From 0 to 1, how to engage in product operations in the field of Internet finance?

Recently, there have been frequent "explosions" in the field of Internet finance, which serves as a warning to those who are engaged in Internet finance operations : they must operate with awe. If you only think about squeezing surplus value from users and then ignore them, it will definitely lead to adverse consequences. Taking advantage of the policy adjustment and industry rectification, today I would like to summarize the lightest type of operational work in the field of Internet finance, so that partners who want to change careers and enter the field of Internet finance can see that the threshold is not that high. At the same time, it must be emphasized that this is just one of the operational modes.

To put it simply, what we are talking about today can be called: traffic operation, which is called "loan assistance" in the field of Internet finance. That is, in addition to borrowers, there are also lending institutions and loan assistance institutions. We collectively refer to the former as "funding parties" and the latter as "loan assistance institutions."

We know that a big difference between undergraduate and graduate majors is that undergraduate studies are more about basic knowledge, covering a broad range of fields without much focus. The postgraduate stage will limit your research direction and contextualize your major. For example, some of my friends studied computer science in undergraduate studies and agricultural information-related majors in graduate studies, applying computer knowledge to the agricultural field. At this time, his computer knowledge is the basis for working in this field, and he needs additional understanding of the characteristics of agriculture and knowledge in the agricultural field.

Working in operations in the Internet finance field is similar to what undergraduate and graduate students did as mentioned above. Your user operation ability, copywriting skills, event planning ability, your logical thinking, process-based and refined working methods, your proactive learning, positive progress and responsible attitude, these are still the basis for you to do a good job in Internet finance operations, and there has been no change.

The following parts may change.

1. Break the original cognition, break through the comfort zone of operation, and learn to cross boundaries

There are many well-known loan-assisting products in the industry, such as Huanbei, Shengbei, Xiaoheiyu, etc. Working in operations at these companies inevitably requires dealing with the marketing department, audit department, and funding parties. For example:

1. Today, the app market promotion has attracted 10,000 customers, and 80% of the users registered for the App because they had financial needs.

2. Among the 8,000 users who registered for the App, 80% of them felt that the application process was not that complicated and that they had the relevant materials, so they applied for loans.

3. Among the 6,400 users who applied for loans, 50% passed the App’s risk control system. Simple ones include: whether the information is complete, whether the ID card photo is clear, whether the person is on the blacklist, etc.

4. 3,200 users who passed the App’s risk control system were sent to the funding party. The risk control of the funding party must be the most stringent among all links because they are responsible for lending. At the same time, they bear the risks of user overdue payments, bad debts, etc. Therefore, assuming that 20% of the 3,200 users sent to the funding party passed the review, that is, 640 people were qualified to borrow money.

5. The subsequent stage is to test the operational capabilities, because the period from user registration to successful loan application may be long or short. How to encourage users to withdraw cash in time when the timeliness is not strong enough, and how to encourage users to borrow again after paying off the loan.

In the above work, operations are responsible for several aspects, taking the market as an example:

▪ Operations are the dominant factor in achieving the final business indicators. Therefore, whether the market launch can help operations achieve the monthly indicators requires operations to make judgments, plans, and promote the market. Some people may say: "Simply relying on marketing to generate revenue for a product cannot prove the work of operations." That's right. Therefore, the market ROI, the selection of delivery channels, and the production of delivery materials need to be led by operations.

▪ Taking loan super as an example, users see the promotion page of their own products in various loan supers or information flows, and then decide whether to fill in their mobile phone numbers to register. The H5 used for this promotion needs to be produced by the operation. We can increase the traffic conversion from UV to registration as much as possible while keeping the single CPA unchanged and the promotion location unchanged. In the above H5 delivery process, how can we improve the conversion rate from UV to registration while keeping the market CPA or CPS delivery cost and delivery position unchanged? Carry out A/B Testing and optimize the H5 page based on the data.

▪ In addition to A/B Testing, to improve the conversion rate from UV to registration, we also need to be responsible for the quality of the channel and still need to use data for analysis. You see, a funding provider cannot lend money to your users unscrupulously. If the quality of your users is very poor, they are unable to repay the loan in time or have serious bad debts, the funding provider will consider whether to continue cooperating with you. In this case, we need to analyze the behavioral performance of users coming from different channels, and perform user operations on high-quality channels based on user behavior.

In addition to market work, operations need to promote cooperation with funding parties:

▪ For example, in the above example, we assumed that 3,200 users were provided with funds, and 20% passed the review, which means that 640 people were qualified to borrow. If the funding party adjusts the approval rate from 20% to 10%, 5% or even lower, it means that with the same promotion and operating costs, the profits we obtain will be greatly reduced, and we may even suffer losses.

▪ We need to communicate with the funding parties to understand why the pass rate of a certain link is lowered, and most importantly, what we can do to assist the funding parties in adjusting or restoring the pass rate.

▪ In addition to the approval rate that we are most concerned about, there are also the credit limit of individual users, the overall loan amount, etc. For example, in the past, a user who passed the review could be granted a credit line of 100,000 yuan by the funding provider. Now, on average, a user who passes the review can only get a credit line of 5,000 yuan. This will greatly reduce the user's desire to borrow money and the benefits that borrowing can bring. These are all tasks that operations need to proactively discover and promote.

In the field of Internet finance, operations personnel need to proactively break through their own work boundaries and possess the communication and cooperation capabilities of business colleagues. But one fact that needs to be understood is that under the loan assistance model, the funding party is the well-deserved "father".

2. A more seamless connection between operations and products

A few days ago, a new operations colleague joined the company, and I was responsible for being his probationary mentor. When we were communicating about our daily work on this product, we mentioned product optimization . He directly interrupted and said, "I know, it's about putting forward requirements for the product." I said, yes, it is to put forward requirements for the product, but there are some differences.

If your own Internet finance product is not intended to be built into a platform-type product such as 51 Credit Card and KaNiu, in most cases, the core goal of the operation is revenue. The title of operation can also be called "commercial product operation ". Since the word "business" is added, the focus of the work is self-evident.

I said, "In the e-commerce, O2O, and video products you have worked on before, their product process improvements and product experience optimization were mostly led by product managers , but this is not the case here. Product managers are more responsible for the implementation of some national regulatory, bank compliance and other requirements. The two most important parts of a product are the user application process based on the risk control requirements of different funding parties, and how to implement the project to commercialize the product. Operations need to take the lead in these two parts. You can take the initiative to promote whether the funding party can cut off a certain application step to directly increase the application rate, or assist the product manager in adding some incentives during the application process to increase the user application completion rate."

Commercial monetization is also included in the operational planning, which is about how to make full use of existing resources and maximize traffic monetization. Continuing with the above example, you gave 3,200 users to the funding party, and the funding party approved 20%, which is 640 users. The remaining 2,560 users will not be able to borrow from our existing funding party. Then can we consider the following solutions: for example, when the user's application is rejected, we can promote some advertisements of other loan products to them and earn advertising fees; can we transfer the rejected users to other funding parties with less stringent risk control requirements, giving these users an additional channel to borrow money; we can give the rejected users some free insurance and financial products, and then the insurance, financial and other product providers can conduct secondary marketing to these users.

Finally, the product prototype and requirements document are still completed by the product manager, but the role of operations will be more significant.

3. Operations gradually became data analysts

In 2017, I interviewed Mr. Su Jie, the author of "Everyone is a Product Manager" through WeChat. One of the interview questions was: Why did you choose to be a product manager? In the answer given by Teacher Su Jie, there is a sentence that the job threshold for a product manager is not very high.

This is even more true for operations. I believe that many friends who choose to work in operations or switch to operations after graduation do not all do so for the purpose of changing the world, but to make the lives of those around them better. Most people would consider how to make themselves more comfortable, so they choose to work in operations. In the field of operations, if there is anything more professional, it is "data analysis". (We are discussing data analysis in the operational field, so if there are colleagues engaged in data security, modeling, and other related data analysis, please ignore it.)

When entering the field of operations, everyone's first choice must be popular or high-end ones such as: new media operation, product operation, etc., or even if they have more or less understood other fields such as: event operation, user operation, etc. It is rare to do data analysis from scratch.

When you enter the field of Internet finance, you have to keep an eye on data every day. You can imagine working in a securities company with four or five display screens on your desk, all covered with densely packed numbers. Although we are not so exaggerated, there are always various data backgrounds and data reports on the display screen. It is normal to look at the data at least once an hour.

Operations need to use various reports and analytical methods to find out some effective, ineffective, abnormal, and things to be optimized from the vast number of numbers.

▪ What is the biggest fear of operations? We have done a lot of things, but no one knows about them, and no one knows which ones are the results of operations. Therefore, we need to use data to analyze what are the outputs of operations.

▪ It is believed that users who have registered for certain loan products will definitely receive text messages and phone calls regarding various products starting from the time of registration. Take SMS as an example. It has costs. We push it every day, but do users receive it? Did the user click on it? Has it been converted? In other words, do text messages have any effect? These all need to be verified through data, rather than taking it for granted and leaving it unchanged once a job becomes a daily routine and we get used to it.

▪ We need to remain sensitive to data, learn some data concepts, master some data testing methods such as A/B Test, and learn some efficient Excel processing methods such as vlookup. In operations, we must always ask for data from iterations, and also iterate based on the data.

Recently, our professional data analyst classmates have started to urge our operations colleagues to learn to write SQL and import data by themselves.

4. Pay more attention to the management of user life cycle

The life cycle of a product on the Internet and the user's AARRR have been talked about a lot, but I don’t know how many partners have actually carried out tiered operations on users and conducted detailed overall operations on users in different life cycles of the product. Take a cash loan product as an example:

1. The user has registered on the H5 page of Daichao, which we call activated registered users. However, the user has not downloaded the App and logged in, and cannot receive product push notifications. For this group of users, the lowest-cost approach is to reach them via text messages, or through some automatic calls or smart voice calls. Because these users have not yet entered the product process and considering the cost, manual telephone marketing is not recommended.

2. Users who download and log in can receive product push notifications.

3. You have already entered the product application process, but stopped at a certain step of the application. To put it more professionally, a certain step has been lost. We need to analyze the churn rate of each link and formulate "periodic contact messages" for the links with higher churn rates. The periodic contact messages can be understood as: after you churn at a certain step today, if you still have not completed the application for this step in the next 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, etc., you will continue to receive push notifications from the operation configuration.

4. The user's application is approved by the funding party and the user is successfully qualified for the loan. Or, they are rejected by the funding party and do not qualify. If the user is not qualified for the loan, we should monetize this user through other projects, and guide the user into a new process through in-product advertisements, text links on the rejection page, product push, etc.

5. After obtaining the loan qualification, the user did not make a loan. We need to guide users to borrow money. In addition to periodic contact messages, daily push and text messages, we can use manual telephones and smart phones to conduct telephone marketing to users, which can usually achieve a conversion rate three times that of non-telemarketing users.

6. After the user borrows money, he will repay it soon. As mentioned earlier, users may have overdue payments and bad debts. When these situations occur, the biggest victims are the funding parties, followed by the lending institutions. Do you think that if the funding party is harmed, will they still lend money to the lending institution? Therefore, we need to provide repayment reminders to users who are about to repay, and collection reminders to users who are overdue.

7. After repaying the loan, the user did not borrow again. Same as 5.

The above is relatively rough, and simply stratifies users based on major aspects. For example, the user application process may have 5, 6 or even more steps. There are different reasons for user loss at each step. We need to conduct targeted analysis and provide guidance to users.

▪ In the above major links, we should find the time points with better conversion effects of push, SMS and phone calls based on data. This time point is definitely not the one given by the industry, such as 7 am and 6 pm for official accounts, because each product is different and has different user attributes, and they need to be analyzed separately.

▪ For different users, we need to conduct A/B testing on copywriting. We need to test whether caring, activity-oriented, conversational or official copywriting can effectively stimulate user conversion.

▪ For users coming from different channels, we need to perform more refined operations based on the channels based on their performance in the data. For example, the overdue rate of iOS channel is relatively low, while that of App Store is relatively high. Then we should increase the operational energy of iOS channel users and improve users' business conversion. For users of App Store, we should formulate corresponding user strategies, which can first reduce their overdue rate. Instead of pushing all the information to the same category of users.

Of course, in the field of Internet finance, it is essential to organize a good campaign, and you have to let users have something to gain. I will write a special article next time about activities in the field of Internet finance.

In short, if you want to cross banks and enter the field of Internet finance, you can start with the business mentioned above. Things are not that difficult, nor as grand as imagined. The most important thing is still to do the monotonous small things to the extreme. Small things will become big things. Show your ability in the details.

Source: Chris Jerico