Case practice: How can lottery activities attract users?

Last night, there was a very interesting discussion.

My senior sister works in an Internet company and is currently working on the promotion and operations of an event. Like many companies’ promotional methods, they chose a lottery. However, I was stuck on the rhetoric for the lottery.

• A: Three red envelopes of 66 yuan, 100 yuan and 388 yuan per person are waiting for you!
• B: Red envelopes worth 66 – 388 yuan per person are waiting for you!

Ps: The winning rate of this lottery is not 100%.

Shortly after the question was raised, many people chose B.

Here are the reasons:

• The difference between 66 and 100 in A is very small. If it was B, I think I could get at least 200.
• B feels that he can get multiple grades such as 120-150-180.
• A has only three possibilities, but B feels that everything is possible. The greater the unknown, the more exciting it is!

In fact, the lottery is not that simple .

1. User experience in lucky draw

A lottery is a method in which sellers give prizes to buyers by drawing lots, and is a means for merchants to attract customers. Therefore, the essence of a lottery is an interactive marketing campaign . The criterion for measuring its success does not lie in how many prizes are given out or simply in attracting traffic - rather, it lies in brand exposure, which is a means of maintaining the relationship between the brand and users.

Therefore, at a higher level, it is the consumer's favorability towards the brand.

This is not difficult to understand. When the prizes are extremely generous, users will naturally participate. However, after users pay a certain cost, the final expected result is far from what they actually get, so their favorability towards the brand will inevitably be greatly reduced.

For example: the very familiar Alipay Five Blessings Collection is also a lottery in form. When Alipay first launched the Five Blessings Collection, “missing one” caused Alipay to be criticized by everyone for the entire year.

The marketing department of Alipay ignored the fact that the Spring Festival red envelopes were meant to bring " good luck ", and in the end, one of the five blessings was missing, which made many people, especially the elders, feel very uncomfortable and unlucky.

Of course, many people put in a lot of effort but in the end didn’t get the so-called “dedication blessing”, and the user experience was very poor. Such activities gain exposure, but not so much word of mouth.

The second time, Alipay learned its lesson and set the probability of drawing each "Fu" to be equal. Through AR , watering the Ant Forest, etc., it was very easy to collect all five blessings. Although not much was shared in the end, it was also a case of both exposure and word of mouth.

Therefore, we say that as a marketing activity , lottery needs to consider two aspects:

1. Let more people participate and increase brand exposure. Here we need to consider the psychological impact of the lottery in the minds of users and the intensity of the user experience of the lottery.
2. How to increase users’ favorability toward a brand during a lucky draw. Here we need to consider the user's lottery experience. In the following, I will use the tolerance range between the user's expectations and actual experience to intuitively reflect the user's favorability towards the event.

2. Certainty and Uncertainty

Regarding certainty and uncertainty, I have already analyzed it in my previous article "Dependence and addiction are two different things." If you want to make a good product, you should try to tell users the goals they can achieve, and let them feel the surprise brought by uncertainty at all times within a reasonable range.

In fact, the same principle applies to lotteries. If participants know that they will definitely win a prize, then the excitement can be increased through different probabilities. Then, this lottery event should be very popular.

But the reality is: sweepstakes activities often have too little certainty and too much uncertainty. Combined with the questions raised at the beginning of our article, the winning rate of this event is not 100%.

The uncertainty of A = the uncertainty of whether to win + the three possibilities of winning (66, 100, 388)

B's uncertainty = uncertainty of winning + 322 possibilities of winning (66 to 388)

We found that compared to A, users have higher expectations for B (assuming that users believe that the merchant will only let most people get 66 yuan) .

If the user sees A, then the user will think that the maximum possible amount he or she can get is 66 yuan. If it is B, then the user feels that he may get 66, 67 or even more.

Of course, merchants are not that stupid. I believe that users who frequently use WeChat Pay’s shake function know that after shaking the phone, they can often only get 0.1 yuan even if they say it’s a free meal.

So from the merchant's perspective, if you choose B, in order to meet the user's small expectations, you must increase the amount to a certain extent. If the merchant does not take into account the increase in costs and the user still only gets 66 yuan, then it can be said that the disappointment is even greater. This is the issue of user expectations that will be mentioned later.

To sum up, based on the analyzed issues, the uncertainty of the lottery increases the excitement of the lottery process. However, too much uncertainty in B can easily lead to the accumulation of costs, which will ultimately lead to excessively high user expectations and reduced user experience. Therefore, from the perspective of the enterprise, option A brings higher certainty and lower cost.

3. Intensity and cost of lottery activities

In Tencent Product Law, there is a tool diagram for demand analysis (as shown below), which is simply a formula:

Product Strength = Experience – Cost

If we think of the sweepstakes as products designed to be drawn, the same formula applies. Its essence is to increase the attractiveness of the activity to users. According to the formula, we know that the core issues are “how to improve product experience” and “how to reduce possible obstacles costs”.

When I was considering Plan A or Plan B, I subconsciously asked: How can I participate in the lottery?

The other party replied: You only need to forward the Weibo to enter the lottery. The forwarding of Weibo mentioned here is the "cost" of the user's action.

If the winning rate of this activity is 100%, that is, as long as a user forwards it, he will get at least 66 yuan, then the company will definitely lose a lot of money. As a business, it will definitely encourage users to forward, comment, collect likes, invite friends to download the APP, etc.

Since the winning rate of this activity is not 100%, the cost of user participation is low, so the user's psychological expectations will naturally be lowered. Combined with the initial analysis, option A is still the better choice. Because expectations are low to begin with, A does not need to incur additional costs to meet user expectations.

For example, after you shake the WeChat payment app and get 0.1 yuan countless times, your expectations will probably be lowered. Suddenly, if he gives you a free meal and you get a surprise, this experience is extremely good. Therefore, don’t give users too high expectations. That’s the truth.

Someone asked, if I only get one cent every time, and my expectations are getting lower and lower, will anyone continue to shake after paying with WeChat?

I said, of course I would. Compared to the ten cents I get on the street, I would rather accept the ten cents WeChat gives me. Because the costs are different: the cost of getting 0.1 by shaking WeChat = the cost of exerting strength to shake; the cost of getting 0.1 on the road = the cost of bending down + the risk cost of being laughed at + the cost of having nowhere to put it, etc.

Therefore, I would rather choose WeChat’s one cent because the cost is negligible.

4. What is the user’s tolerance limit?

You may ask, it’s just a lottery, why think so much about it, as long as many people participate. However, many sweepstakes activities only focus on how many people participate, but ignore the user's subjective feelings - user experience.

In the previous article, a word was mentioned many times: user expectations . The driving force behind sweepstakes activities is user expectations.

Some scholars use the double E factor quantitative model to analyze the relationship between a product's user experience and expectations. We can see that the white area in the above figure is the gap between expectations and experience:

Tolerance domain = user expectations - user experience

The larger the tolerance domain, the worse the user experience is and the product is far from what the user expects. Therefore, between options A and B, the greater the user expectations of option B, the greater the user experience should be (which means that the company may put more effort and cost into the lottery).

When setting up sweepstakes, many operators often consider how to get more users to participate, but ignore user expectations and user experience. The end result is that a lot of money is spent but the result is not appreciated.

Most of the time, lotteries do satisfy the experience of a small number of people (the winners). How to improve the user experience of the majority of people (the long-tail users who did not win prizes) is also something that product operators need to consider.

The above is some understanding about “lottery”. If there are any mistakes, I hope you can point them out.

The author of this article @洪光平 is 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