Summary of practical experience: How to carry out a fission activity well?

Recently, we urgently planned an activity supported by WeChat. From receiving the purpose to the project to follow-up, the follow-up was quite tight. Although the routines for designing support activities are similar and the forms are simple, we can gain some thoughts and experience.

In this article, we will mainly sort out the entire planning process, scattered thoughts and work summaries. Here it is divided into two parts: event planning and event summary.

1. Event Planning

1.1 Purpose of the activity

There must be a background for holding an event, which may be a strategic arrangement or KPI from operations. No matter what the purpose is, it ultimately depends on exposure, attracting new users, activity and conversion. It is best to customize an activity with one main purpose.

For example: during the growth period, when the core goal is to rapidly increase the number of users, we will consider how to acquire new users through activities; and after new users enter the platform, how to increase the rapid conversion of new users can be guided by another activity or rules for new users.

1.2 Preliminary Research

Once you have a purpose, you will then enter a research and analysis phase, which has the following main purposes:

Scope of user groups that meet the purpose:

Here you need to understand the scope of your target users. For example, you need to know the proportion and range of unconverted, potential, converted, and lost users among all current users; and evaluate the final conversion effect and direction.

How to better drive users to participate in activities and meet the purpose:

Here you can communicate with some target user groups through questionnaires or interviews to understand their main expectations and needs, as well as other ways to reach them. For example: what do you hope to gain from an activity; what form of activity or game do you prefer; how willing are users to share; who do they want to share with, etc.

Competitive product activity analysis:

It mainly analyzes the activities of competitors in the same period or in the past. From the product perspective, it can be analyzed through activity methods, purposes, user groups, effect evaluation and other angles. From the operation perspective, it can evaluate the opponent's operation strategy and channels, understand the target users and strategies adopted by the opponent's activities, and the successful reference points. Which ones may be liked by users and which ones are minefields. Even deep disassembly and analysis one by one.

However, due to the tight schedule of the event, not much time was allocated for research work, so it was not done in depth. This aspect also indirectly affects the activity process; for example, there is no targeted research on the main channels of user sharing and the ratio of the number of friends, which leads to some users having poor experience on the sharing channels when sharing, the number of goals set to be achieved is greater than the number of friends the user is actually willing to share with, and so on.

1.3 Preparation of event prizes

After you have the purpose of the activity, you can set rewards around the activity. It is very important to choose the right bait. In general fission activities , the prizes should have the following properties:

What users want: cater to their preferences, combine product business, and meet their core needs. An unattractive bait, or a bait that fails to satisfy users, will hardly make the campaign effective.

Business-related: If there are prizes that users can get for free, it is best to closely integrate them with your own products and services so that new and old users can return to your platform; generally, virtual prizes are much better than physical prizes, and can ultimately increase user stickiness, and the cost can also be evaluated; physical gifts may cause the problem of more users leaving after receiving the physical prizes.

Cost controllable: Assuming that the prizes ultimately require costs, then should there be no restrictions? Actually, it is not. It is necessary to set up a limit for the "top XX" to participate in the activity, limit the timeliness of the rewards, and also limit the frequency of user participation. This approach is to prevent malicious bloodsucking by the wool party, and secondly, to keep the cost of the entire event under control.

1.4 Activity Plan

If the goal is determined in the early stage, research is done, and material budget is prepared, then the next step is to select the way for our fission, which is actually the form of fission activities. We finally chose the form of support activities, but in this article, I also summarized the forms of activities I have collected for reference and consideration.

1.4.1 Invitation Benefits

Users are encouraged to complete new user acquisition or activation. When a user acquires a new user and the new user converts, the user will also be rewarded; for example, Meituan Takeout. Similarly, if an old user is pulled back to log in, the user will also be rewarded, such as the operation of regaining old users in some games.

Of course, in order to avoid new users feeling frustrated, both parties are motivated when old users invite new users. For some apps with high thresholds, incentives are given to old users only after new users have converted.

A typical example of Meituan inviting friends is that after successfully inviting friends, a reward red envelope is on the way. The inviter can only receive the red envelope after the new user completes the task within the deadline. Also, in order to lower the threshold for converting new users and increase the task completion rate, Meituan also gave new users a red envelope to complete the "newbie task".

1.4.2 Red Envelope Fission

After a user completes a task and shares it with others, he or she can receive a red envelope. Similarly, other people can also receive red envelopes on this activity page. For example, after submitting a Meituan takeout request, it can be shared with others to receive red envelopes, and a certain person can be given the largest share to encourage people to receive and participate.

For example, after placing a takeout order, you can share it in the group for others to receive. Takeout is a product with a relatively high repurchase rate, so after users receive the red envelope, they can use it when placing an order later.

What causes fission here is not necessarily the red envelope. The main purpose is to encourage users to share it and at the same time drive conversion of people around them. It could be a coupon or it could be a certain user benefit. For example, after purchasing a course, you can share it in the group and get a course; after purchasing a membership service, you can share it in the group so that everyone can share the benefits, etc.

1.4.3 Group buying

The gameplay of group buying is relatively flexible and common. After users invite others to participate in the purchase, they can finally enjoy the group purchase price to buy a certain product. For example, when a user wants to buy a certain product, he can enjoy the group purchase price by buying it together with others. There are two forms of group formation: inviting friends to join the group and system matching to join the group.

The most common one should be Pinduoduo. The goal of group buying is mostly around conversion. So if no one places a group order together for a long time after the user shares the order, you can also simulate a transaction on the platform and place a group order with this user, and finally complete the transaction. However, it is recommended that the user actively share the order to complete the activity process.

1.4.4 Support activities

When a user initiates an activity, in order to achieve the purpose of rewarding, he needs to invite more friends to "help", and in the end both parties will get part of the reward. This type of activity is quite common, usually aiming to gather large coupons, or help obtain a certain product, or a chance to win a lottery.

It is best to set a task and goal for the support activity. For example, the following are examples with clear goals and tasks. If you gather 11 people, you can get a coupon, or if you gather 5 people, you can draw a membership.

1.4.5 Card Collection Activities

The card collection activity allows users to randomly obtain a card in some form, and users can also exchange or complete tasks to receive or share benefits after finally collecting all the cards. The process of this type of activity is relatively complicated and is more suitable for mature products with a large number of users. There have been classic cases in previous years: the Alipay Five Blessings Card.

If the format and process of the activity can be simplified, for example, collecting cards by completing several user tasks and finally sharing the rewards, it would also be a good choice.

1.5 Event Planning

1.5.1 Activity Process Design

The next step is to formulate the main process of the activity. It is worth mentioning that in order to help both parties, there needs to be mutual benefit, but attention must be paid to restrictions.

Main process:

Start - Log in - Participate in the event - Receive rewards - Help others/others help to get more rewards - Use discount coupons;

1.5.2 Activity Interaction and Status

From the perspective of page interaction, the following page states are sorted out. Because after the event is launched, apart from the rules and processes of the event, the constituent elements of the page will also directly affect the user's participation in the event.

• Login status: Not logged in, Logged in;
• Participation status: Participated, Not Participated;
• Visited pages: activity homepage, your own activity page, and other people’s activity pages;
• Activity period: not yet started, in progress, ended;

Therefore, the page process is as follows:

1.5.3 Activity Background & Data

Build activity indicators:

Here, we generally need to cooperate with the operations work to build the core indicators of our activities. During the discussion, we can use the DuPont analysis method to analyze the indicators we want.

For example: if the core indicator is sales, then sales = conversion rate of participating users ' average order value . In this way, the sources of indicators such as participating users, conversion rate, and average order value are broken down step by step, and finally directly to the user behavior that can be tracked (some indicators may not be able to be tracked). After breaking down such indicators, it is helpful for us to adopt collection strategies.

Activity channel statistics:

Where the page comes from, the users obtained through this channel, and what the final quality effect is. This may be what the operation also wants to see, because if the effect is not good, then the users of this channel may not be in line with our target group, which can reduce costs later.

The converted users are mainly those who have achieved their goals.

Process points:

Tracking each step of the core process is conducive to analyzing the task flow and operations of users during the activity. Here we mainly track the indicators broken down from the above figure. You can monitor it yourself or have it handled by a third party. The main thing here is the project efficiency.

If a third party is used for tracking, the element ID will be filled in by the developer.

Order data:

Because in this event, users can purchase products directly through the event page. It is not an e-commerce product and does not provide users with order management functions. The most important thing in this data is to monitor whether the order status of the entire activity is normal. If there is an abnormal status, then we have to consider how to maintain it.

2. Summary of the activity

2.1 Activity data summary

The work really begins after the activity is completed, because no matter how the activity goes, we have to review and summarize it. By summarizing the basics from the following three dimensions, we can roughly evaluate the channel effect during the event, the process effect of the event, and the user quality of the event.

Evaluation of channel effectiveness during the event:

Activity Process Evaluation:

User quality of each channel after the event:

The above can be used to basically evaluate the effectiveness of an activity. The key points to focus on for different products may be different, but the basic dimensions of assessment and evaluation activities should be similar. If there is not much investment in channels, then you can also consider which category is more in line with expectations during the promotion process.

2.2 Other Summary

Regarding "cold start", an activity that tests communication often needs to consider the method of cold start. The key is to have good KOLs and community resources in the early stage, so you still have to be prepared.

Be aware that invisible factors may increase the threshold of the support process. Support activities generally rely heavily on social relationships, so account systems such as WeChat, QQ, and Weibo should be able to bind user accounts after access authorization, and the threshold for users to split through the platform will also be low. Here, don’t ignore the role of QQ groups.

During the event, there may be a lack of support, that is, user participation may peak. At this time, we need to conduct a specific analysis to determine whether it is because the activity is not exposed enough and there are not enough participating users; or most of the old users have received incentives, so the number of shares has decreased; at this time, corresponding solutions must be proposed, but sometimes this is really the best you can achieve, and you can only start to reflect.

From the perspective of the event, the main factors may include: whether the steps to participate in the event are lengthy, whether the target user group of the promotional channel is small, whether the incentives fail to attract users' attention, etc. But the key is whether the problem can be adjusted and handled immediately after it is discovered. If it is handled, will it affect the user experience of the completed task, or if there are any compensatory measures.

From a product perspective, consider the experience and process mechanism of the activity itself, reduce the steps and attract the user's attention as little as possible, and then think about whether the product service itself is in place. For example, if you are conducting a new user acquisition campaign but fail to quickly, simply, and directly explain the problems that your product can solve and the value of your product, even if you explain it clearly, if it does not hit the user's pain points, new users will still be unfamiliar with your product and may even resist it. At this time, the traffic introduced from the activity is likely to be lost.

In fact, no matter what the activity is, a set of processes are designed to prompt and guide users to follow the process. However, the success of an activity is often determined by whether the product and service hits the user's pain points and whether the threshold for guiding the user is just right.

If you are not particularly confident about the quality of the event, it is better not to set the event start time at midnight on the weekend.

Looking back at this article, the thinking is somewhat divergent. A lot could be written about each point, but it can also be regarded as a review of the work, and there may be inappropriate views in it. If you have any relevant opinions, you can also communicate with each other. Thank you.

Source: Mao Xiaobai