Practical Tips丨How to conduct a successful fission campaign?

The article starts with the wool party and discusses in detail what conditions are needed for a successful fission activity.

Not long ago, I published two articles, taking Pinduoduo, Lian Coffee and other brands of different levels as examples, and discussed the common problems encountered when implementing fission. As a result, within a week, hundreds of colleagues responded and asked me what to do.

The problem mainly focuses on the "freeloaders": this group of people come and get the free stuff, and then leave. The platform subsidies are wasted and the traffic quality is extremely poor.

Among them, a Yunji employee who did not want to reveal the company he worked for said that they recently did a social distribution activity of "opening a store for free", which brought in 7 million users in just one day. In the corner where everyone was celebrating, the operation dogs were filling the holes like crazy:

1. The free-shipping coupons were used by the merchandisers to buy products for 9.9 yuan with free shipping. The charity- style free gift soon broke through the cost defense line, so the person in charge ordered a "minimum purchase of 2 pieces" restriction to be added to products below 49 yuan, resulting in the entire team being labeled as "scammers" and complaints arose...
2. 7 million new users, the coupons disappear once they are used up, and few of them make repeat purchases. The 7 million has become a bluff, and the actual ROI is kept secret.

I'm not sure what the purpose of the 7 million number is. It’s just that the “wool party” is so powerful that some people are afraid of it, some people use it, and some people think they are very interesting. Starting from this group of people, perhaps we can touch the lifeline of “fission” and dig out the essence of social traffic. In this article, I will start with the wool party and talk in detail about what conditions are needed for a successful fission activity.

1. Time: Those in the fission storm

1. The Deified Wool Party

When it comes to fission, the topic my colleagues talked about most with me is: How to block the freeloaders during activities?

The first thing I would think about is: How to define the freeloaders?

• If the "wool party" you are talking about is those professional players who repeatedly swipe in an organized manner, or wool hackers who crack encrypted codes, then this problem should be classified as a technical issue, and you should talk to the developer, or even call the police;
• If you define the "wool party" as people who love to take advantage of others and are resentful of them, I would think that you at least have no sincerity in doing fission. Fission is to exchange subsidies for social traffic. It is human nature to love to take advantage, and it is also the basic driving force of fission. It doesn’t matter if someone takes advantage of you. The key is whether the person who takes advantage is the right person.
• But if these "freeloaders" refer to those petty citizens who are keen on taking advantage of small profits and will help you forward and download files without thinking twice just for a few cents , then I do have some suggestions to stimulate discussion.

In fact, this group of freeloaders that we are so scared of are also a group of ordinary people. We also eat grains, have seven emotions and six desires, have income, and have to spend money. The difference is that most of them live in third- and fourth-tier cities. Their economic conditions may not be bad, but they habitually maintain the traditional virtues of diligence and thrift. They have leisurely jobs or are full-time houseworkers, have plenty of time, and do not attach much importance to social values.

The most important thing is that they also want to buy things . A few dollars for toothbrush and toothpaste, an average of 1 dollar for a pack of tissue paper, dozens of dollars for clothes and shoes...the brand is not important. What matters is that the price is affordable and the quality cannot be too bad.

Where to buy?

Pinduoduo, Beibei, Miaya , and Mogujie all sell products at this price. And these platforms happen to be doing a good job in fission.

This group of freeloaders with strong communication capabilities are the consumers of these platforms. How can fission not be successful if it is done this way?

The wool party is not an alternative, they are just ordinary people who meet the following three conditions:

1. Strong communication ability : They have plenty of time, low communication threshold, and do not worry about excessive forwarding damaging their own social value. They can complete a large number of sharing and communication behaviors at a small cost;
2. High density of people : The mainstream people at the end of the WeChat ecosystem have a large base, and everyone has at least a few such people in their circle of friends ;
3. Consumer demand is consistent : cost-effectiveness comes first, and brand is not important. Consumer demand is highly unified and points to Pinduoduo.

People who meet these three conditions constitute the external conditions for product fission and are the "right time" for fission. The "right time" for Pinduoduo and Qutoutiao are the " right time". Products with different tones will have different "right time". The "right time" for Pinduoduo is the classic "right time", but it is not the only "right time".

2. Find the right time for your fission

The following two pictures are the communication patterns in the two ecosystems of Weibo and WeChat :

It can be clearly seen that in social communication on Weibo, there are often some extremely prominent large nodes. These large nodes have strong communication capabilities and a large radiation range, and almost determine the direction and margins of the communication. These big nodes are what we often call opinion leaders.

In WeChat's social communication, the nodes are relatively evenly distributed, and even if a slightly larger node appears occasionally, it will not play a decisive role.

Why is there such a difference?

Because Weibo is a weak-relationship social network of the "loudspeaker" type, the social driving force mostly comes from topics, hot spots, and interests. Users can easily gather because of local popularity, and 20% of KOLs have 80% of the communication rights. WeChat is a strong-relationship social network of the "private whisper" type. The social driving force is more about kinship, geography, and real-life relationships. The communication rights are dispersed and decentralized, and it is almost impossible for a communication centralizer to have absolute power.

In other words, if you want to form a complete fission chain in the WeChat ecosystem, there must be sufficient transmission penetration rate. In other words, you must at least ensure that each person has two or three friends in their circle of friends who are willing to forward your event link.

This also explains why I emphasize that "strong transmission ability" and "high population density" are necessary conditions for "time", because only when these two conditions are met can the transmission density that causes qualitative changes be formed.

As for the other condition, namely "consistent consumer demand", it should be easy to understand: you must have the appropriate supply capacity to meet this consumer demand, otherwise what will you do with the traffic? For example: Pinduoduo can meet the consumption needs of the "freeloaders", but Secoo, which sells luxury goods, cannot. Therefore, Secoo's "right time" is not the "freeloaders", but must be a group of rich people.

To put it bluntly, the first two conditions are to find "good people", while "consistent consumer needs" is to find "the right people". The reason why most platforms fail in fission is that the wool party is a "good person" to them, but not necessarily the "right person".

“Good people” are all the same, but the “right people” each have their own characteristics. In the previous article, we said that the free-to-eat group is not the only "right time", so let us give some examples of the "right time" that the fission of products with different tones depends on.

(1) New World Marketing Course

In 2018, there was a well-known, or infamous, case of fission.

Fellow students in the Internet marketing industry, all have great respect for the three marketing campaigns of " Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou ", "Buddhist Youth" and "Book Throwing Campaign". When these review courses came out, countless people were excited, and with the last-minute encouragement of "an increase of 5 yuan for every 10,000 people purchasing", I am afraid that few people can survive.

After buying the course, downloading the APP, and joining the course group, I realized that the exciting thing was not the course, but the ubiquitous advertisements of "share posters to attract new users and make money". Even the teachers in the course group are constantly urging you on the screen.

It is human nature to seek profit. Under the guise of knowledge reciprocity, I have personally felt the strong thirst for knowledge as a marketer . It seems that the money can be earned easily and decently, so I decided to move forward it. As a result, Internet users’ friend circles were flooded with posters of the New World. Coupled with the rising number of purchasers and course prices over time, countless people gave in amidst hesitation and anxiety.

Its popularity and phenomenal status are unquestionable, but of course there are also criticisms. Some say it is "swiping the screen in the name of knowledge"; some say it is "online pyramid scheme"; some call it "a negative example of poor eating manners."

In fact, Xin Shi Xiang’s fission communication was banned not long after it went viral, and the one and a half hour audio course became a supporting role in the event. What netizens said was right, but one thing cannot be denied: even if this event generated only frivolous MLM orders, the participating users must be real users with a need to pay for knowledge - they came because of the posters, and their original intention of entering was the course, not to make money.

In summary, the main group of Xinshixiang's fission activity fully meets the three conditions of "time":

1. Strong communication ability : Internet and marketing practitioners, whose work and life are highly internet-based, are well versed in communication methods and techniques in the WeChat ecosystem, have a large circle and high communication quality.
2. High population density : Colleagues, peers, and friends are densely distributed in first- and second-tier cities, and the penetration rate in the circle of friends is extremely high.
3. Consumption demands are consistent : they are attracted by the courses, they are young and hard-working people, work is the focus of their lives, they are eager to make progress, and they have a sense of justice in consuming knowledge.

With these three points, there is no need to worry about the fission of Xin Shi Xiang.

Another case is Lian Coffee, which I wrote about before and is known as the "social coffee". The specific gameplay is described in detail in the previous article, so I will not repeat it here.

Even coffee has a group of people who are its "time":

1. Strong communication ability : The white-collar class on the front line, the group of people with the most say and activity on the Internet, have a strong interest and communication ability for high-quality content, personality display, interesting hot spots, etc.;
2. High population density : highly concentrated in first-tier cities, with higher incomes, similar interests, and larger circles;
3. Consumption demand is consistent : the core consumer group of coffee, and there is a large room for demand growth. The average person in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen consumes 20 cups of coffee per year, while in other first-tier Asian cities such as Tokyo and Seoul, this number is as high as 100.

Therefore, the fission group of Lian Coffee is "good people" and "the right people".

I only cite these cases. If you have other cases, you can try them to see if they match.

We all understand the cases, so when we get a product, how do we determine its "right timing"?

• First, circle out your potential consumer group, that is, a group of people with "consistent consumption needs" and who are directed towards you;
• Then, dig deeper to see if this group of people is concentrated in a certain area because of strong ties and is extremely sensitive to some kind of fission driving force.

Maybe, maybe not. That’s why I call it “time”.

3. Should we block the freeloaders?

Compared with those who are gearing up for fission, more colleagues who care about this matter are probably already trapped in it. That’s why so many people are asking how to block the freeloaders.

As I said before, the "wool party" is also a group of ordinary people. It's just that because of their strong communication ability, dense distribution, and consistent consumption tendencies, they are more suitable to participate in fission.

However, this group of people is also extremely special, and their communication driving force is so simple: luxury goods cannot attract programmers , 3C digital products cannot attract fairies, marketing courses cannot attract civil servants, and coffee and fruit tea cannot attract cleaners. But no matter what product it is, as long as you send out a red envelope or give some benefits, there will always be people who are willing to work hard to spread the word and let your kind heart take root everywhere. They don’t even care who you are. Qutoutiao uses such a rough model.

As a result, after a passionate one-night stand, many products find that they have "slept with the wrong person", and the culprits are mostly wool-gathering gangs.

So, should we block the freeloaders?

We once organized a cross-border e-commerce bargaining event, and were also troubled by the bargain hunters. So I went to find the developer, and he made some restrictions on the number of times the content is posted, the frequency of posting, and the whitelist, which to a certain extent kept the freeloaders out. Unexpectedly, after the revised version went online, there were fewer freeloaders, the activities became less popular, and the number of competitions initiated fell to a fraction of its previous level.

After thinking hard, racking my brain day and night, and carefully studying all the bargaining aids in the industry, I seemed to understand something.

A cross-border e-commerce company with a customer order of three or four hundred yuan imitated Pinduoduo with a customer order of thirty or forty yuan. This activity failed from the beginning because the freeloaders were not the "right people" for us.

However, there are ways to lose.

The opportunity lies in: in WeChat’s strong relationship social networking, communication is cross-class and cross-group.

Weak-tie social networks such as Weibo and Tieba are social relationships based on interests and industries, and there is rarely any intersection between different classes. For example, on Weibo, it is difficult for a full-time housewife to exchange information with a fitness expert. However, WeChat, which relies on strong relationships, is different. The social relationships based on kinship and geography can easily cross classes and groups.

The parents of white-collar workers on the front line are likely to be working class people in small towns; the niece of a boss who invests in a business may be a naive college student...

In other words, the group of people who come to take advantage of you may not have the same consumption needs as you, but there must be the person you are looking for in their circle of friends.

With this in mind, we decisively made another revision: on the one hand, we appropriately increased the difficulty of bargaining to keep the cost within an affordable range; on the other hand, we established a large number of bargaining groups, pulled in all the freeloaders we could, and encouraged them to form bargaining groups spontaneously to facilitate their repeated participation.

If the freeloaders like to play, then they can get together and have fun. In the conventional bargaining method, each person can only help bargain three times a day, but to successfully bargain for free, it will take at least a hundred times. This means that there will definitely be a large amount of exposure that overflows these bargaining groups and covers more different groups of people.

Ultimately, the primary focus of this activity changed from conversion to dissemination, and the activity ROI was also controlled.

2. Geographical advantage: What the platform thinks

1. Coffee’s fission “gene”

A few days ago, I had the honor of communicating face to face with the head of operations of Lian Coffee and learned some about the situation in the coffee industry. Many people know that the cost of making coffee is very low, but how low it is may surprise you.

The cost of selling a cup of coffee = packaging cost + delivery cost, which means that the cost of coffee materials and processing is almost negligible after scale-up. Its gross profit margin is so high that compared with other industries, there is enough room to do many things, such as: fission.

The price tag for a cup of coffee is 27 yuan, and the production cost of the accompanying packaging is 3 to 5 yuan. In the early stages of expansion, the average delivery cost per order is 8 to 10 yuan. By this calculation, the cost of delivering a cup of coffee to the user will not exceed 15 yuan, and the gross profit margin is between 40% and 50%.

In Lian Coffee's fission system, new customers can get a cup of coffee for as low as 6 yuan (1 yuan + 5 yuan for delivery) for their first order. With the support of coupons and coffee library, the initial repurchase price per cup is between 8 and 13 yuan on average. Stable repurchases occur in pocket coffee shops, where each cup is 10 yuan lower than the marked price, or 17 yuan.

From this point of view , although Lian Coffee's fission discount looks very tempting, it does not spend much on subsidies. At least it does not lose money on every sale. The high profits brought by repeat purchases can quickly cover the costs. I learned from the person in charge that Lian Coffee has basically achieved a break-even point. This is extremely rare in the current era when the Internet industry is burning money to expand in its early stages.

It is worth mentioning that freshly ground coffee is an industry with strong brand premium. In this industry, actively provoking a price war is tantamount to seeking death. For this reason, even though Luckin Coffee entered the market with a huge capital of 1 billion, everyone was very cautious in providing subsidies. Coffee is still coffee, at an average price of more than ten yuan per cup, and it is not sold at the same price as plain water. This is also the industry's natural cost defense line and a unique fission gene.

2. The fission users are coming, can you handle it?

Many of my friends are doing fission. When users place the first order because of the subsidy and then do not repurchase, they will grit their teeth and think that they are here to fleece the users.

It is really too much to ask you to treat this user as an equal as soon as he/she comes in, whom you have invited at a low price. Any fission that aims at paid conversion cannot avoid the word "subsidy". Pinduoduo is blatant about it, and even the coffee is decent, but it still provides enough benefits.

It is human nature to pursue profit, and it is wise to use "profit" as the driving force for fission. However, the users attracted by this method have been given a low-price anchor point invisibly. They may have consumption needs, but they may not have the purchasing power. They may be able to accept your normal price, but they may not accept it immediately after getting a bargain.

Therefore, even if you have seized the "right time", it is normal not to get the ideal repurchase rate after fission. You can set up a price buffer for these users so that they can grow into healthy users as much as possible.

For example: at Lian Coffee, after users spend 6 yuan to order the first cup of coffee, they will not be forced to accept the standard price of 27 yuan. Instead, they can buy coffee with an average price of 8 to 17 yuan through lucky bags, coffee coupons, pocket cafes, etc. As users gradually develop purchasing habits, they will slowly be able to accept higher prices.

Users like to buy because they like to buy, but they also like it because they buy frequently.

Let’s look at Pinduoduo again. There are various group buying fission activities. Users who come from fission can get free shipping for the first order by paying a symbolic few cents. These users are almost getting something for nothing, and the repurchase and retention issues are a headache. Fortunately, Pinduoduo's supply chain is strong enough. It sends red envelopes and coupons in various ways, and has set up a channel with free shipping for 9.9 yuan and puts different products on the shelves every day. It's like they have prepared enough wool for you to fleece.

As the free-for-all group got more and more items, they gradually developed a sense of trust in the platform and started buying discounted and cheap items. Later on, they bought everything on Pinduoduo.

What Pinduoduo is doing now with B2C brands is similar to what Taobao did with Tmall . This kind of brand upgrade is similar to the boiling frog in warm water mentioned above.

3. When doing fission, do you have the geographical advantage?

Having said so much, there are only two key points :

• To do fission, you need to have enough gross profit to support it. The space that gross profit can compromise is the attraction of the core of fission.
• Users attracted by subsidies are still far from normal users. This will be a difficult process, and you must have continuous subsidies or enough discounted products to act as a buffer. It is impossible to go from fission to consumption overnight.

We were previously engaged in cross-border e-commerce, but because it was a platform, our gross profit margin was only around 5 percentage points. Because the average order value was relatively high, it was also difficult to come up with enough low-priced products with free shipping to make the transition. The result is that the cost of fission orders is high, the repurchase rate is low, and the profits brought by repurchases are difficult to cover the costs. As a result, the ROI of the entire activity is not good.

Therefore, the supply chain is the "geographical advantage" of fission. A supply chain with fission attributes has high gross profit and multi-level characteristics. It can provide sufficient concessions as a driving force for fission, and can build a complete "discount matrix" to attract new fission customers. Only when these characteristics are met can the input-output ratio of fission be guaranteed.

Of course, if the brand is in the expansion stage, the investors have given you endless money, and there is no ROI indicator, then you don’t need to consider “geographical advantage”. However, given the current Internet financing environment, there are probably not many such products emerging.

3. Harmony among people: Creating a fission driving force that can set the field ablaze

1. Pry open the user’s wallet

Why do users participate in fission? What is the driving force of fission?

Based on the cases collected over a long period of time, I can roughly name a few: personality display (fun tests), honor comparison (mini- game rankings), mutual benefit (give one get one, share red envelopes), and value sharing (forwarding good articles).

However, looking through recent cases, it is easy to find that the driving forces of communication fission are varied, but fission with the purpose of paid conversion cannot avoid the word "subsidy".

The reason is simple: dissemination and conversion are two completely different things.

• Spreading, that is, forwarding and sharing, has a low threshold and low cost, and it is easy to do if you can pry open the emotional points;
• Conversion, that is, paid purchase, has a high decision-making threshold and involves various factors such as demand, scenarios, and price. It is a big topic.

Do I need your products? Do I know and trust you? Am I satisfied with your price? How are your competitors performing? Do I have better options to consider?

You must answer all questions the moment the information reaches the user, so that consumers will be willing to place an order.

If we want to answer these questions universally to ensure that the fission density reaches the threshold of qualitative change, it is almost impossible to do so using conventional means. The industry has found that the only feasible solution is to use exaggerated discounts and subsidies to turn the transaction into a giveaway.

Like "1 yuan for fruit" and "1 yuan for coffee", users can pay a symbolic amount of money to deeply experience the products and services. At the same time, they activate, register, place orders, etc., leaving operators with a path for subsequent contact. Although this is not a equal transaction, it has to be acknowledged that the product has gained new paying customers.

Therefore, when "transformation" becomes a highly anticipated link in the fission closed loop, "interest" becomes an unavoidable core driving force.

2. Give cheaply and respectfully

However, "benefits" alone may not necessarily motivate users to participate.

Not long ago, I was discussing with a friend who runs a micro-business in the maternal and child care industry and discovered something very interesting. In theory, distribution is a kind of fission that is strongly profit-oriented, but their slogan for recruiting mothers to be WeChat business agents is not "making money" but "letting more babies use safe and reliable products."

Except for Jack Ma , there should be no one who is not interested in making money. However, if making money comes with the cost of damaging social values ​​and damaging one's own social image, I am afraid that many people will hesitate.

Of course, we found that the profit-driven motivation of low-end products such as Pinduoduo and Qutoutiao is very naked. Because their target users are a group of people who don't care about social value. They like to take advantage of small things in a simple and crude way, and any embellishment will become an obstacle to the communication of information for them. Therefore, explicit prompts such as "There is a 97% chance of getting 0 yuan if you forward it to 3 different groups" arouse users' attention everywhere and become a booster of fission.

But when your target users are young, decent, and financially well-off first- and second-tier people, this set of things will not work. It's not that they are indifferent to the benefits you give them. They want them, but they don't want others to know that they are here for this. They need a decent gimmick so that they can secretly get the benefits they want while claiming to have taste, interest and a positive attitude.

Just like Lian Coffee’s lucky bags and pocket coffee shops, users forward the messages to show their personality and claim to have good taste, while at the same time getting coffee at prices far below the market price. Like the marketing courses of Xin Shi Xiang, users seem to forward the content because they are eager to learn and share knowledge with others, but in fact they also receive commissions for course distribution.

3. Three forces in the fission closed loop

The driving force of conversion fission can be decomposed into the following three forces:

1. Attractiveness : The power to attract users to click on the link;
2. Spreadability : the power that drives users to forward links;
3. Conversion power : the power that motivates users to pay and place orders.

The different deployment of these three forces determines the focus and effect of fission. Judging from the limited cases currently available, the arrangement of these three forces can be roughly divided into the following routines:

The first type: Three forces in one, "wool" runs through the whole situation

For example, MissFresh’s “Eat Fruits for Free”: seeing the link copy “Eat Mare’s Milk for Free” and clicking on it is attraction; “forwarding to three different groups” in order to eat Mare’s Milk for free is communication power; spending 10 yuan on shipping to eat Mare’s Milk for free is conversion power.

Most of Pinduoduo’s gameplay follows this routine, and “wool” runs through the entire fission closed loop and is the core and only driving force of fission. This model focuses on conversion and has crude benefits, making it suitable for people who are insensitive to social values. The intensity of communication mainly depends on repeated initiations by users. When the conversion of interest points cannot be realized due to excessive difficulty, users will lose trust in the activity and communication will be difficult to spread.

The second type: Based on the closed-loop communication, "conversion" becomes added value

The most representative case is Lian Coffee. If the function of "selling coffee" of pocket cafe is deleted, its "curiosity" attraction and "self-expression" communication power have formed a closed loop, becoming a communication fission similar to a fun test.

In other words, even if the conversion process of this activity is not done well enough and no one places an order in the cafe, the entire activity can continue to fission without being affected, and continue to gain exposure for the brand. This approach separates conversion and dissemination, which is more suitable for products with strong brand premiums that need to convey the value of "wool" in a subtle and decent manner.

The last type: attraction and communication power are independent of each other, with clear subject and object

Those who click on the link because of its attraction, pass through the funnel and complete the conversion are called guests; if the guest user forwards and shares the link with other users, it will be transformed into the host state. Separate the subject and the object, do not take forwarding as a prerequisite for conversion, and do not force forwarding and sharing, so that more precise and friendly designs can be made at both the levels of attracting conversion and dissemination.

For example: The New World Marketing Course separates the attraction and uses a poster that simply sells the course as the display terminal. Users scan the code and enter with the mentality of a consumer, so the traffic is accurately controllable. Only after users have completed payment will they see a prompt to make money by forwarding. This prompt is an encouragement rather than a threat to vested interests, so the experience is friendly and users are highly motivated.

This logic of Xin Shi Xiang has been used in many community fissions . From attraction to conversion to sharing, it is a complete funnel. The three forces do not restrain each other, which is conducive to broadening the width of each layer of the funnel and obtaining greater traffic.

Pinduoduo’s approach to helping people bargain is based on the same logic. The difference is that its highest goal in terms of attraction is not accuracy, but maximizing traffic. Most people who help bargain do so because of strong relationships, and most Pinduoduo users do not mind using strong relationships in exchange for discounts. Therefore, using "help me bargain" as an attraction for customers to enter the market is extremely suitable for this group of people.

This model has more room for design, but because it does not take dissemination as a prerequisite for conversion, the cost requirements are relatively high. After all, for every conversion, a subsidy must be given.

Template for beginners, DIY for advanced players. As the saying goes, three gives birth to all things. Taking these three driving forces as the starting point of fission closed-loop design, I believe there will be many more ingenious ideas.

IV. Conclusion

Source: Operation Dog Oliver