18 most classic user growth operation cases on the Internet

Part 1: Growth Hacking and Related Concepts

1. Growth Hacking

The term "growth hacker" originated in Silicon Valley. It refers to the use of data-driven , refined operations , focusing on user needs, digging deep into user psychology, looking for points that allow users to spread spontaneously, using creativity, bypassing restrictions, and achieving rapid growth with little effort at almost zero cost.

For example, Dropbox, the world's largest cloud storage platform, has made great use of this concept.

Case 1: Dropbox Marketing : How to be so popular despite so many shortcomings

If you don't want to see the link, let me briefly explain that if you use an invitation link when signing up for Dropbox, both you and the inviter will get an additional 250MB of space. Or if you post a status on social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, saying why you like Dropbox, you will get an additional 128MB of space. This is a very simple but very typical case of growth hacking.

2. AARRR Conversion Funnel Model

A AR RR is the life cycle of a product, which describes the depth of user engagement behavior at different stages, namely: Acquisition (acquiring users), Activation (stimulating activity), Retention (improving retention ), Revenue (increasing revenue), and Referral (spreading recommendations). It is called the funnel model because it can identify the problem through the number of user conversions between layers, that is, the conversion rate.

The value of growth hacking is based on the funnel model. By continuously optimizing product strategies, it can reduce unnecessary losses in these five links, improve the conversion efficiency between layers, and thus continuously expand the quantity and quality of the user group. ——Fan Bing

Part 2: Get users 1. Screen your seed users

Seed users determine the early atmosphere of the product and can even influence its direction. Be patient and careful to find the right users in the right channels . At the same time, be wary of spam users. If you are not careful, they will not only disrupt the community atmosphere, but also affect the startup team's judgment of the real needs of target users .

Case 2: How did Tinder become successful in its early days?

If you still don't want to see the link, let me briefly explain that Tinder is a dating app for young people. In the early days, co-founder Martin sent the Tinder demo to the 600 most popular acquaintances in the Los Angeles party circle, attracting a group of young and beautiful long-term online users. Soon, Tinder was seeing tens of thousands of match interactions per day. Later, Martin flew to various universities, first inviting sorority members to use Tinder, and then recruiting male fraternities. Soon, the number of Tinder users increased exponentially.

2. Add social wings

Mature social platforms such as WeChat , Weibo, and Facebook contain rich user information, relationship chains, and behavioral information. In particular, for middle-aged and elderly users who only have one WeChat app on their phones, there is a lot of traffic that has yet to be tapped. If there is an opportunity to access a third-party social networking platform, or to go viral with the permission of the platform and dig deep into the relationship chain, it will undoubtedly give wings to growth.

Case 3: WeChat social relationship chain from WeChat red envelopes

This case analyzes several communication relationships in WeChat, such as forwarding, private chat, group chat, and sharing, based on the communication reach, opening rate, and communication efficiency.

3. Parasitizing on mature fathers

In the early stages of a startup, growth hackers often use tricks such as grabbing data from mature platforms and using it for their own benefit, or parasitizing on mature products and intercepting traffic.

For example, when Microsoft officially announced the end of its space homepage service, NetEase Blog announced the launch of a "one-click moving" migration channel before Sina took action. Later, NetEase Blog's moving service also supported moving to QQ Space, Sina Blog , etc.

Case 4: NetEase Blog’s “One-click Migration” Service

These include the "third-party mailbox collection service" launched by QQ Mail; and grabbing girl avatars from Changba and using them as robot avatars when cold-starting a dating app to fool male users. These are all typical cases of "borrowing chickens to lay eggs."

4. Tell us your story

Stories are the core of content marketing . Distributing good stories to the right people can attract traffic , cultivate potential users, and convert potential users into product consumers through natural entrances at the right time.

This is an H5 that went viral in January. It has characters, conflicts, surprises, and popular stories. Besides taking into account all the elements that make up a good story, it also accurately captures the pain points of the user groups who use Shenzhou Private Car, the pressure of white-collar workers, and the bitterness of office workers...

Case 5: Michael Wang was late for his flight this morning

Therefore, in addition to the basic elements of a story: characters, conflict, surprise, and popularity, it is also necessary to take into account the characteristics of online communication:

a． Know who your target audience is

What is more meaningful than click-through rate is conversion rate . Don’t do meaningless publicity.

b. Build an engine for continuous content output

Forming a fixed brand persona can help pave the way for subsequent stories and create suspense after one or two viral campaigns.

c. Write a sensational headline

A/B testing on a small scale can often identify more appealing headlines.

d. Encourage audience participation and interaction

Like to receive red envelopes, collect to get rewards, share to see the full story, and even leave obvious story loopholes for readers to complain and discuss, thereby causing secondary dissemination on a larger scale.

Case 6: How do you evaluate China Merchants Bank’s advertisement “No matter how big the world is, it’s not bigger than a plate of scrambled eggs with tomatoes”?

e. Choose the right publishing channel

Choosing the right channel means choosing a more compatible user group, which also means that your story is more likely to be spread and loved.

5. Optimize your distribution channels

a． Search Engine Optimization

Commonly used search engine optimization methods include increasing keyword density and weight, increasing the number of long-tail keywords , establishing external links, optimizing page structure, etc.

Generally speaking, building a clear and intuitive page structure, filling it with high-quality content that is relevant to the topic, maintaining regular updates, and obtaining link recommendations from high-authority websites as much as possible can achieve better search engine rankings. A concept similar to SEO is Search Engine Marketing ( SEM ), which usually involves paid inclusion and purchasing rankings. ——Fan Bing

b. App Store Optimization

• Apple will give weight to the rankings of newly launched apps or newly updated apps. Some people speculate that an old app needs 20,000 downloads to reach the Nth place on the list, while a newly launched app only needs 5,000. That is to say, try to push downloads as much as possible in the first one or two days after going online, and update as much as possible, which will help optimize rankings. So we set up an activity where we would double the scout fee on the day a new product goes online.
• Although user ratings in the app store are critical, be careful not to force users, as this will often backfire.

The way that news client Circa guides users to rate is very interesting. They observe and record the frequency of users using the product. Only those "active users" who have used the product for more than 3 days and have started the product more than 10 times will become the targets of their guidance. Instead of using pop-ups that block users’ normal operations, they gently asked these users “Do you like this product?” in the news information flow to minimize the interruption. If the user selects "Like", Circa's next step is to ask "Are you willing to go to the App Store to rate us?"; when the user clicks to confirm again, he will be directed to the download page of the App Store. In this case, the user is very likely to leave a positive review. On the contrary, if the user clicks "no" at any stage, Circa will invite the user to submit feedback and tell the team about the confusion encountered during use.

• When submitting an App, the App title, company name, and keywords actually have an impact on the search result ranking. Therefore, these words should be studied carefully, and the hottest and most relevant words should be filled in.

• The Chinese word segmentation capability of the App Store is not perfect, so many apps pile up irrelevant hot keywords (such as QQ, Taobao , and Dianping) to improve their search rankings.

Case 7: How to make users willingly comment and rate the App ?

6. Remove barriers to product downloads

Provide your products as soon as possible when users need them. Anticipate all possible obstacles that may hinder users from downloading and remove them in advance!

• Browser jump: Take Zhihu as an example. When you see a Zhihu article in the browser, you need to detect whether the user's mobile phone has the Zhihu client installed. If so, a jump entrance will be given. If not, a download entrance can be given without affecting the user's reading.
• Browser search: Novice users will not download apps from the app market . When they need them, they will search directly in the browser. Although there will be download portals provided by the app store in the browser, these app stores will often bundle your app with the download, and will not even allow users to download before installing their client. So in addition to launching on several mainstream app stores, if conditions permit, try to launch on your own homepage and put the APK for users to download and install directly.

7. Starve your target users

Domestic Internet products, especially software, rarely use hunger marketing. This is related to the domestic culture of plagiarism. Once an APP comes out, a large number of similar products will come out. They are highly substitutable and have low barriers, so once hunger marketing is used, all users will run away.

In the early days, foreign software such as Mailbox and Robinhood implemented a queuing system where you had to fill in your email address, register, get a number, and queue up. Doing so will firstly relieve the pressure on the server, secondly increase user expectations and improve attention, and thirdly charge those users who are unwilling to wait and are willing to pay.

But every advantage has its disadvantages. Doing so will greatly increase the user's usage cost and raise the user's psychological expectations of the product. Therefore, any slight reduction in product experience will bring a lot of negative feedback and negative voices to the market, which will backfire and bring disaster to the user.

Case 8: This brokerage firm favored by Google has started to use hunger marketing in China

8. Make your product entrance everywhere

On a high-traffic platform, on a suitable page and in an appropriate location, usually a blog or personal homepage that allows users to produce content on their own, you can place a jump entrance to your own APP or website. The presentation form can be A/B tested. It may be a small widget, or a banner, or even a slogan like "Haven't you started using XXX yet?" This is a good way to attract new users while promoting your own brand.

To give an interesting example, before 2005, the largest social networking site in the United States was MySpace, which attracted a large group of teenagers to chat and talk about everything. However, the mainstream video sites at the time were afraid that MySpace would dominate the market and were unwilling to divert traffic to it, so they banned the interface for sharing to MySpace. However, a little-known video website, despite the world's outrage, not only did not ban it, but also encouraged users to share videos on MySpace, providing convenient embed codes and one-click sharing buttons. This move brought a large number of users and return traffic to the video website in the early stages. This video website is YouTube . Most of the current Miaopai , Pear Video, and Kankan News on Weibo are also following this path. Only with traffic can they be exposed quickly, and only with exposure can a brand effect be generated, which can feed back traffic and thus bring about various subsequent profit models driven by large traffic.

9. It’s time to write a promotional report

Excellent copywriting should make readers feel like they are riding a slide, that is, sliding smoothly along the track you laid in advance, completing the entire journey and reaching the end. The entire function of the title, subtitle, and title image is only to get readers to read the first sentence of the text; as for the core value of the first sentence of the text, it is to get readers to continue reading the second sentence, and so on. Throughout the entire reading process, you should provide readers with enough information without being too lengthy, and at the same time make your readers say "yes", so that they can resonate with your sincere and real statements when reading the copy. —Advertiser Joseph Sugarman

Promotional reports are slightly different from soft articles. Soft articles focus on stories and try to remove all commercial and advertising elements. Promotional reports focus on products, briefly explaining what needs the product meets for users, telling the development story behind the product in an emotional way, introducing promotional activities in a rational way, and finally providing a download jump entrance.

The distribution channels of soft articles and promotional reports are also slightly different. Soft articles are mostly found in the high-traffic habitats of each target user. The stories are told wherever the users are. For example, if you want to find literary youths, you go to Douban to tell stories. If you want to find the middle class and intellectuals, you go to Zhihu. Promotional reports on Internet products are mostly found in various technology media, such as 36kr , iFanr, and Zhixiaochengxu.

There are usually two tips for writing publicity reports:

• Brainstorming : Find out the priority of the entire narrative, eliminate the dross and retain the essence, cut out the redundant content, and refine the points that are interesting.
• Planning: brief overview → topic events → pain points and selling points → features → team interviews → future plans → reward activities → conversion guidance

Case 9: When paid Q&A meets WeChat social networking: Will it be more powerful than Zhihu and Wukong Q&A?

This case is a small program similar to Fenda . They posted a soft article on the Zhizhi Program website. The article is quite readable and is a very typical and regular promotional report.

10. Try to acquire users offline

In addition to online promotional channels, some products are more suitable for ground promotion due to the characteristics of their target population and local features. When considering ground marketing methods, startups should comprehensively weigh regional characteristics, group penetration, and accessibility, and use the most cost-effective method to reduce costs and improve results.

• Regional characteristics, such as shared bicycles that “solve the last mile problem”, are more important for first- and second-tier cities than for fourth- and fifth-tier cities.
• Group penetration: For example, Tinder and TanTan , college students should be more accepting than migrant workers and white-collar workers.
• Accessibility. For example, it is easier to advertise an APP on the WiFi connection page in a public area and provide a download entrance than to distribute flyers to promote the APP.

Part 3: Stimulating Activity 1. Double Viral Cycle in Spreading

Let’s take LinkedIn as an example.

a. When a new user registers, an email inviting the user to register will be sent to the user's friends. Through A/B testing, we found that the maximum invitation conversion rate can be achieved when the number of invitations is 4.

b. Import the user's email contacts through the plug-in.

c. Based on the user’s current company and position, other colleagues in the user’s company will be recommended by default. New registrants only need to simply check the box to immediately establish connections with these potential colleagues. Based on the previous companies and positions entered by the user, old colleagues are recommended by default, and a simple timeline of the user's career is sorted out.

The entire viral transmission design above is called the "Double Viral Loop" - new registered users continuously bring more users, and old users will come back from time to time to check, process requests, or actively initiate friend invitations. Both cycles occur simultaneously.

2. Iterative A/B testing

During the product design and development process, the team often faces choices: red or green, copy A or copy B. Traditional solutions are made by making decisions based on intuition, but they usually cannot represent the target users' usage habits in real scenarios. The most effective way to solve this problem is A/B testing.

The so-called A/B testing, in simple terms, is to provide two different alternative solutions (such as two order pages) for the problem you want to investigate, and then let some users use solution A and other users use solution B. Finally, the optimal solution is determined through data observation and comparison. ——Fan Bing

• Preset evaluation indicators, control single variables, find representative user groups, and avoid seasonal influences: First, determine the core indicators of the team, daily active users? Conversion rate? Acquisition cost? Avoid major holidays and hot events that may have an impact on the APP other than variables, identify two common user groups, conduct A/B testing, and choose the most cost-effective solution.
• The difference between APP and website: Website can be modified and used immediately, without the tedious online process of updating and releasing. Therefore, compared with websites, the A/B testing of APP is more limited. Google Experiment was announced at the 2015 Google I/O Developer Conference, providing developers with an entry point for A/B testing. Although Google is blocked in China, there are still many excellent third-party data platforms that provide A/B testing services. Of course, another method is to introduce H5, let the server send content to users point-to-point, and only use the client as a container to conduct A/B testing quickly and conveniently.
• Don't be superstitious about A/B testing: First, for a startup team, the time cost of A/B testing is too extravagant. For trivial front-end experiences such as a button or a color, what is more important is the solidity of the content and the stability of product operation. Don't put the cart before the horse. Secondly, sometimes we are too obsessed with A/B testing and ignore the real needs of users. We blindly trust the data, which often leads to vulgar products and title-based articles . As a product designer, we still need to retain a certain degree of subjectivity.

Case 10: A/B testing at Airbnb

3. Lower the user threshold

Users are lazy and stupid. As a product person, you must do everything you can to keep the product accessible, lower the threshold for use, and ensure users use it again.

• WeChat: In the era of smart phones, users are very sensitive to traffic, so WeChat has launched low-traffic voice and video services. Only one-third of the traffic can be used to send voice messages of the same quality as talkbox, and only one-quarter of the traffic can be used to send videos of the same quality as WhatsApp.
• WiFi Master Key: Due to the closed nature of the iOS system, in order to obtain the system WiFi hotspot list, users can only manually enter the name of the WiFi hotspot, which is almost an anti-human user experience . The WiFi Master Key method is to let users take a screenshot in this interface, and then automatically read it through OCR (optical character recognition) technology to identify the WiFi hotspot in the screenshot and finally complete the connection. This is a very geeky method, but it reduces the threshold for users to remember and manually enter hotspot names.

Case 11: 7 years, 64 iterations, 1 billion monthly active users, how did WeChat achieve this?

4. Give users some sweetness

The direct effect of subsidies is to attract new customers, but to a greater extent it is to cultivate user habits and build user awareness of the brand. When subsidies are no longer available, it is hoped that users who have established brand awareness will still use the product out of demand.

Subsidies come in many forms and formats:

• Cash back, consumer vouchers, and coupons with a limited validity period after consumption
• Sharing red envelopes based on social relationships (a small tip: the less likely users are to use the product, the bigger the subsidy red envelopes they will get in the group, which will encourage these users to download and use the product)

Case 12: Let’s talk about the subsidy strategies of O2O and e-commerce

In this case, the author divides subsidies into three types from a macro perspective: acceleration type, long-tail type driven by hot products, and ecological type.

Acceleration type refers to products with high-frequency demand, which capture the market by quickly subsidizing users, cultivating repeat customers, changing customers' existing habits, and allowing them to experience the convenience of new products. The acceleration type is not suitable for low-frequency products, because low frequency means that users will use it once and leave, and they don’t know when they will use it again, and they are likely to forget the usage habits they have just developed.

Hot-selling products drive the long-tail type, which means selling some low-cost products at zero profit to create hot-selling products, increase user trust, and drive users to consume other unpopular, long-tail, high-priced products in the store.

Ecological type: usually refers to a market where both supply and demand are insufficient or unbalanced, and "subsidies" can play a very important role. Help regulate the supply and demand balance in the market and stabilize the ecology. For example, in the early days of Didi Chuxing , due to the small number of drivers, it provided subsidies to drivers to drive more users to join the driver team.

5. Games change the world - user growth system

The product is promoted through "gamification", and the most direct manifestation is the user's growth system.

The growth system is a structure that quantifies user behaviors , accumulates the sum of the results and uses it as a measure of user loyalty and contribution to the platform. It can also stimulate users to stay on the platform. The growth system is a means of operation, but in many cases it is the product manager who is responsible for planning and implementing it. There are many forms of growth systems, whether it is the most common points, growth values, virtual currency, membership levels, or achievements, medals, or even hidden conditions and restrictions.

As for how to set up a win-win user growth system, it can not only induce users to use the product repeatedly, but also stratify user behavior to ensure the refined operation of the operation team. Here I recommend two cases, one about games and the other about the user growth system of Internet products.

Case 13: Game addiction mechanism: How do games make people addicted?

Games can be addictive. The most common saying now is that games allow users to experience a state of flow. When people reach a state of flow, they will feel a high sense of excitement and fulfillment. There are three necessary conditions for flow:

• Clear and achievable goals.
• Appropriate obstacles: If the obstacles are too high, users will feel anxious; if they are too low, users will feel bored. Obstacles that are neither too high nor too low are the key to a game.
• Instant feedback: The sound of an attack or the wails of the dead are the keys to keeping users addicted.

Case 14: The most comprehensive user growth system analysis in history, with 6 major cases

6. I, the robot - script automation operation

In the early stages of a product, there is no stable user base or community atmosphere. It is often not so easy to establish equal and friendly signals between people through trust. Once a certain scale is reached and a herd effect is produced, it will be much easier to get people to undergo certain behavioral changes on this basis. If we compare it with real life, we often hear that when a real estate project is launched, they will hire some extras to queue up to create the illusion of hot sales, thereby attracting real consumers and raising the selling price. This is the principle. The community atmosphere in the early stages of a product can be driven by the team’s own operations. ——Fan Bing

In community and dating products, people come here to find people and content, so the initial coldness will undoubtedly make the cold start worse. The common practice for dating products is to use some robots or hire some part-time workers to impersonate users to get through the cold periods. Therefore, writing scripts to develop "robots" that automatically simulate users to perform actions on behalf of the operations team has become a common tactic.

In content communities, industry bigwigs are often invited through funding or connections to contribute top content, which then attracts second-tier bigwigs to consume content, thereby continuing to contribute content, ultimately forming a situation of balanced supply and demand with users flocking to consume and bigwigs producing content.

However, using robots for automatic operation or falsifying the number of users should be done in moderation. Otherwise, if they are discovered, it will often greatly reduce the user experience and even bring negative comments in the market. For example: How serious is the falsification of the number of users on various live broadcast platforms ?

Part 4: Improving Retention

According to a survey by Bain & Company in the United States, in the business world, a 5% increase in customer retention rate means a 30% increase in company profits, and the probability of selling products to old customers is three times that of selling to new customers.

Real user growth refers to the difference between growth and churn. User retention is a concept proposed relative to lost users or dormant users. We usually divide the reasons for user churn into the following categories:

• There are program vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and poor user experience
• Users are frequently harassed and the community atmosphere is poor
• The popularity of topic products has declined
• There are better alternatives
• Force majeure factors such as game clearance, device loss, etc.

The retention rate is a common indicator to measure the amount of user loss:

• Next-day retention rate: You can find out the quality changes of new product versions and the advantages and disadvantages of channels at the first time;
• 7-day retention rate: It reflects the retention status of users after completing a complete experience cycle;
• 30-day retention rate: It can reflect the stability after a version iteration and help determine whether the product evolution direction is reasonable.

In addition to the retention rate in the time dimension, channel retention is also a very important operational indicator. By comparing the retention rates of users acquired through various channels, we can discover the best delivery channels for our products. Focusing operations on channels with high retention rates can achieve twice the result with half the effort.

According to Alex Schultz's experience, if you are starting an e-commerce website, as long as the retention rate is maintained at 20% to 30%, you will basically not be doing too badly; if you are a social media and the monthly retention rate of the first batch of users is less than 80%, then don't expect to grow big. As for measuring whether a newly launched third-party game on the Facebook platform can obtain more than 1 million DAU (this is the minimum standard for determining whether most new games will have a future), there is a so-called "40-20-10" rule, which means that if you want the game's DAU to exceed 1 million, the new user's next-day retention rate should be greater than 40%, and the 7-day retention rate and 30-day retention rate must be greater than 20% and 10% respectively. For mobile applications, the three types with the highest retention rates are information reading, social communication, and system tools , and the retention rates can stabilize at around 10% after 4 months.

The book Growth Hacker mentions the following specific practices to improve retention rate:

1. Optimize product performance

Product performance is the intrinsic strength of a product and an important indicator of whether user needs are well met. Although Internet products emphasize equality for all, and the products used by the president and the beggar are exactly the same, external factors, such as the construction of basic network infrastructure, the differences in personal mobile devices, the signal strength of the individual's location, etc., often cause product performance to be reduced to a certain extent.

• The first solution is to adapt to local conditions, serve the people best, and conduct on-site experience to find out the incompleteness of the product in certain regions or among certain user groups, and then make improvements. For example, in India, most people are still using feature phones, with low data traffic and slow Internet access. In order to develop the Indian market, Facebook not only customized the Indian version of Facebook, but also optimized the user experience in terms of picture size, module startup order, offline downloads, etc., to ensure that Indian people can use Facebook well even under poor network conditions and within a very small data traffic range. At the same time, it launched Express WiFi services for the Indian people locally.

Case 15: After the free Internet was banned, Facebook is going to launch a paid Internet service in India

• The second solution is lossy service, which, as the name suggests, refers to the deliberate output of services with some loss in quality, with the aim of sacrificing this in exchange for optimization of other aspects (speed, stability, probability of successful execution). For example, in some cases, we don’t have to load all the content all-in. We can load one at a time, or limit ourselves to satisfying the core functions of the product. Especially during peak user hours, when the server is congested, we may face the embarrassment of “Everything or Nothing”. Therefore, when congestion occurs, we must prioritize the operation of core functions. Non-core functions must not affect core functions. At the same time, when conditions permit, the fewer features sacrificed, the better. Of course, using various forms of preloading to shorten the user's psychological waiting time is a neutral approach.

Case 16: Interaction Basics: Summary of APP Loading Status Types

2. Guide new users to quickly adapt to the product

If it is confirmed that the user needs are real, the product performance is stable. For tool products, the biggest obstacle for users to get started is not knowing how to use it. For community products, the biggest obstacle for users is that they can't find people and content when they first arrive. This is also the time point when users most often churn. Therefore, a good new user guide can effectively prevent user loss.

For example, when you just sign up for Twitter, the official will recommend a group of users for you to follow based on your registration information, in case your timeline is empty and you can't scroll to any content. Twitter's design strategy has been adopted by many community products. Of course, guiding the use of tool products after the first launch is also a very effective method.

3. Design a wake-up mechanism

The wake-up mechanism usually refers to the mechanism designed by the product to recall lost users.

Before conducting a recall, it is necessary to conduct a feature analysis of users, determine user characteristics, and understand the reasons for user loss as much as possible. Then, based on the characteristics of the product itself and the characteristics of the lost users, develop corresponding content, such as Zhihu's "retention letters", JD.com 's coupons, and HC360's trading opportunities.

The specific awakening forms are as follows:

• EDM wake-up: Based on the reserved mailbox, an email is sent to the user. The content of the email usually involves coupon subsidies, product update notifications, high-quality content consistent with the product tone, friend dynamics, etc.
• Message push notification: For users who have enabled push permissions, push notifications are mandatory. While they have high returns and high wake-up rates, they also have high risks. According to data, for users who have not actively opened the client for a long time, the uninstall rate is the highest when push notifications arrive. Personalized push notifications may be a slightly safer solution: push the right content to the right user at the right time and in the right place.
• Mobile web pages wake up the app: We usually read some online web pages of Zhihu and listen to some online music of NetEase Cloud Music in the browser, and then see the words "Go to the app to listen to the song" or "Open the app to read the full content" at the top of the screen. In fact, these are all measures to guide users to wake up the app through mobile web pages.
• SMS wake-up: Relatively speaking, SMS wake-up is a relatively outdated wake-up method. Forced arrival is a disturbance to users and may even make them feel that their privacy has been leaked. Of course, if some innovative ways of playing can be proposed, the mandatory nature of SMS arrival can often become a sharp weapon. For example, the dating app Tantan has launched a service called "Anonymous Crush Text Messages". Through Tantan, you can anonymously send a love letter to the crush in your address book. If the other person also has a crush on you, the two of you can successfully match up and express your feelings to each other. Tantan has attracted a large number of users by leveraging the forced arrival feature of text messages, coupled with people's curiosity and desire for love.

Case 17: Are the secret love text messages on the TanTan app just a gimmick or is there really someone who has a crush on you?

Part 5: Increasing Income

1. Free model

Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, explained the free model in his 2009 book Free. He claimed that the free model was born from the Internet and was a remarkable ability to drive the cost of goods and services down to zero, meaning that the company's core services would never be charged.

Why is the free model so popular in the Internet industry? Especially among domestic users, who have almost no habit of paying for Internet products, this can be attributed to the following reasons:

• The marginal cost of Internet products is extremely low. As the cost of storage and bandwidth decreases year by year, once a product is developed and launched, there will be almost no additional cost. Simply put, it doesn't matter if one person uses it or one hundred million people use it. This is the basis for Internet products to be free. That’s why we see individual developers who develop various tool apps in order to prove themselves or cultivate their sentiments.
• Once the number of users of an Internet product reaches a certain level, the marginal cost will be further diluted. That is to say, even if the payment rate is very low, it will always be possible to obtain a large number of paying users by multiplying the extremely large base of users by the payment rate.

The easiest way to get 1 million paying people is to get 1 billion users - Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote

• The complete free nature of a few products has encouraged users' usage habits, and they naturally believe that free = Internet. From a psychological perspective, users naturally have an irresistible liking for "free", and at the same time have a great fear of "losing". Therefore, we can see that some products offer a trial first and then charge, cleverly taking advantage of the attraction of "free" to people and their aversion to "losing".
• The reason why "free" is more popular in the domestic market is roughly due to the imperfect copyright protection and credit system in the country, which has led to rampant plagiarism and copying, and there are piles of similar products on the same track. Once a product is charged, bad money will drive out good money, and users will tend to use free products of the same type, even if the experience is slightly reduced.

Here I recommend a highly voted answer on Zhihu about the free model, which explains a very classic theory: once the service provided by a merchant is free, you are no longer their customer, but their product.

Case 18: Is the “free” pricing model really good for users?

2. Profitability under the free model

• Value-added services (Freemium): In addition to ensuring that the basic needs of free users are met, premium services are then launched to charge fees, using 20% ​​of the money from paying users to cover 80% of the service costs for free users and achieve profitability. Typical examples include QQ membership, super membership in Tantan, etc.
• Cross-subsidy: games are free, props are charged; blades are free, razors are charged; low-cost popular products are used for free to attract traffic, and then profits are made through the matching products. The essence of cross-subsidy is that the complementarity of the two products must be strong enough to promote the sales of the other product by making one product free.
• Traffic monetization: Traffic itself is money. In addition to the most typical advertising, for example, Meilishuo ’s business is to direct traffic to Alibaba , promote product purchases, and earn kickbacks and commissions in the middle. Of course, bigger companies play bigger games. For example, Tencent uses social relationships in WeChat and QQ to direct traffic to its other products and build a larger ecosystem.

3. Premium services begin to charge for everything

Luoji Siwei 's Get APP fired the first shot in the domestic paid knowledge market . In the past two years, high-quality services and top content have become more and more "daring" to charge, and top users are less and less averse to charging. To a certain extent, "charging" has gradually become a label that helps users quickly identify high and low quality.

Providing the only option of paid services not only demonstrates your commitment to the quality of your product, but also indirectly reflects the general recognition of users. It conveys the confidence that "we can make money to support ourselves" in a silent manner, and it is also patting its chest to assure users who are willing to enter into a paid contract: we can continue to provide you with high-quality services. This gives people a sense of security. Of course, the premise of daring to cut off free services and only keep paid ones is that your product is good enough to attract a steady stream of customers to come and stay. If you fall into the demand trap or there are quality defects, you will cry. ——Fan Bing

4. When online payment loopholes occur

Online paid memberships or VIPs often have some inevitable bugs, which give some unscrupulous businesses an opportunity to take advantage. Therefore, there are often services on Taobao where you can buy Baidu wealth value for one cent and recharge QQ diamonds for one dollar. The loopholes are easy to fix and the bugs are easy to make up for, but improper handling of fake members who purchase "illegal services" often brings widespread negative voices. If you simply and roughly ban all illegal users, it will cause a large number of fans to turn against you. After all, these people have paid some money and expressed their sincere love for your value-added services. If we completely ignore these "illegal members" of users, it will also anger a large number of paying users who paid real money to purchase memberships.

In 2011, Tencent's QQ membership encountered a vulnerability crisis, and a large number of members were sold for 1 yuan on Taobao. When the bug was fixed, this is how Tencent handled "illegal users."

• Do not blame "illegal users": An activity page is pushed to "illegal users" with the title "What can I do to save you? My extinguished membership icon". There is a red penguin with an afro on the activity page, and the user is told: "Since you have not opened a membership, your membership icon has been extinguished at a certain time". The penguin has tears in its eyes, which arouses the user's emotional thinking.
• Provide reasonable compensation: Losing something you have already obtained is a very painful thing, not to mention you have paid some money for it. Reasonable compensation can eliminate the negative emotions brought about by this "loss" to a great extent. "The reason why these people are willing to spend 1 yuan to go to Taobao to "light up" their QQ membership icon shows that they really like the QQ membership service. Since price is the main factor affecting whether users purchase official paid services, it is better to convert them than to ban them." Tencent offered a 20% discount specifically for this group of "illegal users" to make up for the regret of removing their icons. According to relevant data, after the event ended, 15% of non-members were converted into member users.
• Provide conversion entry in time: seize the time when the "illegal user" icon is extinguished, quickly push the targeted activity page, put the discount information and reasons on the page, and do not wait for it to expire. The focus is to provide an obvious and easy-to-reach payment entrance to relight the member icon, and try to ensure that the payment threshold is low enough.

Tencent's crisis public relations is a good example of how to solve the problem when encountering a membership payment loophole. As a product person, you should assume that the user group is innocent at all times. Not blaming and guiding them is the only way to deal with bugs.

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

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