User growth: build your own traffic pool!

Build your own traffic pool, expand it through promotion and inflow of new traffic, increase the water inlet; operate the traffic pool, reduce the outlet traffic, and allow your own traffic pool to fission, so that our user scale can continue to increase.

The current Internet is an era where traffic is king. Traffic is a scarce and valuable resource, and traffic is equivalent to wealth.

On the Internet, traffic is king and traffic is wealth.

Whether it is the Internet or mobile Internet, all platforms are pursuing traffic. Innovation, entrepreneurship and models have been refreshed round after round. Some people make money by selling products, some make money by selling knowledge, some make money by selling short videos, and some make money by relying on platforms.

All of this, without traffic or being unable to attract traffic, making money is just empty talk. Whoever brings in traffic and makes money will have a chance of success.

In the early stages of the development of the Internet, there was relatively little information and content, and not many people realized that traffic could be monetized, so it was completely easy to gain traffic.

Nowadays, no matter whether it is online platforms, apps or self-media, they are all struggling desperately. Platforms without innovation, scarce value or original content are unlikely to attract and retain users.

When we talk about traffic, we must first distinguish between traffic pool thinking and traffic thinking.

Traffic thinking: the platform acquires users, converts users, monetizes users, and then users leave.

Traffic pool thinking: the platform acquires users, operates user conversion, retention and fission to acquire more users, keep users active, increase user repurchase rate, and create its own traffic pool in a self-circulating system.

The traffic pool thinking is not so much about how many users are acquired on the front end, but rather emphasizes how to operate users for fission and use existing users to develop more new incremental users.

The result of traffic thinking is that after purchasing users, the users come in once and then leave. The traffic pool thinking is about how to retain users, activate users and use users to achieve growth fission.

Any communication needs to have effective conversion

It is difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to achieve actual results in brand communication in a short period of time. It is best to achieve "brand and effect integration" by transforming brand information and highlighting the way of diversion. That is, while building the brand, focus on achieving marketing effect conversion to obtain cash flow.

To obtain traffic, the core skill is actually the conversion ability. Whether users spend time watching ads, downloading apps, receiving subsidies, or spending money, it is a conversion. It is just with the help of different tools or carriers, and setting mechanisms that conform to the rules of the game to obtain and convert traffic.

Where is the inner strength for transformation?

"Landing page is the primary productive force". Nowadays, no matter whether it is a large or small enterprise, it cannot avoid this topic, especially when investing a lot of money in promotion but the copywriting has poor conversion rate.

When I was in charge of the operation of a financial APP, I once planned a subway brand promotion advertisement and booked advertisements in several train carriages for a period of time. On the landing page of the carriage advertisement, we first reflected the brand, followed by the event information, and then a separate QR code. After interested passengers scanned the QR code, they would receive separate promotions. The conversion path is relatively short, and the conversion rate is relatively high when users use discounts to experience the product.

This landing ad page is seen by the most important users of the entire activity, which determines the attractiveness to users and the final user conversion rate.

For general landing page design, only some of them need to be used. Yang Fei summarized the "6 elements of landing page logic architecture" that are relatively strong in practical use:

1. Sort out the core selling points, brands and event information.

The header of the landing page must be eye-catching, show the confident selling points of the brand and event, and tell visitors simply, directly, quickly and effectively: who am I, what can I offer, and how am I different from other similar products.

2. The overall impression of the brand and product reputation.

For most consumers, the landing page is their first impression of the brand, so the design and composition must follow the principles of simplicity and straightforwardness, and avoid cluttered pages, confusing information, and complicated operating procedures.

3. Consumer benefits.

The biggest difficulty in marketing is to think from the consumer's perspective and present selling points from the consumer's perspective. Consumers consider "what your product can give me" rather than "what are the specifications and models of your product". Providing extra value, unique value, or great discounts may encourage them to make impulse purchases.

4. Authoritative certification.

When consumers see unfamiliar products or brands, relevant authoritative certification will enhance trust, reduce doubts and the psychological cost of using the product. After all, no consumer wants to be the guinea pig for a new product.

5. User information retention.

User retention is the core function of the landing page. The purpose of all work is to hope that users will register, purchase or leave their information to complete the conversion from traffic to users and then to sales.

6. Request valid information.

Do not request unnecessary information on the landing page. First, extra information is useless to the business. Second, the more information you request, the more doubts and resistance consumers will have towards the business’s norms. Therefore, just request the most critical information, such as encrypted WeChat ID, mobile phone number, etc.

You need multiple inlets

In an era when traffic dividends disappear, the first thing you need to do is to create multiple water inlets.

The cost of acquiring customers through mature, high-quality, and stable channels will definitely become higher and higher. In the short term, you may have one or more cheap entry points, but because there are too many wolves and too little meat, most high-quality channels will soon become expensive, user quality will deteriorate, and conversion rates will decline.

The own traffic pool requires multiple water inlets. Any brand or event promotion requires all channels and modules to operate simultaneously, cooperate with each other, and jointly divert traffic and create momentum for the event, so as to maximize the effect and conversion.

For a startup or small and medium-sized enterprise, the cost of brand publicity and promotion is very limited. In addition to buying users from large traffic platforms, they can obtain traffic and dissemination through the social platforms that are most focused on traffic.

Operating traffic is like operating a pond. Our pond already has some water, and there is a fixed inlet that continuously releases water into the pond. Acquiring users is the first step and goal of operations. The purpose of all marketing operations is to acquire new customers.

The water inlet cannot rely solely on purchasing users. At the current stage, the quality of users purchased is constantly declining and the purchase cost is gradually increasing.

Whether it is registration or downloading, conversion rate is involved. Optimizing conversion rate can reduce customer acquisition costs to a certain extent.

There will be obvious differences in the display and cost of different channels. Many channels may seem to have few downloading users, but the actual situation is that the loss rate of a certain step is too high. At this time, the overall statistics of operations become very important.

In order to better track, many products require users to register before downloading and track conversion rates through userId. This is a good approach.

Channel data analysis has high statistical requirements for data (mainly data matching and classification). Both product and operation should develop the habit of statistics.

Don’t underestimate any detail that can improve your conversion rate. Here is a classic AB testing case: the registration landing page has a button to click to register. In a previous activity, we experimented with which type of copy on buttons was more effective in guiding users to register. Free registration and immediate registration, the click-through rate of the former is 40% higher than the latter.

With the end of the mobile Internet traffic dividend period, the cost of acquiring a new user has greatly exceeded the past, even to a level that a startup company cannot afford. Startups in the financial sector may even spend four-digit customer acquisition costs to acquire an investment user.

The users that come in are just the beginning of the operation

We are certainly not satisfied with just one purchase from users acquired through channels and marketing. There is a reservoir in our product with an entrance and an exit. We carry out refined operations for users who swim in. Through fission, we make this user not only a consumer, but also a promoter of our product.

Fission marketing, also known as self-propagation, is the same principle as what is said in the Tao Te Ching: "Tao begets one, one begets two, two begets three, and three begets all things."

Fission marketing, that is, new customer acquisition operations, has the ultimate goal of achieving maximum customer growth at the lowest cost.

Fission is currently a relatively effective marketing method for mobile Internet, which mainly borrows social relationships under mobile Internet. Fission in circle of friends is the most common operation routine. Select fans in the APP, public account or group, design fission bait, and let fans share actively.

Fission mainly stimulates and induces users to share through subsidies and benefits. Users also need sociality, personality, narcissism, display and comparison. Currently, the way of playing fission has been tried and tested by everyone. We need to understand users and have a deep understanding of human nature during design activities.

The current fission mainly revolves around the APP and WeChat ecosystem, and sharing basically takes place in groups and friend groups. The goal is also simple. "Use the lowest cost and method to seize the last traffic dividend in the mobile Internet era." 』

For example, the fission of the following products:

Lian Coffee’s products are priced at 100 yuan, and we participated in an invitation-only event where you could get 30 yuan off for five people. When user A sees the product, there are two buttons: 30 yuan and 100 yuan. He chooses to pay 30 yuan. Within 24 hours, he needs to invite 4 friends and each of them pays 30 yuan to successfully form a group. Otherwise, if more than 24 hours pass, the group formation fails and 30 yuan is refunded.

Mogujie easily acquired 3 million new users through group buying fission, 70% of whom were attracted through the group buying mechanism.

The most dazzling star in the fission in 2018 was the little blue cup. Luckin Coffee constantly stimulated user fission through the APP, giving friends a free cup of coffee each, buy two get one free, buy five get five free, and free drinks when shared in the circle of friends, so that the number of users reached a geometric growth.

summary

To build your own traffic pool, you need to use various means to obtain traffic through various channels, and then obtain more traffic through the continued operation of the traffic, and repeat this cycle over and over again.

On the one hand, new traffic is expanded and inflowed through promotion, and on the other hand, the key to operating traffic is to allow the own traffic pool to fission, thereby sharing the traffic cost and improving the scale and quality of the traffic pool.

Only by increasing the water inlet, operating the flow pool, and reducing the outlet flow can we continue to increase our user base.

Source: Chat about Finance