Why is user activation important? Share 3 points!

The essence of user activation is to quickly deliver the core value of the product to users.

01. Why is user activation important?

In the AARRR Pirate Model, user activation is the second very important step. We have acquired a large number of new users through various market acquisition methods. If the user activation process is not done well, these traffic will be lost in vain.

When a new user comes to a product, his first impression of the product determines whether he will stay. Therefore, the essence of user activation is to quickly deliver the core value of the product to users. Usually, the means of user activation include improving new user experience , landing pages , and guide videos, etc.

Josh Elman, a former member of the Facebook and Twitter growth teams, and Casey Winters, former head of growth at Pinterest, both believe that user activation is a critical part of growth strategy.

Josh Elman even goes so far as to say that companies should spend at least as much effort on onboarding new users as they do on product development, or even more.

Why? Let’s first look at two data.

Among the apps in the Google Play Store , the vast majority lost more than 70% of their users on the second day. This means that for the vast majority of apps, more than 70% of the traffic that the market has worked hard to attract is gone the next day. And then, there will never be another thing. Just a slight increase in the early user activation rate will have a huge impact on later user retention and profitability.

But in reality, user activation is often in a no-man's land. Because for the marketing department, their main job is to attract new users through various means and channels ; for the product department, they are more focused on building the entire product architecture system.

The attention window of new users is often very short, whether on mobile phones or PCs. For a new user who has no idea about the product, whether he can quickly perceive the core value of the product is the key to retaining him. Therefore, if there is a growth hacker or growth team that focuses on making some improvements and experiments on user activation, it will often have good results.

02. 5-step guide to new user activation

01. Find the Aha moment

Aha moment: Also known as the surprise moment, it usually refers to the moment when a new user first perceives the core value of the product.

After new users go through market training and then use the product, their understanding of the product will change from a vague concept to a clear perception of its implementation. This is a warm moment. For the first time, the user clearly feels the value and changes that the product can bring to him.

For example, before using GrowingIO, users did not know that data mining and analysis could be so friendly to business personnel.

Some companies in Silicon Valley with mature growth systems have a clear definition of Aha moment. The usual format is (who) completes (how many times) (what behavior) in (how long).

Why find the Aha moment? There are three reasons for this:

• Help you find user retention patterns: tell you which behaviors lead to user retention.
• Guide activation and retention experiments: because this is a leading indicator.
• Help the team find clear focus.

Take Airbnb as an example. In their growth team, there is a paid growth team, a viral marketing team, and a platform optimization team. The goals of these three teams are very consistent, which is to enable new users to quickly reach the Aha moment of "first booking". This way of working with a common goal is very efficient.

How to find your Aha moment?

• List 3-5 user behaviors that you think may be related to long-term user retention;
• Use data analysis to find the behaviors that are most positively correlated with long-term user retention;
• Further confirmation through qualitative user research;
• For new users, generally focus on one activation behavior

To give a simple example, for a selfie app, the behaviors that may be associated with long-term user retention include: taking 5 selfies, trying 3 filters, and sharing 1 photo.

After quantitative analysis, it was found that behaviors positively correlated with retention included: taking 5 selfies and trying 3 filters.

Through user research and qualitative analysis, we finally determined that the Aha moment for new users was “trying 3 filters.”

2. Measure new user activation

After finding the Aha moment, how do you measure the activation of new users? This requires a clear activation indicator, which refers to the ratio of new users completing activation behavior within a certain period of time.

This indicator depends on the company's own business and product situation. For example, Pinterest, as a photo social networking site, needs new users to spend time browsing the site, so users who can still remember them and return within a week are considered successfully activated. Therefore, their activation indicator is users who return within 1 week of registration/total number of registrations.

My company, Acorns, is a micro- investment platform, and the core behavior of new users is investing, so our activation indicator is the number of users who invest within one week of registration / total number of registrations.

Once your team has defined your activation metrics, I would recommend creating a new user activation funnel.

For example, in the picture above, we take an ordinary application as an example, pull out the data of new users from downloading to registration to completing activation actions, and make an activation funnel.

From this graph, we can clearly see that the number of lost users in the second registration step and those who complete the activation action is the largest, so the room for improvement in these two steps is the largest, and the corresponding growth ROI is also the highest.

3. Experimental iteration improves activation rate

As we just mentioned in the new user activation funnel, we can clearly see the step with the largest user loss . Then, we can design experiments in these areas, optimize and iterate to improve the overall activation rate.

Here’s an example from Acorns itself:

Since we are an investment platform, users need to enter their bank information during the registration process. However, through the activation funnel data, we see that many users are lost at this step.

Our assumption is that users may feel unsafe entering their bank information , so to target this loss point, we designed some experimental ideas and conducted A/B testing.

For example, adding security symbols, using different bank logo designs, optimizing text, popping up information windows within the product to explain the necessity of linking to the bank, etc.

Once you discover the churn point in the new user activation process, you can generate various experimental ideas based on this node, and continuously iterate and optimize to help users achieve the Aha moment.

The overall experimental steps are: discover the problem – analyze the data – generate hypotheses – design experiments – measure the results, and repeat the cycle over and over again.

In addition to the quantitative experimental method mentioned above, there is also a more qualitative experimental thinking model, namely the "excitement index" of new users.

This was shared with us by a growth expert from Dropbox. Simply put, when a new user starts to use a product or service, his level of interest, or "excitement index," is relatively high, and will be further increased by the website's activities, titles , designs, and so on.

However, during the long registration process, the user's "excitement index" will be consumed step by step, because the act of registration itself does not bring value to the user.

This thinking model suggests that you use a more qualitative mindset to simulate the journey of new users after they come to the product, so first you need to clarify the new user’s initial excitement index, and then understand the impact of each element/step on the index, and then regularly review each link of the funnel.

4. Four principles of new user guidance

The picture above shows the four principles of new user onboarding that I personally think are very useful, namely, increasing motivation, removing obstacles, timely boosting and personalization. These four principles are actually derived based on BJ Fogg’s (Editor’s Note: behavioral scientist) user behavior model.

That is, user behavior = motivation x ability x trigger. Therefore, enhancing motivation and personalization are both aimed at increasing the motivation of new users. Removing obstacles is to improve the usage ability of new users. Timely boosting is to provide users with a clear trigger mechanism.

Principle 1: Increase Motivation

Here are two classic examples:

As shown in the left picture above, a certain ticket booking application will first guide users to successfully complete a ticket booking before asking them to turn on push notifications. By taking the opportunity of sending important information to users, the application will encourage users to turn on push notifications to avoid missing out on ticket information. This experiment increased the push open rate by nearly 200%.

The right picture above is a mobile device security application. When asking users to turn on location sharing, they give users a very strong push, telling users that turning on location sharing can help you quickly find lost mobile devices.

Both of these are very good examples of enhancing user motivation, that is, explaining to the user what benefits this behavior brings to him.

Another good example is Uber, which leverages the existing social trust between the recommender and the recommended user during the user recommendation process.

For example, if I recommend Uber to a friend, he will receive a text message saying that you can accept the recommendation from xx, and we will give you and the recommender some coupons.

Another example is our own Acorns. After a new user completes the registration, we will generate a very beautiful animation within the product to provide the user with a customized investment plan.

This process seems redundant, but the data shows that users like this step very much and the registration completion rate has also increased a lot.

Language learning app Duolingo allows unregistered users to start learning, and you only need to register when you want to save your progress. This is also a very good way, which delays the time of opening an account, but also gives users stronger motivation.

Principle 2: Remove Obstacles

Before explaining "removing obstacles", I would like to mention a concept, namely "cognitive burden".

What is cognitive load? Both Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg wore the same clothes all year round because diverse clothes would increase their cognitive burden and make them spend more time and energy deciding what to wear, but in fact this time and energy could be used to do more valuable things.

So the same applies to users. We should try our best to reduce the "cognitive burden" of new users, which is what we often say "Don't make me think".

For example, the well-known social application Line hides all the redundant information on the user terms page and only leaves the most important ones for users. This simple behavior has greatly improved the overall registration completion rate.

Another way to remove obstacles is to avoid cold starts . Compared with removing unnecessary steps, this method may not be thought about or touched upon as much.

What does it mean to avoid cold start? Just avoid sending your users to a page that requires them to think from scratch.

For example, on Acorns, we initially required users to fill in the regular investment amount themselves. Later, we set a default of $10, which users could also modify by themselves. However, this simple change greatly increased the investment success rate.

Principle 3: Timely promotion

We need to use flexible UX models for various user guides, with the goal of allowing users to obtain the greatest value in the least amount of time.

For example, Robinhood allows users to use a virtual account to experience the stock buying and selling process before registering; HeadSpace uses various cute symbols to guide users; Google Calendar uses pop-up windows to guide users.

In addition to user guidance within the product, we can also use some external channels to remind users to complete user guidance, such as push, SMS, email, etc.

Principle 4: Personalized Customization

Personal customization allows users to choose according to their interests and then provide some personalized content.

For example, FourSquare recommends nearby restaurants based on user interests.

LinkedIn will ask users about their purpose of registration during the registration process and then provide different user guidance.

These are all very worthy ways to learn from in onboarding new users, but it should be noted that not all methods are suitable for your product. Don’t blindly follow the trend, but continue to test and iterate.

For example, Pinterest is a good example. In the early days, most of their users were women, so after testing, they found that it was very effective to recommend pictures that their friends liked to new users.

However, as the number of male users increased, the user activation rate began to decline. So they made an improvement by allowing users to select their gender and then recommending different content based on gender, which achieved very good results.

So even if it is the same product, when your user group changes, your new user guidance strategy needs to be constantly adjusted, not to mention that different products directly use other people's strategies.

5. New user activation is a systematic project

The picture above is Instagram’s new user activation system. You can see that this system not only includes the registration and activation process for new users in the first 7 days, but also includes the continued activity after 60 days of registration.

In addition to the user journey, the activation of new users also requires the cooperation of multiple channels.

For example, Twitter uses multiple channels to drive users to quickly reach their Aha moment, which is to follow 30 users. During the registration process, they will automatically recommend users based on interests, find existing contacts, or recommend new people to follow via email.

Finally, even if your new user is successfully activated, you still need to continue to pay attention to his subsequent progress and cultivate an activated user into a loyal user step by step.

The left side of the above picture is a user engagement ladder. You can see that there is still a long way to go from activated users to optimal users. The right side of the picture above is GrowthHackers’ new user task list. We hope that users will follow this list, experience the core value of the product step by step, and become more engaged users.

After using this task list, our key behavior activation rate increased by 1400%.

03. Summary

As a growth hacker, you should quickly find the part with the strongest leverage effect and prove your value. The new user activation part is in the no-man's land between product and market, but it is the place with the highest growth ROI.

How to win in "user activation" and efficiently convert the traffic drawn from the market to boost the long-term retention and monetization of products? I hope this open class can give you some inspiration.

Author: Qu Hui, authorized to be published by Qinggua Media.

Source: GrowingIO (ID: GrowingIO)