Practical skills + cases | The magic weapon to increase user payment rate: user psychological account

The concept of " psychological account " plays a certain role in the product's payment rate and user stickiness, and its gameplay can be summarized into three steps: defining psychological accounts, positive incentives, and reverse incentives.

No matter how we promote it, users won’t pay. It turns out the problem is the psychological account.

So, what is mental accounting?

"Mental accounting" means:

People will classify their money and keep it in different accounts in their minds. Some are for savings, some are for satisfying vanity, some are for maintaining relationships, and so on. And what’s interesting is that different accounts perceive prices differently.

Therefore, no matter how expensive the product is or how discounted it is, if users are not willing to pay for it, then there is a high probability that there is something wrong with the product’s psychological account settings.

An example:

A can of beer that used to cost 8 yuan a can costs 10 yuan if you buy it today. How do you feel inside? Will you buy it again?

But if you are drinking the same beer at a bar with your friends and it costs 20 bucks a can, how would you feel? Will you buy it?

Concept and application:

So in practice, how does mental accounting help marketing ? For marketing, psychological accounts are about grasping two directions:

• Positive incentives: Make the user's mental account feel that the purchase is a good deal, so the user will pay for it;
• Reverse incentive: Make a user's psychological account feel that a certain behavior will cause losses to his or her account, so that the user's behavior can be effectively managed.

What cases of mental accounting are worth learning from?

Case 1: Convenience store membership card

introduce:

The membership card of FamilyMart convenience store is full of tricks.

Let’s take a look first:

• The FamilyMart Collection Card is free, and you can earn 1 point for every 1 yuan spent; the FamilyMart Premium Card requires an annual fee of 100 yuan, and you can earn 2 points for every 1 yuan spent.
• With the free membership card, you can earn 200 points at a time by buying certain designated types of bread, while the exclusive card will give you an additional 100 points on top of the 200 points.
• And the machine-printed receipt will show the number of points and the number of extra points.
• FamilyMart’s points can be used as money.

analyze:

This actually belongs to the positive incentive mentioned above. Let’s focus on the exclusive card that requires an annual fee of 100 yuan:

(1) Rational analysis:

The 100-yuan exclusive card can accumulate twice as many points as a free card. So when the points are used as money, it means you are enjoying a discount that is 1 times higher than a free card.

Then this 100 yuan can actually be included in the discount as cost. However, if users think this way, the exclusive cards will not be sold.

(2) Analysis based on mental accounting:

I eat work meals at FamilyMart every day, and this 100 yuan is entirely an investment in work meals. So it's worth it. I spent 100 yuan and got 2 times the points, which is a good deal. Therefore, the psychological account of this work meal makes users honestly pay for the 100 yuan.

It’s not over yet. You’ve spent 100 yuan. Are you embarrassed to go to FamilyMart only once a month? Wouldn't that be a huge loss? The 100 yuan also effectively improves user stickiness. If users do not shop at FamilyMart frequently, they will feel a sense of loss, which in turn utilizes the negative incentives of the psychological account.

Interested friends can take a look. Amazon ’s Prime membership, which costs 388 yuan per year, has the same gameplay as the FamilyMart Premium Card.

Case 2: Alipay Wish Savings

introduce:

In Alipay’s Yu’ebao, there is a function called Wish Savings. The function is like this: set a wish for yourself, such as a trip, and then enter the target wish amount.

Set whether you want to save weekly or monthly, and how many installments you need to save to fulfill your dream. The money will be transferred from your bank card to Yu'e Bao at a fixed time in each cycle.

analyze:

Taking the financial product Yu'ebao as an example, merchants do not want the liquidity of users' money on the platform to be too strong. That is to say, I hope you don’t withdraw the money just after you deposit a little. So how can we reduce the liquidity of the money users deposit into Yu'e Bao?

Analysis based on mental accounting:

Psychological account, users define their own wishes, is actually a function provided by Alipay to users, allowing users to define their own psychological accounts.

If the psychological account is for traveling at the end of the year, the user will not easily touch the money in this account. Because of the loss of this money, users will feel a sense of loss. This is the reverse incentive mentioned above, so that Yu'ebao can effectively manage user behavior and thus reduce the liquidity of deposits.

Other examples:

Mental accounting is prevalent in marketing across all industries:

• "I won't accept any gifts this year, the only gift I'll accept is Melatonin." Well, Melatonin is expensive, and it is not for personal consumption, but for giving as gifts during the Chinese New Year. Therefore, it belongs to the psychological account of emotional maintenance. It seems quite cost-effective when you think about it this way.
• “If you love him/her, take him/her to eat Haagen-Dazs.” Haagen-Dazs is expensive, not for you to eat as ice cream in a hot day, but for you to eat it with the one you love. It belongs to the psychological account of emotional maintenance, and it doesn’t seem expensive when you think about it this way.
• Why does the demolition of urban villages create countless local tycoons, and why do these local tycoons like to squander the money they get? Because this is unexpected money and is not placed in the rich man’s psychological savings account.

Mental accounting is applied to marketing, what are the specific methods?

Based on the above concepts and cases, I would like to refine mental accounting into a method template that can be used right away.

The method can be broken down into 3 steps:

• Define user psychological accounts: Common psychological accounts include: savings account, change account, emotional maintenance account, charity account, and vanity account. Of course, it is not limited to these psychological accounts. Defining user psychological accounts means letting users know why they come to your store to consume. For example, if you tell users that the reason they come to your store is because they are thirsty and want to drink water, then if you sell a bottle of water for 10 yuan, few people will pay.
• Positive incentives to complete user payment: The purpose of positive incentives is to make users feel that the consumption is very cost-effective under the defined psychological account. Once again, feeling like a good deal is different from actually being a good deal. Please use your imagination here.
• Reverse incentives improve user stickiness: The purpose of reverse incentives is to improve user stickiness when users have completed consumption, thereby increasing user repurchase rate. The general approach is to stimulate users' sense of loss.

Thinking about products

If the product is the result, then demand is the cause. But if demand becomes the result, what is the cause? When we continue to examine cause and effect, you will find that this kind of thinking brings the product manager 's thinking into a deeper dimension.

Thinking about cause and effect:

Back to the concept of mental accounts: Alipay and FamilyMart are both results at the final product level. Let's think deeply about it, taking Alipay Wish Savings as an example:

When the result is: Alipay Yu'ebao launched the wish savings function; then the cause is: the liquidity of Yu'ebao savings needs to be reduced. When reducing capital liquidity becomes a result, the cause will be: because users have psychological accounts.

This reasoning is a bit convoluted, but I think that making products is a process from effect to cause, while the natural world is a process from cause to effect.

For example, because it snowed today, I didn’t drive to work today; because I didn’t drive to work, I was late for work.

Returning to the product, it is a process of deducing from effect to cause. Because you have a desired result, you have to find the core reason that can lead to this result.

So, when I need to reduce liquidity, I know very well that I should plan my products based on that factor, that is, the mental account.

Summarize

Today I shared the concept of "mental account", which plays a certain role in the product's payment rate and user stickiness. The gameplay of this psychological account can be summarized into three steps: define the psychological account; positive incentives; reverse incentives.

Mental Accounting:

• The help to operations is: it can play a role in the planning of activities;
• The help to the product is: it allows us to grasp the cause and effect and have rules to follow when iterating product functions.

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

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