How to improve product stickiness and user retention?

Most low-frequency, rigid-demand products face the problem of low user retention . Users choose to leave immediately after a certain need is met in the product. When the demand arises next time, if the product lacks highlights/core resources, it is often difficult for them to come back, which will inevitably affect the order volume. Today we will analyze how to improve the stickiness and retention of such products.

1. The Stimulability of User Demand

When it comes to product operation , it is inseparable from user needs. Different products naturally have different user needs, and the operation strategies will also differ accordingly. Based on the dimension of "the stimulability of user needs", we roughly divide the needs into three categories:

1. Needs that don’t need to be stimulated

Most of them are rigid and high-frequency demands for life services. Users will spontaneously or even actively look for related products without much stimulation. Such as: takeaway, social , entertainment (video/news information), etc.

2. Stimulable Demand

Users themselves do not have such needs or the demand is not high, but it can be stimulated through some operational means. This type of product has many operating methods and a wide range. The most typical ones are e-commerce products, such as Tmall , which is dominated by operations. It gives you a reason to spend money almost every day and vigorously markets to promote users' desire to buy.

3. Unstimulated Demand

Users have no demand for the time being and will only use the product when demand arises. It should be emphasized that although most of them are rigid needs, such demand cannot be stimulated through operational means and will only appear when users spontaneously generate it.

House rental and medical products are very typical products that cannot stimulate demand. They have multiple factors such as rigid demand, low frequency, and uncontrollable. For house rental products, which have time attributes, the end of each year and graduation season can be used as key opportunities to grasp; for medical products, the time when users generate demand is often untraceable and difficult to grasp.

Therefore, from the perspective of user demand characteristics, for most low-frequency and rigid-demand products, it is difficult for technical operations to guide user behavior , but rather resources - whoever can get the core resources can capture the users. When medical products have expert appointments and rental platforms have good housing sources, it doesn't matter if the product is as difficult to use as 12306.

2. How to improve stickiness

For this kind of "unstimulating demand" product, if the promoters lack insights into the industry and target user groups, there will usually be a "new customer acquisition cliff" after the new customer acquisition activities. The effect and traffic of a new customer acquisition activity itself are actually quite good, but the number of users who are truly converted into the core services of the product (making appointments for house viewings, making appointments for renovations, medical consultations, etc.) is often bleak and falls off a cliff.

In fact, the reason is very simple. The users who are "pulled back" by attracting new users and promoting activation are often users who have no needs. This type of users can be said to be truly "see and leave". Therefore, improving the conversion of core services is a crucial step in improving user stickiness for products with low frequency demand.

In fact, we can establish a "strong guidance" between new user acquisition activities and core services to retain users. The positioning of this guidance is "to make users think of you when they have needs." As for what this guidance is, it depends on the specific positioning and resources of the product.

For "products that cannot stimulate demand", such guidance often has the following operational means, which can match different products and have different effects:

1. Points system

“Products that cannot stimulate demand” are mostly low-frequency products, and the point system has no inherent advantages. For example, the rental cycle is about once every two or three years. What is the point of letting users accumulate points? However, travel products rely on the flight mileage system of early airlines and have natural advantages. For example, Fliggy has borrowed this advantage and has achieved good results.

2. Content community

For medical products, it is a more natural approach to put content first and guide the product. Good examples include Ding Xiang Doctor’s tens of millions of fans and SoYoung’s WeChat public account , which has long been popularizing celebrity plastic surgery cases to attract attention. Another advantage of creating content is that it can also attract new users, which can be said to be a long-term way of making your presence felt in front of users. For community products, the patient group in Haodaifu can be said to be a typical example of how the community retains users.

3. Marketing activities

For products with paid requirements, marketing activities are also a good choice. Please note that the marketing activities here can easily fall into the misunderstanding of attracting new customers. The marketing activities mentioned here are not about attracting new users (as mentioned above, users cannot be attracted without demand), but about making users form a long-term awareness of "there are discounts here". The most typical and basic ones are things like discounted air tickets , discounted housing rentals, etc. However, it is difficult to achieve the desired effect through one or two events. Long-term subsidies and discounts may be required, which is a considerable expense for the company. Once the discount stops, users may be lost. Of course, you can make slight changes on this basis and add elements such as check-in and sharing.

4. Others

Different products have different attributes, so you can dig deeper into their own product features. For example, the time attribute of rental products is that there are two relatively large cycles every year, namely after the Chinese New Year and graduation. Carrying out concentrated marketing activities during these two cycles can also bring good conversions, rather than "doing something" every month.

3. How to improve retention

1. Increase user usage scenarios

The low-frequency and rigid-demand market requires us to explore and even create some scenarios to increase the reasons for users to use it. Taking renting a house as an example, renting a house itself is a low-frequency demand, but the house management after renting a house, such as the payment and deduction of water, electricity and gas bills, is much more high-frequency than renting a house. Exploring sufficiently high-frequency usage scenarios to increase stickiness or retention is a method that is currently used more frequently. However, creating scenarios requires product managers to have more courage and perseverance. This requires extremely high creative ability and strong insight to create a high-frequency scenario that can be accepted by users out of thin air.

For example: The initial functions of a real estate APP are only: personal butler, visitor invitation, mobile phone door opening, and mail order. Although these functions are very practical, they are not necessary for users.

For example, the door opening function with a mobile phone, in fact most owners use room cards. The APP has added a community function to guide users to complain, for example, whose dog poop is not cleaned up in time; where there are cigarette butts; or organize owners to participate in fun activities. In this way, through the participation of owners, the activity level is increased, and ultimately the retention rate of this low-frequency APP is improved.

2. Help users make choices faster

Taking the home improvement industry as an example, it is necessary to create a relatively standardized "explosive" series in the home improvement field with particularly strong personalization, and be able to fully control its upstream service providers and designers.

3. Help users make careful decisions

For example, Lagou.com specializes in online recruitment . For enterprises, recruiting online talents is very important. This is called prudent decision-making. This is the reason why many bosses and HRs like to use Lagou.com to find online talents. On the contrary, if you are looking for a cleaning service, just go to 58.com. When this is applied to the field of home decoration, the designer's professional talents must be brought into play. The designer must help the user make a careful decision based on the user's house and needs.

4. Help users avoid choice phobia

When we go out to eat, we always go to Dianping to find restaurants, but they have a huge amount of information and you have to search by category, which is really a headache. Therefore, websites like Enjoy and Chengmi that select limited-edition delicacies have an advantage. They help you make choices and pick out the best restaurants, and you just have to eat according to their recommendations. In this regard, the emergence of a small red book in the home decoration industry is enough.

So, although it is low frequency, as long as you are professional enough, vertical enough, and humane enough, and can help users achieve personalized matching quickly and accurately, you may be able to outperform those seemingly higher frequency products.

In summary, no matter what kind of product, the general direction of improving retention rate is inseparable from increasing the user value of the product, finding the reasons for user churn , and solving the problem of user churn. The strategy to improve retention is not to constantly add functions/PUSH to increase the burden on users, but to truly treat users as friends and find ways to provide them with better products and services, solve their pain points, and meet their needs.

The author of this article @朱葛君 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games