Analysis of AARRR (user growth) model: How to achieve user growth?

This article starts from the experience and explains it in combination with the AARRR ( user growth ) model. I believe that the use of this model must be carried out in the scenario of product construction. And the good experience involved in each step will feed back into the improvement of the scene.

There are internal and external factors in every step from acquisition-activation- retention - conversion -propagation. This article only discusses internal factors, the process by which a product moves from initial external customer acquisition to the internal user experience and then to external communication.

The article is not a teaching plan, nor is it the truth. I hope everyone will look at each article with a critical eye. After all, the spirit of thinking is the magic weapon to form independent thinking.

1. Acquisition

1. Acquisition of natural traffic

When it comes to acquiring natural traffic, we can do very little to interfere with the experience and can only polish the product itself. However, the natural influx of users must be based on one or more of the following points. We may be able to intervene before the experience~

(1) Relevant functional needs caused by a certain social phenomenon or hot topic. (For example, the Didi driver who killed a flight attendant not long ago caused panic among many young girls. This heightened their awareness of safety. At this time, you will find that an app in the App Store has emerged as a "scare" (interested friends can download and experience it by themselves). It is this social hot spot that caused a surge in natural traffic. Of course, it is not ruled out that products use this hot spot to market their own products.)

(2) A pain point really needs to be solved. (When a certain type of user has a pain point, they will choose a product to use by searching or comparing similar products. If your product happens to help users solve their pain points, then you have successfully attracted users.)

(3) Purely experience the product. We call these users (product enthusiasts, users who have experienced similar competing products, those who downloaded the app accidentally, etc.) invalid traffic because these users are generally unlikely to become loyal fans of the product. He has no clear purpose and no clear pain point to solve.

2. Obtaining Operational Promotion

The term "operation promotion " has existed before the birth of the Internet . It's just that the traditional marketing methods, namely product-price- channel -promotion, began to gradually become ineffective and were transformed into scenario-based operation promotion, which implemented the promotion in specific small scenarios.

(1) Online promotion

Online promotion includes online marketing activities (marketing activities are divided into: marketing with existing topics, which can choose to integrate current hot topics such as festivals, major events in the entertainment industry, etc. & provide topic pain point solutions for marketing, and creating topic marketing , creating unique topics in the industry, creating topics through deep users, and promotional activities (including gifts for inviting friends, membership discounts, certain holiday discounts, etc.).

Online promotion is nothing more than building virtual scenes through the Internet, and by continuously extending the boundaries of the scenes, covering and attracting more users to participate.

(2) Offline promotion

Offline promotion includes ground promotion , which will inevitably bring in two groups of people:

1. People who are attracted by the prizes in the marketing activities ;
2. People who are really attracted by the introduction of the product.

Posters & endorsements will also have two groups of people:

1. people who are attracted by the star effect;
2. People who are attracted by the product introduction.

Due to the mutual traffic diversion cooperation among stores, the efficiency of offline promotion is far slower than that of online promotion. However, for products that require offline scenarios, this is essential.

3. Social self-propagation

Through single-point breakthrough, this requires the operation team to have good insight, find the community that matches the product's tone, detonate the community or neighborhood through events, and make the community become the advocates and disseminators of your product.

(1) Acquire users through the model of old customers bringing in new customers

Once a good bond is established between the product and old users, the old users will naturally take themselves as the center and help you promote the product externally.

(2) Exploding the community

Find the target audience for your product through various communities. By studying the community and using the community's internal language or expressions, you can mobilize the entire community to help you. There is point-to-surface diffusion, which is called the "balloon theory (a very thin needle can burst a balloon)". This is also a particularly important point that can trigger the spread.

(3) Sense of participation (social relationship binding)

When everyone around you is forwarding or using it, if you don’t understand it or don’t use it, it will cause a sense of loneliness. In other words, "They are all playing it, and I will be left behind if I don't play it", but this situation generally does not occur in the early stages of product promotion. When the potential for communication reaches a certain level, it will go viral on WeChat Moments !

2. Activation

When users are directed into the product from outside, whether they leave or stay is related to the product and business. How to let users use the product naturally after entering it is the principle of fool-proofing.

Yes, by guiding or attracting users to take the next step. (For example, you go to an unfamiliar restaurant, and no one greets you when you enter, and no one tells you to choose a seat or order food. Do you feel overwhelmed? I think you will soon find another restaurant.)

1. Operation guide after entering the product

• Visual guidance: including the priority of page elements and the prominence of page elements for visual guidance. A common example is: when you use a product for the first time, the user will be guided to perform the first and second steps to reduce the user's unfamiliarity with the product.
• Motion guidance: Educate users on how to operate through floating layers on the page. This is also a way to guide new users in product design. Ultimately, it is to eliminate users’ unfamiliarity and confusion with new things.

2. Whether the product itself can arouse the user's desire to explore

Of course, this question itself is based on whether it can truly help users solve certain pain points. Otherwise, no matter how strong the desire to explore is, it has nothing to do with your product itself.

How to stimulate users’ desire to explore?

1. Is the overall visual performance of the product and the experience of using the process attractive enough? Is there something attractive about the product itself? (The path effect of that year directly sent it to the top of the national craze)
2. Does the product continue to appeal to users? In the early stages of a product, you can only stimulate users through various means (product experience optimization, activity intensity, publicity methods, concessions and profit sharing, etc.), but it should be noted that excessive marketing does not mean effective stimulation.
3. Is the product's task flow setting reasonable? Normally, tasks are set from simple to complex. Due to the user's silent cost, after completing certain tasks, they will settle down and gradually become loyal users of the product.

Mobike products require users to fill in personal information first, and then prompt them to recharge the deposit at the end. From the user's perspective, since you have already sold your personal information to the platform, do you still care about the 200-plus yuan? Otherwise, you can ask him to try the process in reverse, charging the money first, then filling in the information. I guarantee that not many people will use it.

The process setting is like a hook, slowly hooking the user.

3. Retention

1. Retention of active users

For active users, they will become loyal users of the product because of the need to constantly solve their pain points.

What kind of experience do these product users want? What experience makes them settle down and become grassroots users of the product?

This can be considered from two perspectives:

(1) Product design activities: Of course, as products have evolved to date, activities have almost been ruined by various companies.

We roughly categorize it into the following categories:

For example: attracting users to participate in activities regularly (daily check-in, participation in activity plans, etc.) can effectively promote user activity. However, there are certain risks, because for the sign-in and clock-in rewards, you must persist every day, assuming that it is interrupted due to an emergency one day. For the user, he has to start all over again from scratch. Too high a cost will directly lead to user loss.

Attract users to participate in activities from time to time (festival-related activities, a specific event suitable for product activities, etc.). This part of the participation experience does not require users to develop long-term participation, but rather is immediate and contingent. You will see that many products are holding events to cater to an upcoming festival, which will explode your circle of friends , thereby activating old users and attracting new users.

(2) Adding community functions to products: that is, to improve the experience of relationships between users. If a product wants to be monetized and expand, it will almost certainly transform into a community in the end. The era of acquiring traffic has passed, and now is the era of refined user operations.

Finally, the product's users will be consolidated into a strong relationship chain. If you look at the market, you will find that most products are moving in this direction. People-scene-people, acquire users through traffic, operate users through scenes, and then keep the product burning continuously through the accumulation of human relationships.

2. Activation of Silent Users

These users need to be activated through some means. Doing a good job in the experience will allow you to maximize the effect at the lowest cost.

First we need to classify silent users and hit the key points. The silent user group is generally divided into three categories: those who have no particularly strong demand for use, those who have demand but have forgotten about the product, and those who have no relevant demand for use at all.

Then the first two categories are the users we need to activate. Now that we have found them, the next step is how to activate them. Activation is divided into active activation and passive activation.

1. Active activation is simple, and you’ll see it every day through promotional offers, push notifications, and SMS messages to stimulate users to change their minds. There is a lot to say about push and SMS, such as when to push, what to push, and how often to push. (I won’t go into details here; friends who want to know more can find a lot of information on this topic on the Internet.)
2. Passive activation is to encourage these users to generate demand by creating specific scenarios. How to understand it? By injecting huge amounts of capital, finding cooperative enterprises, and customizing specific scenarios, which can be offline activities , etc., by rendering the atmosphere, this demand is generated in a fixed scenario, guiding this part of users to use the product.

4. REVENUE

Only when there is a sufficient user base can most products start to monetize. The most important thing in the monetization process is: how to do our best to increase conversion?

1. After the new product is launched, free trials and coupons are provided

When launching new products, most companies use bombardment-style discounts to quickly seize the market. It is absolutely true that time is life. Luckin Coffee , Ele.me , Meituan Taxi, Didi, etc., without exception, are all supported by capital and quickly cultivate user groups and user habits through a money-burning model. Once the habit is formed, then, haha, start reaping the benefits.

2. Is the monetization experience path within the product good enough?

There are many ways to monetize within the product. Advertising space rental income, product purchase conversion, and premium service purchase conversion. In the conversion experience, the most important thing is whether the payment and purchase process is simple enough. After all, the best way is to complete the conversion through the shortest path. One more step means one more loss.

3. Whether the app can continue to attract users after completing the specified path and operation

In other words, after a single user completes a conversion, are certain measures taken to enable the user to achieve a second or third conversion?

Because the cost of acquiring old users is much lower than that of acquiring new users, general products will distribute discounts again after the user completes the conversion. Meituan and Ele.me will share red envelopes when users complete their orders, encouraging them to use the products again. Of course, if the product/service that users pay for is good enough, then users will naturally use it again.

5. Dissemination (REFER)

Dissemination is an important step in expanding your product from point to surface, and it can be positive or negative. People have become new channels for sharing and communication. It no longer matters whether users are communicators or marketers. What matters is the personal endorsement of mutual trust during the sharing process. For the communicator, the more he shares, the more he gains.

1. Forward Propagation

Forward propagation is:

1. In certain situations, groups or individuals just happen to have pain points that need to be solved by this product. Then you will be happy to effectively share what you think is the best product.
2. When you use a product and it really impresses you, as a product fanatic, you will also share the product.
3. Spread and share to get discounts, the more you share, the more you get, invite friends to get coupons, invite friends to help you complete tasks, etc.

2. Negative Propagation

Of course, there are both positive and negative communication, and communication is hijacked by interpersonal relationships. For example: Back then, forward this message to different groups, otherwise you would die XXXX.

The platform is suspected of defrauding consumers and causing losses to users in certain aspects. As long as the product developer starts to use improper means to gain wealth, it will bring devastating damage to the product, and the trust built up by users will be completely shattered, and the product will be pushed down by everyone.

Conclusion

Most people can become great designers and great product managers . There is a so-called routine for everything. When you are familiar with the routines of a certain industry or multiple industries. You will look at problems from a higher perspective, and you will also go further and faster than others.

The so-called routine is based on the individual, and you may have a good mentor who can tell you about past experiences. But I think that routine is the continuous summary and generalization through seemingly clumsy efforts step by step.

The above content is the viewpoints I have summarized over and over again. Different people have different opinions. I hope you can correct me if there are any shortcomings.

The author of this article @OTT-seven compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games