Activity promotion and new customer growth gameplay

From time to time, you can see some screen-sweeping activities on WeChat. These highly shared and highly disseminated activities are mostly new customer acquisition activities for major products. When it comes to attracting new users, we have to mention Pinduoduo, which makes people "love and hate". The rapid growth of Pinduoduo's user scale depends to a certain extent on its rich and aggressive matrix of new user acquisition methods.

However, as new customer acquisition activities become more mature, how can we do them well? This article is the third in a series of articles on e-commerce event operations . I will share with you my experience and thoughts on new customer acquisition activities and hope that it will be helpful to your work in acquiring new customers.

1. The logic of attracting new customers is also simple

Different from the market-oriented growth method that mainly relies on advertising, the main method of attracting new users is to bring in old users, that is, to use the existing old users of the brand or product to share and spread the word, thereby bringing in new users for the product. It can also take over and utilize the sharing and communication value of new users to form a fission cycle and ultimately achieve growth in user scale.

The biggest advantage of new customer acquisition activities is that the cost of acquiring new customers is low. Why is the cost low?

There are three main characteristics of new customer acquisition activities: ① Driven by rewards; ② In the form of sharing; ③ Utilizing users’ social relationship chains.

The cost of new customer acquisition activities is mainly activity rewards. The issuance of activity rewards is evaluated based on the user's new customer acquisition effect, and payment (to users) is strictly based on the new customer acquisition effect. The design of user rewards is flexible, so the customer acquisition cost of new customer acquisition activities is low, which makes new customer acquisition activities more sustainable and has become an important way to acquire new customers for major products.

To do a good job in attracting new customers, two key issues need to be addressed:

1. How to motivate old users to share and spread the word;
2. How to guide new users to complete registration conversion.

Both of these key issues can be solved using the Fogg behavioral model (behavior = motivation * ability * prompt). How can we design benefits for new and old users to increase their motivation to participate? How to optimize activity path rules and lower the participation threshold? How to design gameplay packaging activities to stimulate users’ interest?

If the motivation, ability and prompt issues of new and old users in the new user acquisition campaign are solved, the new user acquisition campaign will basically be successful.

2. How to play the new customer acquisition activities

It’s a thankless task to start an activity from scratch, so first take a look at how everyone is doing activities to attract new customers.

From the perspective of user interaction, new user acquisition activities can be divided into three categories:

1. Crowdfunding: everyone helps me get benefits, such as bargaining;
2. Reciprocity: everyone gets benefits together, such as group buying;
3. Sharing type: I help everyone get benefits, such as invitation and gift.

1. Crowdfunding: Bargaining and new customer acquisition activities

The rules for new user acquisition activities such as bargaining assistance are relatively clear. In order to obtain rewards, old users initiate sharing and invite friends to help. Once a certain number of friends help, the old users can receive rewards.

There are two advantages of new user acquisition activities such as bargaining assistance. First, the participation threshold is relatively low, mainly for the participation behavior of new users. Old users can share, and new users can log in and click to help. Second, it has fission transmission properties. After helping, new users can be directly guided to participate in bargaining assistance activities. Due to the low participation threshold, the participation effect of new users is weak, and it is easier to form a fission cycle.

The main problem with bargaining assistance activities is that the low threshold and high spreadability result in poor user quality and lack of precision, and are more suitable for general products with a wide range of target users. In addition, bargaining assistance activities will also consume users' social relationships to a large extent, and the long-term effect will decline significantly.

2. Mutual benefit: group buying and team building activities to attract new customers

Group buying and team forming activities focus on old and new users completing designated group buying/team forming behaviors and obtaining valuable activity rewards at the same time, thus achieving a certain degree of mutual assistance and benefit among friends, rather than one-way interaction.

The threshold for group buying and team formation has been further raised compared to the bargaining assistance activities. Most new users need to pay a small amount of money to join the group buying/team formation, and the accuracy and quality of new users acquired have been relatively improved, which has also led to a decline in the scale of new customer acquisition.

3. Sharing: Invitation and gift-giving activities to attract new customers

The sharing type and the reciprocal type are similar in that both new and old users can enjoy the activity benefits, and generally the rewards for old users are more valuable. The reason why it is defined as sharing is because of its packaging and communication form, which emphasizes that old users give benefits to new users. After the new users complete the receipt/use, the old users will receive rewards.

Invitation and gift activities mostly use red envelopes/coupons as benefits to attract new users and convert first orders. The quality of new users brought in is relatively high, and the scale of new users attracted will further decrease.

Bargaining assistance, group buying, invitation and gift-giving activities are the main ways to attract new customers in the market. The scale efficiency of attracting new customers is gradually decreasing, but the user accuracy and quality are gradually improving. In actual applications, it is generally in the form of a multi-activity matrix, with multiple different types of new customer acquisition activities coexisting, giving users choices, covering more old users, and exerting its value of attracting new customers.

3. Are there any creative ideas for new customer acquisition activities?

After talking about these common new customer acquisition activities, it is indeed very common, especially for Internet practitioners. These gameplays have become "familiar" and "popular in the street". Are there any new ideas for new customer acquisition activities?

First of all, since these activities are already very common, but various companies are still using these methods to attract new users, it shows that they are still effective, have a high input-output ratio, and can help various products increase the scale of new users.

In addition, users have been educated by these gameplays and are familiar with their rules and methods. As long as the welfare rules are designed properly, the effect of attracting new users will still be considerable. So, don’t underestimate these new customer acquisition activities.

Let's talk about how to innovate. No matter how we innovate, the logic of attracting new users will not change. If we want to achieve more sharing and dissemination among old users and bring more registration conversions from potential users, these are the two core issues. The creativity of the event should also focus on solving these two problems, rather than going through all the trouble.

Regarding the creative ways to attract new customers, here are four ways:

Gamification, light gamification enhances the fun of new customer acquisition activities while ensuring the straightforwardness of the gameplay.

Pinduoduo has many gamification methods, but most of them are heavy-duty, focusing on increasing user activity and retention, and require a lot of users' time and energy. In new customer acquisition activities, gamification should be lightly designed, simple and easy to operate, and quickly point to key behaviors for attracting new customers. Gamification is also often combined with randomness, such as lipstick machine gameplay and Candy Crush Saga format.

Randomness can indirectly increase the value of activity rewards, satisfy users’ gambler and speculative psychology, and increase participation.

The cost of rewards for new customer acquisition activities is a headache. If the rewards are expensive, the customer acquisition cost will be high, while if the rewards are cheap, the customer acquisition effect will be poor. By setting large rewards randomly, the user's motivation to participate can be increased, and the gameplay can be more diverse and interesting. For example, it can be packaged into a lottery, dice rolling, or even a rock-paper-scissors game.

IP/hotspots, combining well-known IP/celebrity/holidays/popular hotspots to enhance the spread of the event.

IPs/hot spots that users are familiar with and pay attention to are natural communication carriers. Old users are happy to spread them without too much social pressure, and new users are also more interested in clicking to view, which brings more conversions. For example, in Maoyan Movies, there is a type of movie promotion fission gameplay called "Celebrities invite you to watch a movie."

DIY/User Creation: Allow users to have strong interactions in activities, generate personally relevant shareable/show-off content, and increase willingness to share.

Previously, DIY poster sharing was quite popular in the education industry. That is, when users participated in new user sharing activities, they could upload their own photos to generate personalized posters, which significantly improved the sharing and conversion effects.

There is no fixed paradigm for creativity. I hope the above methods can inspire your inspiration.

To be effective, creativity needs to be relevant to users and be popular with them, thereby improving the efficiency of information transmission, enhancing the effectiveness of new customer acquisition activities, reducing self-satisfaction, and treating yourself as a user and users as real people.

IV. Conclusion

That’s all I have to say about new user acquisition activities this time. Activity-based new user growth is a low-cost, sustainable way to increase user scale. Its importance is self-evident. Understand the logic of attracting new users, master common gameplay, and inspire inspiration and creativity. I hope your user growth will continue to grow.

Author: Wu Yijiu

Source: Growth Corsair