How to create a viral effect to increase conversion rate?

When people are exposed to an explosive amount of information in their daily lives, how to make content stand out, create a viral effect, and thereby increase conversion rates is a problem that many platforms urgently need to solve.

This can be reflected in the recruitment positions. Many platforms have a strong demand for growth-related positions.

In fact, achieving viral growth requires high-quality ideas and appropriate means, and there are rules to follow.

1. If the product itself does not have viral characteristics, how to create viral content?

Every product operator is burdened with KPIs, and everyone hopes that their products will have viral qualities, so that work pressure will be reduced.

But in fact, many products do not have such characteristics. So, can they not be spread virally?

Online personal finance software Mintel grew to 1.5 million users within two years before being sold to Intuit for $170 million.

There are countless competitors in Minter's market, including Visabo, an online financial management platform established a year earlier. Many of these competitors are backed by powerful large banks or venture capital companies, but Minter stands out.

In fact, in the markets where Mintel operates, most people are not very happy to talk about personal finance issues.

To gain a foothold in this crowded and challenging market, Mintel took a creative approach to marketing and leveraged three different recommendation algorithms to drive awareness and engage customers: Google search results, social news aggregation , and the iTunes App Store .

In each case, Mintel strategically optimized its operating strategy based on the mechanisms of these platforms.

1. Minter’s Google Strategy

After figuring out how to optimize Google search results, Minter realized that people weren’t going to Google to look for “personal finance software.” Instead, Minter thinks people are more likely to use words that are close to the problem they're having, like "property help."

Minter started a financial advice blog long before launching budget management software. When people search for information on this, they find helpful content about budget management and personal finance articles written by members of the Mintel team to encourage readers to get their finances in order.

These articles are useful to customers and are also important clues that point them to Minter services: when Minter takes steps to write articles related to the topics that users search for, the company also ensures that these articles are helpful to visitors, whether or not they ultimately become Minter users.

Mintel works hard to ensure that its relevant content is easily searchable. Many businesses consider this type of search to be the core of their business and worthy of investment.

2. Social News Aggregation

Through unremitting efforts, Minter's blog has become one of the top-ranked personal finance blogs online.

Jason Putorti, former chief designer at Minter, told KISS Metrics, an internet analytics provider: “Our app doesn’t have strong virality, but our content does.”

In fact, Minter’s content was so viral that it was shared on large social news aggregator sites. These websites determine the exposure of articles based on user votes, and an article that eventually appears on their homepage is very important in contributing to traffic .

After the Minter team discovered this traffic source, they began to study the content that spread well and create more similar content.

3. Apps from the iTunes App Store

In mid-2008, more than a year after the iPhone was launched, Minter began developing its mobile phone strategy.

Aaron Forth, Mintel's vice president of product, said: "It wasn't an obvious choice to go into mobile at the time because all of Mintel's revenue at the time came from individual users visiting the Mintel website."

However, a few years later, 20% of users accessed Mintel only through their mobile phones, and most people bound their Mintel accounts to their mobile phones. When Mint decided to launch a mobile app , due to limited resources, it initially only made an app for the iOS platform.

Less than a year later, after being acquired by Intuit, the company launched an Android app.

In a speech at the South by Southwest conference, Aaron announced that their initial goal was to become one of the top three apps in the free finance field - they recognized the importance of ranking high to success, just like they had previously said that ranking high on Google search results was important to success.

Minter successfully created a popular app that brought in significant new users. As of 2011, 20% of registered users came from mobile apps, and most users bound their accounts to their phones.

This leads to an important conclusion about this process:

In most cases, if you find a platform and start the optimization process before “everyone” knows about it, you have a lot of opportunities to drive breakthrough growth strategies. The chances of success cannot be underestimated if you explore some channels when they are not yet fully mature.

Therefore, when you take over a product that seems unlikely to become viral, don’t worry. You can leverage the power of the platform to create a product with viral content.

2. Find users who are not users

1. Provide content to make it easy to share

An early catalyst for YouTube's rapid growth was its ability to leverage the MySpace platform in a variety of ways. Of course, the key factor at the beginning was that MySpace authors wanted the ability to upload YouTube videos to their own sites.

Next, let other MySpace authors who visit the site that have already loaded the YouTube video link know that they can do the same.

Although MySpace is no longer as popular as it once was, this principle still applies to various other social platforms. As shown in the picture below, under each YouTube video, there is a sharing option that allows you to share the video to 13 third-party platforms with a simple click.

Screenshot of YouTube sharing options

Hotmail takes a slightly different approach by adding a note to the bottom of every outgoing email. Below the default signature, there is a message stating that the email was sent from a Hotmail account and a link for the recipient to sign up for a free Hotmail account.

This strategy was incredibly successful and made Hotmail one of the first internet companies to achieve viral growth.

In fact, early investor Steve Jarvison wrote an article on the website of his venture capital firm about the power of this marketing technique.

He said of Hotmail:

A clickable URL (Uniform Resource Locator) link is included in every outbound message sent by Hotmail users to promote their web-based mailbox.

This contains a key element of viral marketing : as long as every customer uses its product, he or she will become its involuntary salesperson.

Steve compared the techniques used by Hotmail with those of its competitor Juno. By comparing the marketing budgets of the two companies, he found that Hotmail gained 12 million users in 18 months with a marketing budget of $50,000, while Juno gained much fewer users than Hotmail with a budget of $20 million through traditional advertising.

No one could have predicted the growth that Hotmail achieved at the time, and the company became the first great example of how easy it was for a product to go viral as barriers to adoption fell on the Internet.

3. Through cash or bonus

1. Reward users

At the beginning of the platform's establishment, the online payment and transfer platform Pay Pal would reward $10 to new registered users and users who invited this user.

While there were people who gamed the system (people created multiple email addresses to sign up and invite people, earning over $20 per account), this strategy did catalyze early growth for the company, as co-founder Peter Thiel said:

On the PayPal platform, our initial users were only 24 people, all of whom worked at PayPal.

Acquiring users through banner ads has proven to be too costly. However, giving money directly to users who signed up, and then giving them more money when they invited their friends to sign up, has allowed us to achieve significant growth.

This strategy cost us $20 per additional user, but it also gave us a 7% daily growth rate, which meant that our number of users almost doubled every 10 days.

After four or five months, we had a ton of users and a real opportunity to build a great company by enabling them to transfer small amounts of money, a service that would generate far more revenue than the cost of adding users.

Another example of using cash to reward users is the online cloud storage company Dropbox.

In a 2010 speech, the company's founder and CEO Drew Houston demonstrated that they used PayPal's referral program to incentivize word-of-mouth marketing, which ultimately drove Dropbox's viral growth.

As background information, it is worth pointing out that after the product was launched in September 2008, the company tried many traditional marketing techniques to increase users, including launching a public relations campaign and placing pay-per-click ads on Google.

Unfortunately, Drew explained that a $99 product would cost $233-388 in customer marketing fees, which was clearly unsustainable.

However, Dropbox's core customers really like their product, and they tell their friends about it. This was key to the company’s subsequent 14-month “epiphany period,” which optimized growth by rewarding people — in the form of expanded free capacity — for sharing documents after signing up and for accepting documents from their friends.

After the launch of this optimized new referral program, it brought in 60% of new registered users and "a sustained monthly growth rate of 15% to 20%."

4. Optimize services for the most valuable users

Often your most loyal users are also the ones who refer the most new users. With this in mind, sometimes you need to consider introducing features that help optimize the experience for your most valuable users and make the initial interaction as simple as possible.

After its initial launch in September 2006, Facebook made regular improvements to its interactive features, but the groundbreaking change was the News Feed, which introduced updates in reverse chronological order to those who were connected to each other on Facebook.

This feature has been used by services such as RSS ( Really Simple Syndication) readers, which allow users to push the latest content published by blogs and other media websites. Facebook's News Feed can be said to have brought the arrival of a standard interactive paradigm for social network updates.

Unfortunately, that wasn't something Facebook's roughly 8 million student user base normally wanted to share at the time. Many of them quickly decided to organize protests to let Facebook know of their dissatisfaction.

Time magazine wrote an article about this the week the feature launched:

Since Tuesday, the day the new feature was launched, several groups have emerged on Facebook opposing News Feed. The largest group, with 284,000 members, is called Students Against Facebook News Feed (official petition to Facebook).

The group was created by Ben Parr, a junior at Northwestern University, who logged onto Facebook that morning and was disgusted by the feature. Pal quickly set up a meeting and created a group, told a few friends about it, and then walked away from his computer.

A few hours later, he returned to his computer and found that the number of members had reached 13,000, and it had been growing steadily throughout the day. By 2 p.m., the number soared to 100,000 - at this time, Pal announced that the recruitment of members was over.

Interestingly, the fact that a group on Facebook grew so quickly without any ads or promotion is a good example of how effective the new “activity-based” interactions on Facebook are.

No need to search for Pal's profile to find the group he created; everyone who joins the group will quickly send the group's updates to their friends in the form of dynamic messages. This gave Facebook’s News Feed team further confidence that the new UI paradigm was on the right track.

5. Use existing connections to extend

It’s easy to overlook the fact that sometimes people need to be quickly reminded of who exactly they want to invite. Because such links are built into digital services like Facebook and Twitter, we find this to be true.

In 2004, less than a quarter of new LinkedIn users wrote down their friends’ email addresses and invited them to join the social network. This obviously severely limits the expansion of social networks. So the LinkedIn team created an Outlook plugin that automatically checks new users’ contact information for potential invitations.

This feature is very popular, with 7% of new users using it, and the number of invitations sent by new users has increased by 30%.

It’s easy to think of the social connections on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, but this feature is a good reminder that there are many more social connections in less obvious digital storage, such as email and phone address books.

So how can we make the act of inviting other users more “gamified” to increase users’ motivation to attract new users on their own?

The term "gamification" has become popular in recent years. The definition given by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is:

(as a task) the process of adding a game or game-like element to something to encourage participation.

Many companies have been trying to use material incentives to promote sales, such as giving customers redemption coupons that can be redeemed for free prizes or discounted services on their next purchase.

However, this type of incentive became a must-have recommendation by most corporate management consultants 10 years ago. In fact, one major analyst firm released a report stating that “70% of the Global 2,000 companies have at least one gamified application.”

This strategy can certainly be a must-have, but you can also consider incentivizing your customers to do other things, such as recommending your product to people they know, so that those people can also become your customers.

LinkedIn has demonstrated a unique approach in this regard, and many professionals have accepted its motivational approach. Over the years, the company has found many interesting ways to incentivize people to complete their personal information. You may remember its strategy as making your profile "100 percent perfect."

The irony of this strategy is that the system obviously has no idea what a person’s complete professional profile looks like, but many people are encouraged to start completing the task, which in this case includes creating a LinkedIn profile.

6. Use data to make

1. Scientific decision

Since entering the digital age, it has become increasingly easier to produce massive amounts of data. When making decisions at work, people tend to rely more on finding answers from data. Before you start relying on data to make decisions, though, make sure you’re asking the right questions.

There was a classic marketing case in the 1970s, which occurred between the two cola giants: Coca-Cola and Pepsi .

Coca-Cola has always had an iconic bottle design that is highly recognizable and is a statement of Coca-Cola’s enviably strong brand .

Pepsi thought that people liked Coca-Cola more because they liked the bottle, so it decided to change that situation.

In 1970, John Sculley was hired as marketing director of PepsiCo. His first task was to develop a distinctive glass bottle to compete with Coca-Cola's 6.5-ounce container.

If John Sculley had not been a creative and curious person, he would have certainly repeated the mistakes of his predecessors and ended up on the road to failure: trying to design a bottle as recognizable as the Coca-Cola 6.5-ounce glass bottle. He might do the following:

1. Design a new 6.5 oz bottle;
2. Conduct consumer surveys;
3. It was found that consumers still prefer Coca-Cola's design;
4. Go back to step one until you are fired or switched to another project.

John did design a new Pepsi bottle and took the bottle out for consumer research. As Pepsi gave away more drinks and got feedback from people who were willing to become testers in exchange for free Pepsi drinks, John discovered something interesting: all the Pepsi drinks were being drunk.

Only then did he realize what the real problem was. Instead of designing a new 6.5-ounce bottle, Sculley thought it might make more sense to design a larger bottle, which would also avoid the fierce competition in the small-sized cola market.

In this way, PepsiCo will increase its profits because consumers consume more of its beverages, which will increase the company's profits, and customers will get more of what they want in a larger bottle.

He invented the 2-liter beverage bottle. In addition to allowing consumers to buy larger quantities of beverages, the bottle will also appear more frequently in supermarkets such as Walmart because it is made of plastic rather than glass.

Before this, Walmart had never stocked Coca-Cola because it was difficult for it to store the fragile glass products. An article published in Business Management Journal mentioned that Sculley, then 30 years old, persuaded retail legend Sam Walton to sell Pepsi at Walmart.

"Mr. Walton, this is our new Pepsi drink in a non-breakable package, and we think it will be perfect for sale in your supermarket," said Sculley.

Then he deliberately dropped the bottle on the ground. Walton thought that would be a mess. But when the bottle bounced gently from the ground and rolled some distance on the ground without any damage, Walton was shocked.

"What is this bottle made of?" Walton asked in surprise. “This was the beginning of our most successful marketing campaign ,” Sculley said.

Scarry used data to help him make decisions, but he didn't let the data make decisions for him. He uses his own judgment to complement the facts presented to him by the data.

If he had been data-driven , he might have gone down a dead end and ended up selling nothing more than PepsiCo beverages.

But Sculley’s innovations in using data to turn PepsiCo into a giant ultimately helped him land the job as Apple’s CEO.

When you want to promote a new product or service, your existing customers can be one of your most important engines of growth. Because recommendations from acquaintances are often more credible. Then we need to consider reducing the various obstacles that customers may encounter when making recommendations, and use different interactive methods for different promotional content.

Source: Noteman