Putting aside vanity metrics, how do you plan a successful new customer acquisition campaign?

Attracting new customers has always been the goal of many event operations . There are many ways to attract new customers, including word-of-mouth acquisition through "old customers bringing in new customers", targeted field sales , and online channel acquisition through promotional cooperation. Carefully planned online and offline activities can quickly attract new customers. The ultimate goal of new customer acquisition activities is conversion , not a beautiful number of new customers. In every company that pursues data-driven development , blindly immersing oneself in monotonous sudden increase indicators is not relying on data-driven decision-making, but struggling in the mud of data.

Recently, I participated in a B2C cross-border e-commerce transaction platform that serves global merchants. The platform has been grasping user needs through a data-driven concept. I will use a new customer acquisition campaign of the platform as an example to introduce how its team evaluated and improved a new customer acquisition campaign through data analysis .

1. “Looks good”: Three major issues behind the vanity metric of attracting new customers

In June this year, the company planned a month-long new customer acquisition campaign titled "Plan A". The activity is mainly in the form of old members inviting new members to register. Significant results were achieved on the first day of launch: the number of new members increased by 100% – 200% per day, and the transaction volume on the platform increased by 20% – 30% on the day of the event. The surge in the two indicators made the students participating in this project particularly excited.

In the field of data analysis, the indicators of "total number of registrations" and "new number of registrations" are themselves vanity indicators. These indicators will show a short-term surge depending on the intensity and form of the activity. They can tell you how many "new users" your activity has delivered and influenced. These new users know what you are doing, but it does not mean that your product must be valuable to them. Obviously, it is necessary to consider the retention and conversion of new users comprehensively.

Indeed, as the activity continues to progress, combined with in-depth data observation, it is found that there are many problems hidden beneath the seemingly glamorous appearance. I will list three of the more typical problems.

The proportion of invalid invitations is as high as 40%.

Most of the new members of this event were invited by old members. However, after multi-dimensional data analysis, it was found that more than 40% of the new customers were "invalid invitations", that is, there were problems such as the registration country of the inviter and the invitee were inconsistent (under normal circumstances, the invitation should be from the same nationality), the invitation code was invalid (the invitee filled in the invitation code incorrectly), and the device was duplicated (a device was registered multiple times).

Figure 1: On the day of the new customer acquisition activity, it was found that the registration countries of the inviter and the invitee were inconsistent

Low conversion rate and low willingness to pay

According to statistics after one week, compared with natural traffic , the retention rate and conversion rate of newly registered members of Plan A were both lower than 50%; the conversion rate from registration to browsing product details was lower than 60%; in addition, the average number of payment orders per person was reduced by 3 times, and the average consumption amount per person accounted for only 25% of the natural traffic. The figure below shows the conversion of new members brought by the event and natural traffic members.

Figure 3: After one week, the total conversion rate of new members is 50% lower than that of natural traffic.

In summary, these problems expose the imperfections in the activity content and the product itself. This is a difficult problem that needs to be solved urgently for new customer acquisition activities and sustainable product development. For example, why do invalid invitations exist? Is the page layout shopping (payment) friendly? Do the color matching and style give users a relaxing visual experience? Is the user's shopping experience comfortable?

2. Aim at the right target: new customer acquisition problem positioning and strategy based on data-driven thinking

Scientific data analysis can get infinitely close to the real intentions of customers. Data analysis can guide operators to discover problems and find possible causes of problems, thereby optimizing the experience of the list page, improving the efficiency of home page traffic distribution, purchase decision paths, etc., and ultimately improving user conversion rates. Regarding Plan A’s new customer acquisition activities, Wang Xiangjun took corresponding measures around new customer acquisition, retention and conversion in response to the above-mentioned new customer acquisition problems and poor activity effect evaluation.

1. Crack invalid invitations and enhance the effectiveness of attracting new users

For new customer acquisition activities, the platform has made optimizations in the following two aspects:

(1) Identified and corrected the registration page problem, reducing invalid invitations from 40% to 15%

Through the invalid types of invalid invitation groups, it was found that the country mismatch accounted for 50%, that is, the registered countries of the inviter and the invitee were inconsistent. By grouping and analyzing these users, we found that the registration country of those with invalid invitations happened to be the default country on the registration page. Obviously, there was something unreasonable about the default country setting on the registration page, and we immediately started to improve it.

Figure 4 The registration page of the e-commerce platform

On the second day after the revision, the number of invalid invitations with inconsistent countries dropped to single digits. The proportion of invalid invitations in the entire event dropped to about 15%, and this indicator remained stable in the later stages of the event. This shows that this was a very successful change.

(2) A/ B testing selects the best solution, increasing daily clicks by 10%

Because Plan A uses rewards to encourage old users to bring in new users. That is, old members invite new members by sharing the activity page. Good visual page perception and style can not only increase the probability of sharing among old members, but also promote the desire of new users to register. Therefore, four different plans were designed for testing on the sharing activity page.

The technology department has embedded points for four sets of solutions in advance and marked them with four tags: version 1.0, version 1.1, version 2.0, and version 2.1. These four versions were assigned to four different user groups. After one week, it was found that the number of clicks brought by version 1.0 was significantly higher than that of the other versions. Obviously, version 1.0 is the most popular, so all sharing pages were changed to the 1.0 version. After this revision, the daily clicks on the sharing page increased by 10%.

Figure 5 Comparison of member clicks in four versions

2. Promote new members and accurately push messages to win back lost members

The rapid loss of new members may be caused by many reasons, which may indicate that the platform is not attractive enough to new members entering the event, or that members fail to obtain the most concerned content in the product in a timely manner. A series of measures have been taken to address the low retention and conversion rates of new users . Here are a few examples.

(1) Add new channels to cater to their interests and promote user conversion

In order to increase the stickiness of new members, a new member channel is added for new members, and a series of activities are launched for new users entering under Plan A in the form of store discount information and product recommendations . Through Sensors analysis, it was found that this activity had a great effect on the conversion and retention of new users. Picture omitted.

(2) Accurate push and user grouping to promote member retention and conversion

During the event, the e-commerce platform pushed messages to the entire APP. The next day, the number of visits to the event page increased by 4 times, and the number of participants reached a record high. However, the good times did not last long. A week later, the number of new customers showed negative growth. Continuous tracking is not ideal. It was decided to screen out members who had not made any transactions within one week after registration. These members were potential members about to churn. The e-commerce operator chose to send a text message and push the message on the website to the target group.

By viewing the detailed information of the churned population, you can directly create user segments. For this group of people, the operation staff carried out targeted message push within the APP on the integrated push platform, and pushed SMS messages on other platforms based on the personal user attributes of this group to stimulate their transactions. We will continue to observe various indicators such as retention, conversion, and value of each group to measure the direction of the activity.

Figure 6 Comparison of member conversion effects before and after precise push

After completing the information push, the operator will also use multi-dimensional analysis to display the push effect in real time and evaluate the push or product optimization effect. As can be seen from the figure, after completing the precise push for "lost users", the overall conversion rate was as high as 24.69%, while the conversion rate for people who did not receive the push was 16.34%, indicating that this was a relatively successful precise push.

3. Data analysis and summary of new customer acquisition activities

To sum up, data-driven has become the direction of efforts for many companies. This requires companies not only to pay more attention to data, but also to focus on "driving decisions and products." This activity's new user acquisition case gave us some inspiration for operating activities. I summarize two points:

1. The new customer acquisition metrics you focus on should be actionable metrics

The only purpose of vanity metrics is to make people inflate. Monotonically growing indicators such as click-through rate, PV, UV, and website visit duration are indicators used in the early days of the Internet. That is, the measurement of activities should not be obsessed with vanity indicators that "look good". In the era of refined data analysis, we should focus on indicators with comparability, ratios, and strong operability, which show the user engagement of the product.

2. Pay attention not only to “how much”, but also to “why” and “how”

Whenever you look at a metric, you should ask: Based on the data in front of me, how can I optimize my current activities? This is the ultimate goal of data analysis. If data analysis cannot answer this question, it will be like what was said at the beginning of the article. It will simply be satisfied with some simple growth indicators without trying to change operational behaviors. It is not truly data-driven, but struggling in the mud of data.

During the entire new customer acquisition campaign, the e-commerce platform did a good job of data collection in advance, used various data analysis methods to view the main indicators, and also conducted some A/B tests to view the effects of different solutions. By paying attention to and tracking key indicators, we can grasp the real needs of users and continuously improve the content of activities to suit user tastes.