Ignite user growth: Is user operation just about attracting new users?

1. Wedge

Some time ago, I chatted with a young lady A who works in user operations . She said distressedly: "I have used all the new methods I can think of, including soft articles on WeChat public accounts, continuous posting of posters on QQ and WeChat groups, Moments, Weibo, and various websites and forums frequented by college students. From morning to night every day, I switch to various platforms, write soft articles, write marketing copy, make posters, make pictures, and sometimes make short videos. I am almost exhausted. The number of users of the website has increased significantly, and the number of registrations per day has been around 500. For a platform like ours, this number is considered large, but the leader is actually satisfied. I don’t know what he wants to do?"

A's company makes online learning products, and its target group is mainly college students, so A's target for attracting new users is also college students, and she also works hard to attract new users.

However, there are very few active users on the platform, with less than 1,000 check-ins per day and even fewer orders per day. Sometimes I see a lot of orders being completed, but when I check the order amount, I find that they are basically free courses and there are very few paid courses.

The leader has been dissatisfied with this situation, so A has worked harder and recently expanded a lot of new channels and is preparing to increase efforts to attract new customers. And she plans to create several more paid traffic channels to attract more users.

2. Try your best to attract new customers

In fact, there are many operators like A, who are blindly pursuing the growth of the number of users and the number of new users added every day.

However, we do not care whether users can stay after they come, or become loyal users, which is actually the so-called user retention issue.

Just like A, he tries hard to attract new users, but after the users come, they just click on this page or that page and stay for a while if they find content that interests them, and leave immediately if they don’t.

No one is maintaining these new users, and no one is thinking of how to make new users interested in the content of the platform, or to present the content that users need so that new users can find it and become interested in it as soon as possible.

No one has studied the psychology of new users. Why do they come to our platform? What functions and content of our platform do users need? When users are using the platform, at which stage problems occur, leading to user loss, and how to improve it to keep users.

No one has considered these issues at all. They just keep attracting new users but cannot retain them, which leads to a strange phenomenon.

The operations staff tried every possible way to think of various methods, using all their skills to write copy, write soft articles, and organize activities. They racked their brains to attract batches of new users, and the number of platform users has been increasing. However, the company's performance and revenue did not increase, while advertising fees and platform traffic costs continued to increase, which resulted in a situation where expenses were not enough to cover the income.

So every year many platforms and products emerge, and after a while, they disappear quietly.

3. Focus on user quality and growth

The main reason for this strange phenomenon is the pursuit of user quantity without paying attention to user quality and growth. What is user quality and growth?

The book "Explosive User Growth" tells us that only newly grown users are the target users of the platform, and these are quality users.

At the same time, these new users must be able to retain and generate continuous purchasing behavior, which is the growth of users.

If the problems of user quality and user growth are not solved, the new users brought in can only be regarded as invalid users, or what we often call zombie users.

What’s the use of a platform having many zombie users? We must find ways to make users active and help them grow, which is the key to user operation.

4. Improve your product

Any product launched online is for users to use. Only when users feel comfortable and have a good experience, and the platform can provide value to users, can users be truly retained and transactions be generated.

When the platform is not perfect, do not attract new users too quickly, otherwise it will only lead to some negative effects and eventually cause the product to be taken offline.

The correct approach is to be clear about the target audience in the early stage of the platform launch, and to carefully study which functions are urgently needed by users and how to design these functions to achieve the best user experience. The functions must make users comfortable to use and will not cause user loss due to poor experience.

For some learning platforms, you need to study which products on the platform are needed by users. When users come, guide them to quickly find the content they need, so that they can quickly become attached to the platform and become loyal users of the platform.

Instead, after new users come, this function point is pointed out many times but there is no response, or the user guidance is not good and they can’t find the content they are interested in no matter how hard they look. What’s more serious is that users come and become interested in your platform, but your platform does not have the content that users need. It is basically wishful thinking to want to retain users.

There are tens of thousands of platforms on the Internet now, and users have so many platforms to choose from. After a new user comes, if the user feels uncomfortable or uninterested within 30 seconds, it will be extremely difficult to retain the user, and all the actions taken before to attract new users will be ineffective.

I have had such an experience myself. One time, I saw a double-layer bamboo chair forwarded by a friend on WeChat Moments, saying that the website was holding a promotion. I was very interested in the bamboo chair, so I immediately found the website, registered and logged in, and after some trouble I finally got it done.

But that double-decker bamboo chair is like a treasure, and no one knows where it is hidden.

I clicked on all the banner images on that website, even those in the secondary columns. What made me even more speechless was that I clicked on all the products that looked similar on the homepage or secondary column page, and spent six or seven minutes searching, but still couldn’t find it. I thought it was a scam, so I left decisively.

I talked about this with that friend the next day, and she said that the activity was still there, but I needed to open the product details page to see it, and she also sent me the link.

When I heard that, I thought, forget it. What kind of activity is this? I have to keep opening the product details page to see it. What’s the difference between that and looking for a needle in a haystack? This experience is too bad.

I never visited that website again after that, and I don’t remember the username and password I registered on that website.

This is a typical case of a bad experience, no consideration for users, and loss of users.

5. Summary

Having said so much, what I really want to say is that user operation is not just about pursuing new users.

It is important to analyze the characteristics of target users and attract them, attract quality users as much as possible, and avoid attracting invalid users, as that would just be a waste of time and energy.

The second thing is to consider the functions and experience of the platform and products, as well as providing users with valuable content to retain users and promote user growth.

Only by achieving these two points can we truly understand the true meaning of user operation.

Source: That was June