How to improve user acquisition and retention?

As the Internet's demographic dividend becomes smaller and smaller, the cost of attracting new users through public domain traffic is getting higher and higher. Major companies have turned to private domain traffic. Attracting and retaining users has become a universal problem. We can think about how to attract new users? What does retention depend on?

The author believes that the focus of attracting new users is still to consider user favorability, while retention requires operations staff to have a deep understanding and analysis of users.

Well, we can start from these two points.

1. Improve user experience

There is a formula in behavioral science: B (behavior) = M (motivation) * A (ability) * T (trigger).

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Whether a user can produce expected behavior depends mainly on three factors: motivation, ability and trigger. That is to say, the stronger the user's motivation, the weaker the ability required to achieve the goal, the more obvious the trigger mechanism, and the higher the possibility of the user producing the behavior.

When it comes to attracting new customers, we can divide it into three aspects: "how to make users motivated to use the product", "how to reduce the difficulty of use for users", and "how to stimulate user feedback" to improve user favorability.

1. Motivate users to use the app

When designing functional points of a product, we must not think about "what kind of technology do I have", but rather we must stand from the user's perspective and think about "what needs does he have". The demand points must be clear. We can add many functional points based on the demand points, but the functional points must only serve users, not solve needs.

For example, an app dedicated to making friends, the demand is to make friends. In order to meet this demand and to make it easier for users to use, we can add "live broadcast", "people nearby", etc., but if the function points are too complicated, it may make users feel that they "don't know why they are using it", which will cause the loss of target users.

2. Reduce the difficulty of use for users

With the motivation to use, the most important thing is to reduce the difficulty of use for users. Many SaaS companies have this function. For example, in the process of new user registration, compared with the method of asking users to manually enter their mobile phone numbers and verification codes, users do not need to enter their mobile phone numbers and can quickly complete registration/login with one click (or after the user enters the mobile phone number, it automatically verifies the consistency with the current local card number without sending a text message verification code). This can effectively improve the user registration conversion rate and ensure that user data is not leaked.

3. Stimulate user feedback

It usually refers to stimulating a certain reaction in users due to being touched. In order to attract users, the triggering methods chosen by operations colleagues mainly include payment, benefits, subsidies, etc., which involves how to fully reach users with these messages.

SMS marketing, which has the advantages of low price, fast dissemination, and simple push operation, has become the preferred operation method. Our common SMS marketing is a marketing copy of no more than 70 words + a short link.

2. Optimize user stratification labels

User retention is an issue that almost all products need to focus on. The higher the retention rate, the greater the user value. Doing a good job of user portrait analysis is a key step in improving retention rate. According to the user life cycle, stratifying and labeling users in the early stage of the product will be of great use for operations, later awakening and recall.

The refined operations that have been talked about in recent years require operations staff to conduct profiling and stratification of users.

For example, a financial management software will infer your financial management preferences based on your browsing history and the time you stay on the page. This is the user portrait in the background; what is stratification? It is to further differentiate users based on the portrait.

Let's take the financial management software as an example. The background has already classified you into the group of "people who can use funds", but there are many types of funds. Which one to push to you depends on how you usually divide your investments. If you often buy funds of around 1,000 yuan, the background label will be "weak investment intention", and small bond funds will be highlighted when push notifications are given to you.

It can be said that the more accurate the user stratification labels are, the easier it is for users to trust them.

There are many different directions for user segmentation. Let us briefly introduce a few.

1. Differentiate based on user value

Usually in community products, there will be officials, KOLs (key opinion leaders), KOCs (key opinion consumers), ordinary active users, and silent users. Operations staff will assign corresponding roles and rights based on the value generated by each level of users to build a healthy relationship.

In non-community products, stratified labels will be created based on user usage frequency and willingness to pay.

• For users with high willingness to pay and high usage frequency, we give priority to payment; for users with low willingness to pay but high usage frequency, we can generate traffic and use the usage behavior of this group of people to attract traffic;
• For users who have a high willingness to pay but low usage frequency, what we need to consider is optimizing the product to encourage these users to become high-frequency paying users.

2. Differentiate by RFM model

The RFM model is an important tool and means to measure customer value and customer profitability. It describes the customer's value status through three indicators: Recency (distance to the most recent transaction), Frequency (consumption frequency), and Monetary (consumption amount).

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Based on this model, we can divide users into more detailed categories:

R (time interval) small + F (consumption frequency) high + M (consumption amount) large = important to keep customers

This group of users are the main consumers, and the needs of users labeled as such must be met.

R (time interval) is large + F (consumption frequency) is high + M (consumption amount) is large = important value customers

These users are loyal users and need to be awakened in time by operations staff.

R (time interval) small + F (consumption frequency) low + M (consumption amount) large = important customer retention

This group of users still have a certain willingness to consume the product, and must be retained from a product perspective.

R (time interval) is large + F (consumption frequency) is low + M (consumption amount) is large = important development customers

These users are potential users and should be developed as a priority.

R (time interval) is large + F (consumption frequency) is high + M (consumption amount) is small = average value customer

Most of these users are demand-oriented, and operations staff can attract them by adding new features.

R (time interval) large + F (consumption frequency) low + M (consumption amount) small = general development customers

These users may not be the target users of the product.

R (time interval) is small + F (consumption frequency) is low + M (consumption amount) is small = general customer retention

These users have just used the product and may be willing to continue using it, so we need to do a good job of retaining them.

R (time interval) small + F (consumption frequency) high + M (consumption amount) small = generally retain customers

This group of users should account for the vast majority of product usage, so user retention should be done well.

The RFM model can dynamically display the entire profile of the user, which provides a basis for personalized communication and services.

Operations colleagues can choose appropriate models for analysis based on different products. Only by identifying the user groups of key products can we further optimize the products and improve the retention rate.

Author: Beibeijun

Source: Beibeijun