Experience summary | Building a user incentive system for your own APP from scratch

Recently, the company’s new product has begun planning to build a user incentive system for the app in order to allow users to stay on the app longer and retain the users that have been hard to attract.

It has been a year since I took up this responsibility again in a relatively systematic way, and there are still some details that need to be reviewed. So, I have recently studied the incentive systems of many platforms. Each different type of app has its own unique user incentive system, such as a social level medal system, an e-commerce point system , etc. Most apps combine incentive methods such as the point system, medal system, and level system. Therefore, many times when you are creating an incentive system for an app, you must also understand the positioning and target audience of your product in advance.

This article will tell you how to build your own app’s incentive system from scratch, and this construction from scratch will talk more about team coordination and many problems encountered by yourself.

What is the user incentive system?

Simply put, it is a set of tools that stimulate your desire to use the product in order to enable users to use it for a longer period of time. This user incentive system will follow a virtuous cycle of reward goal → effort → reward → satisfaction and feedback from satisfaction to effort.

This user incentive system includes a level system, a medal system, a points system, a membership system, etc. These incentive methods are also frequently used by many apps. They can be used alone or in combination. It depends on the type of your app and its business positioning. Don't do it just for the sake of doing it. Such a user incentive system is actually just a formality.

The purpose of building a user incentive system is also very clear, and this is also what we need to clarify when building the incentive mechanism of the app. I mainly summarize it into the following three points:

1. Retention

There is no doubt that the current Internet demographic dividend period has passed, and the cost of acquiring customers has increased significantly, so partners who are now doing operations need to be very clear that it is better to retain 100 new users than to attract 1,000 new users. Because no matter how good your operation and promotion capabilities are, you will not be able to retain users if your product design mechanism is not perfect. So many times the first thing I do when I go to a company is to look at yesterday’s retention and churn rates.

2. Increase user page dwell time

Why do tool-type products need to create a community? The reason is very simple. You are just a tool. You are used when needed and can disappear when not needed. I would like to ask which app is willing to be played around by users like this? When it wants me, it thinks of me, and when it doesn’t want me, it completely ignores me, just like Ink Weather . Even if you want 1.3 billion users, I believe advertisers will not be willing to invest in you.

3. Increase user activity

The activity rate is actually a key indicator of an app. Without this indicator, you won’t know what behaviors your users have on the app, and whether these behaviors are sufficient to support a virtuous cycle for the entire community. A very important point of the incentive mechanism is that it can activate all actions in the app, including likes, comments, replies, rewards, etc.

What do you need to do before building a user incentive system for your own app?

Let me just say one point! Nowadays, every field and industry has corresponding apps to meet everyone's needs. There is Didi for travel, Meituan for food delivery, Toutiao for information, Douyu for live streaming , Meitu for photography, etc. So if you say that your app is unique, no one will believe you.

Therefore, the app you make will definitely have competitors. This is the current situation of the proliferation of apps on the Chinese Internet . Therefore, when we are building our incentive system, we must analyze how our competitors’ products are built. Here are two suggestions for you:

1. First, you need to select competitors that are ranked high in the industry by default . For example, if I make a food delivery app, my competitors will definitely be Meituan, Ele.me , and Baidu Takeout, which I heard is now being sold. Needless to say, because they are the leaders in the industry, since they are in the leading position, they must have excellent aspects that we can learn from. So it is necessary to select industry benchmarks.
2. After selecting your competitors, don’t start imitating or copying them, but analyze their pros and cons. How to analyze it? First, you can make an assumption: if this app does not have this mechanism, can it still survive? The second question is what are their shortcomings? Is to find their flaws.

Now you can build a user incentive system for your own products. How do you build it?

Here, I will not say too much about the points system and medal system, and then post a few case studies. These articles are already available on many platforms, so I will not go into details here. At this point, someone might say that how to build this system is the focus of this article. If you don’t say that, then what do you want to say?

By the way, this is the key point I want to talk about now.

Many of our operators now do not know how to actually operate and implement the user incentive system when building it? For example, I need to communicate with the product, what should I do after the communication? If this is your first time doing this, it can be said that no one has written an article to teach you, so let me talk about this step.

• The first thing you need to do is decide on a plan. After you have analyzed the situation of competing products and based on your own product positioning, you should start writing a plan. This plan does not need to be complete, but the general framework must be there. This plan may include purpose, product function analysis, user behavior , psychological analysis of the target group, encouraged behavior, etc. This is what you need to have a general idea in mind.
• Then, what you need to do is to take the plan and communicate with your closest product . At this time, finding a product actually has one purpose, which is to confirm whether these functions can be realized and the impact of their realization on the entire product mechanism. Another point that needs to be made clear when communicating with the product is whether this user incentive mechanism will have an impact on the business of the entire product and whether it will be helpful for your subsequent event operations . These are all things you need to think clearly about. Once you have decided to do it, you cannot change the mechanism casually. After you finish communicating with your product, the product will discuss implementation issues with the technology, and you have to follow up at this time.
• After the product is launched, the incentive system needs to be tested. At this time, you and the product need to always pay attention to user behavior, because some points or medals may have defects. At this time, you need to follow up in time to find problems and make timely adjustments so that this mechanism can be applied to all users of the platform as soon as possible.

A very important point in building a user system is to never do it just for the sake of doing it. There must be a reason for every behavior encouragement, for example, I need to set up a sign-in function. What can I bring to users by setting up this sign-in function and will the platform be better with this function? These all need to be done in conjunction with product business.

Many apps nowadays are not active, not because their promotion capabilities are not good, but because they have not figured out the logic behind it. They want users to be active in your app, which is simply deceiving themselves!

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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