if the product itself has no highlights and no hooks, it is impossible to rely on external measures such as activities to solve the internal problems of the product.

Think it through before you do anything. After all, organizing an event will consume time, research and development costs, and promotion expenses. Use these resources to do something more useful.

Source: Operation Dog Work Diary