Behind Alipay's "Collect Five Blessings" activity during the Spring Festival, there are actually some "little tricks" behind the operation

Alipay has once again launched the "Collect Five Blessings" campaign, and this time its uncreative gameplay was mercilessly mocked by netizens - running out of ideas, being lazy, and trying to be a monkey...

However, is this “collecting five blessings” really as superficial as netizens complain about? This article will uncover the surface of this event and help you understand Alipay’s little tricks this year.

Alipay’s official WeChat account announced the rules for this year’s Five Blessings event. The event will start at 00:00 on February 6 and end at 00:00 on February 15, with prize draws taking place at 22:18 on New Year’s Eve. 500 million yuan will be randomly allocated to users who have collected all five blessings, with amounts ranging from 1.08 yuan to 666 yuan.

In a blink of an eye, Alipay’s Five Blessings Collection activity has entered its third year.

In 2016, Alipay launched the "Five Blessings" campaign for the first time, where players who collected five blessing cards could share 200 million yuan. In the end, the 790,000 winners shared 215 million yuan in cash, with each person receiving 271.66 yuan. Because the number of winners was too small, netizens were full of criticism.

In 2017, Alipay lowered the standard for obtaining "Jingyefu", and the red envelopes were changed from "equally divided" to "random". In the end, the number of winners increased from 790,000 in 2016 to 168 million, with each person receiving less than 1.2 yuan on average. This time, Alipay was criticized again because the winning amount was too small.

For this year's Five Blessings Collection activity, Alipay has learned its lesson. On the one hand, it has increased the prize money from 200 million to 500 million. On the other hand, it will launch two new channels for collecting blessings on February 8 and February 11 respectively - the mini -games "Ant Farm" and "Ant Forest".

Ant Farm Collection

Ant Forest Collection

The naked temptation of money in the past has been covered with the hazy veil of games this year. What are the considerations of the Alipay operation team behind the changes in the gameplay of Ji Fu?

First, let’s take a look at what these two games look like.

1) Ant Farm

Ant Farm is a chicken farm and there is a little chick of yours in it. This little chicken only does two things every day - eat feed and complain of hunger.

After eating, it will lay an egg with a heart printed on it.

What’s so fun about such a simple game?

First of all, this chick looks so cute that you can’t help but take care of it (see the traveling frog). But more importantly, after collecting 5 love eggs, you can make a charity donation. So, you are not only playing games, you are also doing charity .

So, there is only one question left - where does the chicken feed come from? Just click the "Get Feed" button and complete the required actions. ( Please note that this setting is very important)

This game also has functions for interacting with friends. For example, you can rank with your friends to see who has donated the most.

Another way to interact with friends is that if one’s chickens are not full, they will run to their friends’ houses to steal feed.

2) Ant Forest

Ant Forest is a tree-planting game. By completing prescribed actions in the game (pay attention, there are prescribed actions), you can gain green energy.

If you accumulate enough green energy, you can turn the small tree in the game into a real big tree in the desert.

Like Ant Farm, there are many ways to interact with friends.

To sum up, there are two major similarities between " Ant Farm" and "Ant Forest":

① The required behavior needs to be completed;

②You can interact with friends.

Alibaba is the company with the strongest operations. Behind every red envelope they send out, there is a very strong operational value system planning, and it is not just superficial to please/cater to users.

Within a month after the 2017 red envelope war , the number of users of Ant Forest exceeded 100 million and is still growing. The growth system of planting trees and raising chickens provides sufficient user stickiness. The original weak relationship of the payment tool has become a strong relationship of the development game. Therefore, Alipay has also gained the DAU and MAU that it has long sought, and increased the trigger volume of key effective behaviors mentioned in Alipay's "Ant Forest Guide" , such as subway travel, online payment, online ticket purchase, green office, bus, green package, etc. Placement games such as Ant Forest have become an effective tool for Alipay to improve user activity and loyalty to a certain extent.

As the demographic dividend of mobile Internet disappears and new user growth becomes difficult, Internet companies have collectively turned their attention to cultivating user retention and loyalty. In the past, guidance that could be completed with simple text (such as the user growth guidance of Baidu Encyclopedia in the figure below) now needs to be packaged in a gamified way.

With "The Traveling Frog" sweeping the WeChat Moments , and Alipay pushing Ant Forest and Ant Farm, it is foreseeable that in 2018, many high -traffic products will be launched in succession to develop and place games, in order to achieve the operational goals of guiding new users and increasing user activity in the user life cycle in a scenario-based manner.

The author of this article @雷雷 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