How to get users to try your new product? Here are 5 tips!

A while ago, a new coffee shop opened downstairs from my company. Not long after it opened, I extorted a friend and went to have a drink there. To be honest, it was actually quite good, and tasted much better than the Starbucks diagonally opposite. However, I found that this shop’s business was not very good. Even during the busiest time after work, the occupancy rate was less than 20%. I was puzzled at first, but when I was thinking about why I didn’t go in, I realized that if it weren’t for this extortion, if I wanted to drink coffee, my first reaction would definitely not be here, but the Starbucks diagonally opposite. Why?

Let’s review another scenario. We often have one or two restaurants around us that we often go to. After becoming regular customers, every time we order food, do we think about trying new dishes? However, it is very likely that after repeated hesitation, you still order the same dishes you ordered before and finally give up trying.

Kahneman and Tversky, authors of Thinking, Fast and Slow, once designed a coin-tossing gambling experiment:

"Now, toss a perfectly fair coin in the air. If it lands on the tail, you lose $100. If it lands on the head, you win $100 (to show that the game is fair, you can also choose to win if it lands on the tail and lose if it lands on the head). Overall, the probability of winning or losing in this bet is the same, and it is an absolutely fair bet. Would you choose to participate in this bet?"

But experiments have shown that most people would reject this bet. Because for us, the fear of losing $100 is much stronger than the desire to get $100. Compared with the pain caused by an equal loss and the joy brought by an equal gain, the loss has a significantly stronger psychological impact on people.

This is the same as when we try new products. How do I know that the coffee here is good? What if it’s not that good? And the coffee at Starbucks across the street is also good. I have no reason to change. The reason for trying new dishes is also simple: what if they don’t taste good?

There is a great possibility that we will buy a good product, but there is also a great possibility that we will buy a product that we regret. If the original product we are used to is still good, in order to avoid losses, most people will tend to choose the previous product.

This is the dilemma of new products. We have organized many activities and many users are aware of our products. We hope to bring in new customers through word of mouth from these seed users in the early stages, but the reality is not always so good.

So what should we do to make users willing to try it? The following strategies may help you.

Lower the trial and error (cognitive) threshold

This strategy can be adopted when it is impossible for users to directly perceive the product results.

In the cosmetics industry, various brand advertisements are bombarded, and each brand may have new products every year. In this case, users are completely at a loss as to what cosmetics to choose. Therefore, many cosmetics products (especially high-priced brands) will adopt the strategy of 1 yuan trial pack. It's only one yuan, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't work.

This strategy can also work on many financial products. Users who are worried about making a large investment all at once may be worried. Therefore, we guide new users to invest one yuan, give you 10,000 yuan in trial money, and enjoy 7 days of high-interest financial management returns.

As for watching movies , the threshold for watching movies is actually very high. If it is a bad movie, it is not just a waste of money. It would take at least four or five hours for us to see a movie, considering the travel time, waiting time and movie time. Time is wasted, so we have trailers, which are just two or three minutes long to highlight the highlights of the movie. Let users have a good expectation for the movie.

For example, there are dozens of specialty shops on the Dongmen Food Street on one floor. To be honest, I have no idea how to choose among such a large number of shops. But I found that some stores made the dishes into finished product models, which gave customers an intuitive feeling of what the dishes will look like. They look delicious, which greatly reduced my worries about possible dish choices.

A good basic strategy for new products is to conduct trial and error at a low cost, present the product as intuitively as possible, and lower the entry threshold.

Find your opponent and strengthen your advantage

Some products may not necessarily be able to lower the user's cognitive threshold for loss, so at this time you need to start from your advantages.

In the coin tossing experiment at the beginning of the article, both the gain and loss are $100. Most people would refuse this gamble. But if you change the bet so that the gain is $1,000 and the loss is $100, then most people will try this bet.

That is to say, when we are faced with a new product, although there may be certain losses, when we are sure that there will be better benefits, we will naturally choose the new product. After all, perception is a small loss and a big gain.

So how do you create this feeling?

Find the products used by existing users, which are your competitors, and emphasize your own advantages through comparison.

For example, the advertisement of Shenzhou Private Car (as shown below) at that time, its benchmark competitor was Uber. This advertisement was very controversial at the time. It was impossible for them not to know the huge risks after the advertisement came out. Why take such a big risk? The reason is simple, it can achieve the goal. From the purpose of the advertisement, it has achieved the perception that if you are worried about the safety issues of Uber, then choose Shenzhou.

For example, in the hairdressing project that my company is doing now, we have always emphasized that we are different from traditional hair salons. No sales calls, no card applications, and no one will talk nonsense to you when you are getting your hair cut. We emphasize that we are an Internet hairdressing business, "pure craftsmanship, just hair cutting", and our data-based management of hairdressers. What I have said so much is just to express that I am much better than those ordinary hair salons on the market.

Every time Luo Yonghao holds a new product launch conference, there is always a segment where he complains about various mobile phones on the market. In the early days, he publicly mocked Xiaomi as "mobile phone futures", "dual-SIM design" and "low-priced mobile phone". Complaints about the Meizu MX's "freely changeable color shell", "raised Home button", "removable back cover but cannot replace battery", "unlock by swiping up from the bottom of the screen", and "only three icons can be placed on the Dock". Then tell me about your cell phone? Doesn't he know that his behavior is very low? I know, but this can highlight how great your phone is through comparison, so you should change to a Hammer as soon as possible :-D.

For example, I saw a small advertisement before, which said "Choose two pairs from Adidas or Nike for 399 yuan". This is also a comparison to highlight the product advantages. What are they comparing? Compared with other platforms, Adidas and Nike are priced over thousands of yuan. Of course, users will try this APP. If it says "Choose two pairs from Anta or Xtep for 399 yuan", I think no one will install this app.

By comparing users' original products, you can create a perception of small loss (or no loss) and big gain for users, and users will choose you.

Short-term obvious profit

Such examples are quite common. For example, in Uber's early subsidy strategy, a taxi fare of 10 kilometers in Shenzhen was about 30-40 yuan. During the peak period of Uber's subsidies, an Uber fare of 10 kilometers was only 6-8 yuan. The first order of new orders within 30 yuan was free of charge. In this case, users would naturally choose Uber instead of taxis, even if they might be so-called illegal taxis.

Similarly, in the early days of Ele.me and Meituan ’s subsidy strategy, a box lunch with two meat dishes and one vegetable dish with soup often cost seven or eight yuan. Compared to a random meal downstairs for twenty or thirty yuan, people naturally chose takeout.

For example, there is a fresh food e-commerce company called Aixianfeng, which specializes in fruits. At that time, new users could buy four mangoes for 5 yuan. I remember that 80% of my colleagues who knew about it sold them. Combined with the spread of those who had already purchased, the number of new users was really not small.

My company has an activity where we give out dolls to those who attract new users. The first 100 users who attract 10 people to follow our official account will receive a half-meter-tall cute doll with big eyes. When this activity was carried out, there were less than 1,000 people on our official account, and we attracted 40,000 new followers.

When our original store opened, we launched a small promotion where “you can pay whatever you want for a haircut.” A large number of users paid prices such as 1.6, 1.8, 6.6, and 8.8. This promotion lasted for a month, helping the store accumulate a large number of seed users in the future.

We are not stupid. When we see obvious benefits, we will naturally follow up. However, this strategy will cost a lot after all. It can only be used as a short-term strategy to attract new users in the early stage of the product. For short-term strategies, we do not recommend continuing this strategy until we are sure that we have accumulated a certain amount of users. Of course, if you have money, you can do whatever you want.

Create a hit

Why do we need to create a hit product?

There are three characteristics of a hit product.

• It is often a single product (or functional point) of extreme quality.
• It is widely accepted by the general public (has social effects).
• It is contagious.

We do not accept new products because, essentially, the new products do not have product features that are particularly attractive to us. Hot-selling products, on the other hand, maximize product features to avoid the losses caused by users trying new products to the greatest extent, while also expanding product advantages as much as possible within a certain limit.

Xiaomi 1 is the most typical representative of a hit product. When Xiaomi 1 came out, its performance far surpassed other phones of the same price level on the market. As a person in the Internet industry, I heard about this brand from my childhood friend on the bus. He said the brand of the phone was "Xiaomi". I asked him twice before I was sure that I had heard the name correctly. Xiaomi has achieved the ultimate in hot-selling products, including balance bikes, sockets, routers, and power banks. Almost every product can carve out a path in the industry.

Sohu Video really had little presence in the early years. A big part of the reason for its popularity back then was the early "Diaosi Man" and the later "Go Princess Go". These two films almost drove the content playback volume of the entire platform.

A hot-selling product does not necessarily refer to a physical product, it may also be a certain functional point of a certain product.

The rise of Cheetah Browser was due to the ticket grabbing plug-in at the time. After many people used this browser to grab tickets, they thought it was pretty good and just started using it.

The WeChat Spring Festival red envelope feature directly led to WeChat Pay's surprise attack on Alipay during the 2014-2015 Spring Festival. By the first quarter of this year, WeChat Pay and Alipay had formed a situation where they shared the third-party payment world equally.

Snail Reading , with its one-hour free reading every day, directly ignited the product, and all major media platforms were flooded with this news, with the core discussion being about the free one-hour. I had never come across any information about the Snail Reading APP before, but now it is always on my phone.

Visual influence strengthens expectations

I didn’t intend to talk about this one, but I think its role cannot be underestimated, so I’ll mention it.

When we face new products, visual aspects are an important part that cannot be ignored. Good-looking people look like good people (except for those with plastic surgery). Although this may not make sense to people, it does make sense to the product.

For example, if a restaurant is decorated very high-end, I can basically be sure that its food will not be too bad. After all, the decoration is so good that it is unlikely that there will be obvious shortcomings in the core chef.

When I first saw the official website of Qingmang APP, the interface design was simple and creative, so I guessed that with such a design, its content design would not be too bad. After downloading and trying it, I found that the product interaction method and content arrangement did have many surprises.

The founder of the French company Dassault once said, "Any airplane that looks beautiful is a good airplane." You can verify it.

Therefore, every product output cannot be ignored visually. Apple and Xiaomi have set excellent examples in this regard.

at last

How to get users to try our new products? Lower the threshold for trying, strengthen product advantages through comparison, make significant short-term concessions, create best-sellers, and pay attention to the visual performance of product outputs.

Summarize the general direction, lower the cognitive threshold, and strengthen product advantages. Avoid users' concerns about risks and strengthen their expectations of benefits, and users will naturally try.

Hope it's useful for you.