How to design new product invitation activities to promote products themselves (Part 1)

This article is a summary of the results of a user research team's efforts to help the operations team improve their operations indicators, based on user experience evaluation, competitive product analysis , desk research, etc. The value of user research is not just to meet the individual needs of the business side and complete a project perfectly, but to cross-border learning to continuously accumulate solutions and paradigms for similar needs/problems.

Attracting new customers is one of the core goals of operations. New customer acquisition can be divided into external channel acquisition and product self-propagation acquisition. The former includes offline promotion , paid advertising, SEO / ASO , new media operations , post promotion , events, etc., while the latter includes product experience word-of-mouth, function sharing, event incentives, etc.

The strategies for attracting new customers through the two channels are constantly changing at different stages of the entire life cycle of Internet products. In short, in the early stages of a product’s launch, attracting new customers through external channels requires casting a wide net and testing the effectiveness and ROI of different channels. The product mainly relies on word-of-mouth communication and feature sharing from seed users . When a product enters a rapid growth stage, attracting new customers through external channels will focus on several key channels, and interest incentives will be added to product self-propagation. When a product enters the middle and late stages of maturity and the number of users reaches a certain scale, investment in attracting new customers through external channels will often decrease. Usually, new customer acquisition activities such as paid advertising are invested in at special times in stages, and more reliance is placed on product self-propagation activities to incentivize attracting new customers, with old customers bringing in new ones. The saved resources are used for refined membership operations.

This article only discusses the scope of product self-propagation and new customer acquisition. It is difficult for an operations person to control the product's self-propagation and new customer acquisition, as this falls within the scope of the product manager 's job. Instead, they should think more about how to design activities and continuously innovate self-propagation functions of the product .

1. How to design a new member invitation activity

Before designing an incentive activity to invite new users to share, there are several points that operations staff need to think about clearly, including:

1. How to design a suitable activity theme or scene;
2. Through what location can we reach users?
3. What incentives do users get from inviting new members?
4. What rules to adopt;
5. What form should be designed?

1. Activity theme/scene

All activities must have a reason, that is, a theme or scene. Event planning requires an organic combination of reason and activity. In the book "Starting Operations from Scratch", the reasons for activities are classified into: time node type , such as holiday theme activities, seasonal activities, and anniversary activities. This type of theme activities are easier to gain user recognition because users have formed habits in traditional business activities; planning based on the product or commodity itself , such as online game server launches, new version launches, etc., e-commerce "TV Festival" and "Refrigerator Festival" for a certain category, travel ticket purchasing platform ticket grabbing support activities, etc.; hot spot type , including social hot spots, entertainment hot spots, and life hot spots, such as World Cup events; self-created hot spots , such as Tmall 's " Double Eleven " and JD 's "618". Please note that this is very difficult. Of course, there is another type that does not involve any scenario, which is to directly invite new users to share .

2. Active contacts

The touch points for inviting new users mainly include long-term fixed positions, advertising positions , service push, temporary pop-up positions combined with the product’s own scenarios, temporary fixed positions, etc. Long-term fixed positions are often found on the product’s “My” or “Personal Center” detail pages. Products that are extremely eager to attract new customers may even set up a separate ICON fixed position on the homepage to invite new customers. The most common advertising location is on the homepage banner, followed by the "My" and "Personal Center" detail pages. Service push is mainly through WeChat official account messages or service notifications (the prerequisite is that users follow your official account ). Temporary pop-up screens and fixed positions combined with product scenarios need to be designed in combination with user usage scenarios.

3. Activity incentives

The reward resources that users who invite new users to share activities mainly include coupons/red envelopes, cash, commission rebates, paid membership rights, prizes, and cross-industry cooperation resource exchanges.

Coupons/red envelopes are the most common incentives. Their advantage is that they can stimulate users to repurchase and the cost of attracting new users is relatively low. However, their disadvantage is that most users are already immune to such activities and the efficiency of attracting new users is low.

The advantage of cash activities is that they can stimulate users to share, and the average number of shares per person and the number of new users attracted are relatively large, but the disadvantage is that the activity cost is high and the risk of being swiped is high.

Commission rebates are often seen in virtual paid income products, such as financial management apps and knowledge payment apps. Their advantage is that user incentives are greater, but there are also problems such as a long redemption cycle and low product acceptance among invitees (such as unwillingness to pay for virtual goods or services).

The advantage of paid membership benefits is that the cost is very low or even zero, such as points/mileage inflation, exclusive green channels, exclusive VIP customer service, etc. The disadvantage is that the incentives are insufficient and are not suitable as a standalone incentive item, and need to be combined with other rewards such as coupons to achieve.

Prizes include physical prizes and virtual prizes ( traffic , phone bills, etc.). The advantage is that it better motivates users, but the purchase and logistics distribution of prizes will lead to higher activity costs.

The advantage of cross-industry cooperation and resource exchange is that the existing users of both brands can be quickly directed to each other, and the cost of attracting new users is reasonable. However, there is also the problem of unequal efficiency in attracting new users on both sides. In addition, it is not easy to find matching cross-industry parties and reach business cooperation.

4. Reward Rules

The reward rules are mainly divided into three categories: basic rewards, cumulative rewards, and ranking rewards. Basic rewards refer to the rewards users receive after sharing an activity with friends; cumulative rewards refer to the cumulative rewards brought by friends' actions (registration, ordering, etc.) after users share an activity with friends; ranking rewards refer to the rewards users receive when they achieve a certain ranking in sharing an activity. These rewards can be used individually or in combination.

5. Activity form

The most common and mainstream form of activity is direct invitation of new members. In addition, there are non-mainstream forms such as sharing, group buying, support, guessing questions, answering questions, checking in, stealing red envelopes, and voice red envelopes.

After mastering the elements of new sharing activities, you can design an activity panel and conduct continuous combination and testing until you find the activity that best suits your product/platform.

Related: How to design a new product invitation campaign to promote your product (Part 1)

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

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