New ideas for attracting new users: active and passive user acquisition

The article mainly explains in depth and in a simple way the new ideas and new methods for attracting new customers from two aspects.

I have been in the Internet industry for many years and have witnessed the development of APP from the blue ocean to the red ocean, and now to the bloody ocean, especially the second half of the Internet that everyone is talking about now. Logically speaking, in the second half, the top priority should be monetization, but when communicating with industry partners, I found that the biggest and most pressing problem to be solved is still attracting new customers.

Like the students in the marketing department, they are always thinking about where to find high-quality and cheap traffic , and the operations department is always thinking about how to carry out new customer acquisition activities, such as: fission. More than half a year after the launch of mini programs , when the monetization methods became clearer and clearer, everyone began to buy traffic for their own mini programs, and a new round of mini program attraction wave swept in.

Through the historical trajectory of attracting new users through APP and public accounts , we can predict the trend of attracting new users of mini programs. The ideas of attracting new users are always similar. This article explains the ideas and methods of attracting new users from the following two aspects.

1. Attracting new customers is the company's eternal topic
2. New customer acquisition can be divided into active acquisition and passive acquisition.

1. Attracting new customers is the company’s eternal topic

New customer acquisition accompanies a company throughout its life.

When we were operating mobile games , the product was still under development and there was not much to do in terms of operations and business. At that stage, attracting new customers seemed non-existent for the company. But after launching two mobile game products, I learned a new term: user washing.

As the name suggests, it means putting the user in the washing machine to wash. During the washing process, coins, banknotes, and other valuable items will be washed out. This process is called washing the user.

As long as the game company does not go bankrupt, it will continue to develop new games. When new games are launched, they must import new users or users of old games. If the import (attracting new users) is unsuccessful, the result will be that either the new project will fail or the company will fail. This shows that there is no way to stop attracting new customers.

When operating an APP, attracting new users is a daily task. APP is not like a game where you can just make a quick buck and leave. After the APP is developed and launched, new users must be continuously introduced. Like Taobao , even though it has grown so big, it is still thinking about how to acquire new users.

This is the case for apps of this size, not to mention that most apps currently only cover a small number of users. Assuming the target users are 100 million, and there are 100,000 new users every day (if there are 10,000 new users every day, many people will wake up laughing), it will still take 3 years.

When doing advertising , attracting new customers is really a painful process. This is more for B-side customers. Attracting new customers means finding potential customers to advertise to. It is very good if you can find 7 or 8 potential customers every day. Without new customers, and relying on old customers and the natural churn rate, within a few months, the funds will be unable to turn over, and the internet celebrities under them who are starving for food will have to sleep on the streets. In order to avoid this situation, new customer acquisition must be carried out every day, even on weekends.

Only by attracting new customers can a company remain vibrant.

I saw an interesting statement before, which asked why Coca-Cola has been advertising for more than a hundred years?

Because people will forget. If you don’t advertise for a few years, even the most amazing brand will disappear.

Why does this happen?

Because people, like systems, are constantly iterating.

There is an iterative trend among those born in the 80s, 90s and 00s. Just imagine what the memories of those born in the 80s are: arcade games, rope skipping and tree climbing; the memories of those born in the 90s: the Internet, entrepreneurship and staying at home; the memories of those born in the 00s, uh, they should still be in school.

Because of iteration, the company will have a process of renewal. Take maternal and child APP as an example: in 2017, the country's new population was 17.23 million. With the new population, there will be 10 million expectant mothers. Before becoming a mother, there is almost no demand for maternal and child APP. After having a baby, the demand arises and you need to find a maternal and child APP to learn about infant care knowledge. Which one should you choose?

It depends on the operations and market of each maternal and infant APP company, and who has better ability to attract new customers and has a wider coverage.

By the way, let’s talk about the post-2000s. Those born in 2000 are now 18 years old. Most of them entered university in September. Let’s not talk about those who started early or failed a grade. Who is the happiest when seeing these young and ignorant people who have just entered university?

Those loan companies. For them, this is another wave of fresh lambs to be slaughtered. They have no social experience, weak social vigilance, and no restraint in spending money. The clarion call to attract new people has been sounded again. The author here wants to warn the post-2000s: cherish life and stay away from loans.

2. New customer acquisition can be divided into active new customer acquisition and passive new customer acquisition.

In the eyes of operations, attracting new customers is mostly active, so how can there be such a thing as passive attraction? This term comes from my work in the advertising business for promoting influencers on Douyin .

When facing B-side customers, there is also a link of attracting new customers. Attracting new customers means attracting new customers. You can directly make a phone call to promote products; or you can send out product requirements and wait for customers to inquire. The latter situation is passive new customer acquisition.

1. Actively attract new users

The duty of an operation is to proactively attract new customers. In a company, how can the value of an operation be quickly demonstrated?

Bringing in hundreds of thousands of new users with zero budget, if you can do this, your boss will bow to you. Isn’t the concept of growth hacker very popular now? A new position has emerged: Chief Growth Officer (CGO). If you do an excellent job in attracting new customers, you may become a CGO accidentally.

Conventional methods of actively attracting new customers:

Regular new user acquisition is the basic work of operations. Taking APP as an example, regular new user acquisition refers to listing on the application market , front-end material optimization, resource purchase, etc. By doing these basic tasks well, you can gain a number of stable new users every day.

There is also a method commonly used in the gaming industry to attract new users, which is to place information flow ads . However, this is mostly the responsibility of marketing colleagues. The role of operations here is to evaluate the quality of users and see whether the market is buying a lot of robots.

Everyone knows the conventional methods of attracting new customers. There is only one factor that affects the effectiveness of conventional methods of attracting new customers: who does it more professionally. Take ICON as an example: a small 256X256 icon, if designed well, can increase the added effect by 2 times. Add to that the copy and screenshots on the details page, each of which can add points, and all require continuous testing by the operator.

Information flow advertising is more detailed. A slight change of the font will make a difference in the effect. There is no unified standard and it depends on experience and trial and error. Conventional new user acquisition is not an easy task.

Unconventional ways to actively attract new customers:

Unconventional methods of attracting new customers mean that not every company will do it. The reason is that on the one hand, they don’t know that they can do it that way, and on the other hand, they don’t know what the effect of doing so will be. Take fission sharing as an example: There is a very effective way to increase the number of followers of a public account, which is to share the information package. It is said that the effect is good, but there is a risk of account suspension.

Although my public account does not have many followers, less than 100 million, I would still be very sad if it was blocked because of this. So how can I try?

I applied this gameplay to adding WeChat . Users can add my small WeChat account to get the information package. For users, WeChat has been added, but to get the information package, you need to share a poster picture to Moments first. Using this method, I added more than 200 friends at once. I didn’t allow them to share pictures with the ones who came later because I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to add all of them.

2. Passive acquisition

Passively acquired users are of the highest quality.

Passive new customer acquisition refers to obtaining users who actively come to you through your own publicity and promotion . The most representative example is Baidu SEM . Here I use B-end customers as an example. Compared with C-end users, B-end users are fewer in number and have greater value. The cost of acquiring a B-side user may even exceed ten thousand yuan, but there is still profit.

When looking for customers for advertising, some people use very stupid methods, such as sending mass text messages and emails. For any industry they want, such as e-commerce , regardless of whether the other party has advertising needs or not, they will just send the contact information and business introduction. As a result, the conversion rate is extremely low. Not only do you waste time and energy, but the results are also less than ideal. Of course, sometimes you are lucky and can hit one or two target customers.

A clever way is to use Baidu SEM as an example. Let’s take finding customers as an example. The company’s official website is used for bidding, and dozens or even hundreds of customers come to consult every day. The most important thing is that they are customers with needs. Although the cost of acquiring customers will be higher, the efficiency is greatly improved, which is much better than the method of casting a wide net. Remember, there is no output without input.

Passive new customer acquisition is hard in the early stages, but comfortable in the later stages.

This is about a brand that was exposed for promoting mobile games . At that time, after the advertisement was released, they didn’t worry about whether there were users coming in. The only thing they worried about was whether the server was large enough. Advertising is an example of passive customer acquisition.

Take mobile games for example, what needs to be done to expand into various mobile game media?

Thinking of selling points, brainstorming to refine copywriting, producing materials, purchasing media resources, matching needs, scheduling, launching, rework and modification, etc. Even though it only takes less than a week to launch the product, the preliminary preparations take at least a month and it's really hard work.

It’s hard work, but the effect is amazing. On the first day of the ad going online, I saw the new data in the background increasing rapidly. After the ad went online, there was not much to do. I monitored the display of the materials to see if there were any resources that were missed. Evaluate the conversion rate again and test the material before it goes online so that materials with poor effects will not be rolled out. So in the later period, it really is the kind of thing where you just lie on the sofa, drink fat house happy water, and wait for users to search and download the APP.

If you want to be respected in front of others, you must suffer behind the scenes. It takes time to create passive new user materials, or even official websites. There is a better way to attract new users , which is to do Baidu SEO , which takes even more time.

Those who make games can even do this: create a game information website, rank the "game" keyword , and then embed their own games in it. The traffic brought by Baidu every day will be enough to support the game team. Of course, this requires perseverance.

Passive new customer acquisition is the future trend.

Compared with active new customer acquisition, I prefer passive new customer acquisition, which is efficient, targeted, and most importantly, does not cause waste. Some physical stores distribute flyers to promote their stores, but they send out 10,000 flyers but don’t attract any customers to the store. This is not only a waste of money and time, but also affects their confidence.

To passively attract new customers, you only need to focus on two points: where and how to say it. That’s it. Isn’t it simple?

In summary

Now that we have explained the concepts of active and passive new customer acquisition, you can think about which parts of your work belong to passive new customer acquisition, and whether you can get more output with less investment. If so, you can dig deeper into this area. At present, when time is the same, efficiency is the most important thing.

Source: Tiger Talk Operations