The three major responsibilities of operators: attracting new customers, converting customers, and extending the life cycle

Operations can transform you into a wedding night at the Civil Affairs Bureau, but it cannot bring about a happy marriage... The author of this article will combine his own experience to share with you the three major responsibilities of an operator in a popular and profound way. enjoy~

Reality: 80% of operations are focused on retention .

This is wrong and is the reason why operators are underpaid. Operations are linked to business value, products are linked to user value. Asking operators to focus on retention is counterproductive and will accelerate the death of the product. Who will give you a high salary then?

I wrote an article a few days ago, which was an in-depth analysis of the relationship between products and operations: he scolds me at you, you scold him at me, and I scold you at him. I think the best way is for everyone to do their job. Therefore, I put forward the three major responsibilities of operators in the "Practical Operation Guide": attracting new customers , conversion, and extending the life cycle . No retention.

Why? Many people asked me, and I joked: It is a consensus in the industry that under the pressure of high KPIs , operators have long become the "king of routines."

Just a joke. This article provides a detailed interpretation from three aspects, from which you will find that I really cannot let operations be responsible for retention. However, 80% of operators in the industry have been working for 3 years and still cannot find the trick to get a high salary. The reason is that the retention pool can never be expanded, and what you are doing is the core business of a product manager .

This article outlines:

1. What is real operation? Once you understand this, you won’t treat operation as operation.

2. What is "retained user"? Many people are not clear about the concept of retention pool.

3. Based on the above two points, interpret the three major responsibilities of the operator.

1. What is real operation?

To understand the concept of operations, we need to start with what operations departments do in reality. Take my career experience for example. From 2008 to now, I have worked in operations in four companies.

My first job was in online education . I was affiliated with the online marketing department. The highest leader was the operations director , and there was no operations manager position. The online marketing department is divided into four groups based on work content: SEO group, online editing group, design group and planning group (which is further divided into online event planning and offline event planning). I am the website editor, and I also serve as a product manager and online promoter (I have always regarded the web editor position as a product manager). I am responsible for the planning of relevant new channels and the execution of low-cost marketing promotions . My achievements at that time were to create two products: planning of new channels and planning of advertising alliance platforms, and by creating content I increased traffic tenfold (now it seems like a vanity metric). The SEO team is responsible for website optimization and data analysis . The design team supports the front-end interaction and visual effects of the web editing team and the planning team. The planning team is responsible for user operations .

My second job was working for an IT vertical portal. It was my first time as an operations manager, affiliated with the product technology department. At that time, the department structure was: the deputy general manager of the business unit was the highest leader, and the department had product groups, technical groups, and design groups. Later, in order to build an SNS community for the IT industry, an operations manager position was set up, and the job fell on me, and from then on, there was an additional operations group. At this time, my job was to build the community from scratch, promote, operate core users, and produce UGC . This is the time I miss the most. We have done a lot of work including online and offline activities, content-based special planning and promotion, and community marketing cooperation and support for major customers.

My third job finally had a dedicated operations department, which was an Internet operations center established by a traditional listed company. At this time, I started to have an official title. I also experienced the competition for performance and the competition for interests. This department is led by the operations director and is composed of a network editing group, a customer service group, and an operations support group. The network editor is responsible for the business contacts of various branches of the company, the customer service group is responsible for receiving IM and 400 telephone business inquiries and conversions, the operation support group is responsible for communicating with the technical department, product department and marketing department, and making optimization opinions and suggestions to various sister departments based on website data.

My fourth job was in recruitment . Actually, I entered the recruitment field by accident. At that time, I joined the company as an online educator and joined a small innovative business team within the organizational structure. Later, due to business failure, we switched to core campus recruitment business. This allowed me to experience the operations of new media , APP and other businesses. At that time, the operations department was scattered, and each project had an operations team. Later, the boss integrated the operations department together without a clear division of labor. It was roughly divided into an operations editing group, a user group, and a channel group. Within the company, the product manager is in charge, with operations managers protecting him and his subordinates doing chores.

It was during my fourth job that my senior leader and I learned the skill of making the best use of less than a small amount of money. I began to study the word "optimization" in depth, and gave what I believe is a unique definition of operations: operations are project-based, with a starting point and an end point, and the key word is tuning variables. This means that operations need to discover the key issues that affect the performance of the ultimate business goals through data analysis, and then find key variables (correlated variables or causal variables), establish projects and coordinate product, technology and other advantages to overcome this problem. Ideally, all variables that affect key business indicators should be adjusted to the appropriate level and finally combined to achieve the goal of automatic and efficient business operation.

This is the definition of operations that I have come up with after years of operational practice and observation, and based on my own professional background.

With this operational definition, have you discovered that, in our concept, retention requires the inheritance and continuation of "love", while a project has a beginning and an end (explained in detail below).

2. What is "retained user"

Let’s continue analyzing the second definition, retaining users.

Let me first state the conclusion. What do I understand by retained users? These are the moments of surprise that have already occurred to them, the hardcore users who consider your product an indispensable part of their daily lives.

To make it easier to understand, let me give you an example from real life.

When you like a beautiful girl or a handsome guy, you will think about attracting them: meeting them for the first time and leaving their WeChat .

Then you "focus on the user" every day, deliberately guiding him/her to discover your good points, transforming the weak relationship into a romantic relationship, and then go to the Civil Affairs Bureau for your wedding night.

After getting the marriage certificate, it’s forever. At this point, he/she is truly your “retained user”. The probability of loss is very small, and the user will be a lifetime member.

The question is, how can we maintain this happy marriage?

The answer is retention.

If you want to stay together for a lifetime without leaving or losing (divorcing), think about it, can you rely on these operating tricks? Three parts water and seven parts solid? Using tricks every day?

Marriage life is full of the realities of life, and one can only rely on product thinking to continuously polish and iterate the relationship between husband and wife. All the operations department can do is to analyze the reasons and conduct targeted recall when a couple has an argument and runs away from home, push a confession letter, organize youth nostalgia activities, etc., try to bring TA back to the marriage retention pool, and help the product extend its life cycle.

Therefore, once you understand what true "retained users" are, you will understand why operations cannot achieve retention. Operations can transform you into a wedding night at the Civil Affairs Bureau, but they cannot achieve the effect of a happy marriage.

Okay, now that you understand what operations are and what user retention is, we will use the AARRR model to briefly explain the three major responsibilities of an operator, which will open your mind.

3. Three major responsibilities of operators

Let’s look at a picture first:

Interpretation: Based on the AARRR model, responsibilities are divided and the acquisition, activation and revenue stages are the main battlefields of operations. During the retention stage, product development is done while operations staff do the chores.

1. Attract new customers

It is easy to understand how to attract new customers: use positioning, delivery, creativity and other means to bait and capture traffic.

In the new customer acquisition stage, there is a word that must be deeply remembered, which is "cost control"

The first question when meeting new members is: How much does it cost for you to acquire one user? The boss likes employees who can achieve great things with little money. Spending small amounts of money means channel costs, and doing big things means the target user scale (note that it is target users here). Once the two indicators are put there, colleagues who attract new users can start work. Don’t be fooled by the students who recruit new students and spend large sums of money at will. They are dancing with shackles. What’s worse is that most of the colleagues who attract new members even skip the task of cost control, because they don’t give you any “cost” at all, leaving you “stealing with nothing”, which is extremely miserable.

How to attract new customers? Let me briefly explain my understanding:

(1) Channel screening

In fact, it is about positioning the relationship. For example, my last name is Han, and yours is also Han, so the relationship is found; your name is Han Li and my name is also Han Li, that’s amazing, our names are like twins, and you are my brother, which immediately brings us closer and establishes a strong relationship.

(2) Design process

The deep meaning of attracting new customers lies in the word "new". Many people, when attracting new customers, just want to lure them in, without caring whether they live or die. This is wrong and is completely KPI-oriented. When I was attracting new members for Xiaomiquan , the most complicated part of the process design was the article content. My articles are very long, and these few days they were all over 10,000 words. In my plan, if you can read my article from beginning to end, I will consider you as my core fan, and you will not lose a large number of fans after joining the secret circle. I put the cost-saving measures on the stage of attracting new users, saving me the cost of recalling silent users. Therefore, the essence of the word "new" in attracting new users is new "retained users" rather than new traffic. When calculating costs, you cannot use UV, registered users, etc., but must measure it based on the standards of retained users.

(3) Self-service new customer acquisition

This is a new concept and there are two approaches. When I was doing online education, I built my own CPS system. Individual webmasters or community owners who wanted to monetize only needed to register on the platform and get a promotion code. If I monitored that user A came from you, I would give you a high commission. This fully mobilized the desire of small and medium-sized webmasters to monetize, and the conversion rate of users attracted was also very high. The other is the sharing recommendation (dissemination in A AR RR) which is popular nowadays. This is currently the lowest-cost strategy for attracting new customers. Through good content or word of mouth, users can share and gain new customers. Of course, sharing and attracting new users usually happens within the pool of existing users.

2. Conversion

What is conversion? Transition the user from one state to another.

In daily life, I like to stir up trouble. I want to make my son cry so that he can relieve the stress of studying in kindergarten. How can I do it? I ate all the snacks in front of my son, muttering "How delicious, how delicious!" My son was converted on the spot and started crying.

Conversions are divided into large conversions and small conversions. The big conversion is the conversion of the ultimate goal of the product. For example, daily active users, transactions, etc. Small conversions are everywhere. Any hierarchical relationship (funnel) can be called a conversion, so when doing operations, you should always keep the conversion awareness in mind.

For example, taking the activation phase of AARRR, what is the conversion goal? What indicators are used for consideration? I have asked some colleagues, and most of them are looking at improving the next-day and 7-day retention rates , while a small number of people are looking at the 30-day retention rate. Different products have different usage frequencies. For example, I usually watch news, social networking and reading products every day (next-day retention). As for video products, such as Tencent Video and iQiyi , I usually watch them on weekends when I have time to relax (7-day retention). As for my bank card client, I only take a look at it on payday (30-day retention). Married men all know that all Wang Baoqiang’s money was transferred away by Ma Rong, just kidding. Therefore, during the activation phase, define activation indicators based on your product features and ultimately convert users into the retention pool.

In the revenue stage, the responsibility of operations is still: conversion

The concept of revenue is very broad. Everything the user does that is within my intention is revenue. For example, for UGC products, posting, commenting, and liking are all positive behaviors, while complaints and uninstalls are not considered positive and do not generate revenue. Communication in a narrow sense means sharing and forwarding, and sharing is also a positive behavior. Therefore, in the AARRR model in this article, for the convenience of interpretation, I put communication after revenue and do not single it out.

So, what is the goal of operations during the revenue stage? Taking social apps as an example, there are generally two major things: conversion into communication ambassadors (the purpose is to attract new users at low cost) and conversion into daily active users.

(1) Dissemination

When doing communications, operators often make a mistake, which is to choose the wrong target users. That is, we need to choose which users to focus on in order to maximize the communication effect.

For example, when looking at the number of article forwardings, we will have users forwarding at each of the above stages. A new user just installed the APP and found a good article in it, so he forwarded it. Communication in a broad sense is more complicated. Communication is word of mouth. Only by continuously accumulating value in the minds of users can you produce large-scale good reputation, and users will only accept it if they are convinced. Therefore, when doing communication, if you want a high conversion rate, you should focus on retaining users (let me remind you of the definition of retained users) instead of investing resources in new users or users in the activation period.

(2) Daily activity

Most people understand revenue as making money. E-commerce is easy to understand, but for social products that do not monetize users, what is revenue then? In real life, what does your boss or leader ask you most often? "How many daily active users were there today?" "How much did the daily active users grow compared to the previous month?" These words make people nervous and are the "golden sentences" that most operators are most reluctant to hear.

The revenue of most social apps will be converted into revenue DAU. Interested students will monetize daily active users, that is, how much one daily active user is worth, which is easier to understand. There is a page monetization function in GA that works on the same principle. After all, bosses are interested in money. After DAU is monetized, the concept of conversion becomes naturally understood. One DAU is analogous to an order conversion.

3. Extend the life cycle

We have already understood what user retention is above. Let me reiterate:

Retained users are those who are already interested in your product, have found the surprise moment, and visit frequently. In a more strict sense, they are users who not only use it frequently, but also actively use it.

In the operations world, no one dares to stand up and tell the boss that retention is not my job, and I am not a playboy, so I dare not compete with KPI. I am just being realistic: operations cannot achieve retention, product managers are the main force in retaining users. Here, operations only continue to receive commands from the product and assist the product in doing miscellaneous tasks, such as research, making dictionaries, optimizing copywriting , and doing recalls.

The goal I set for operations at this stage is to extend the user life cycle .

It is a consensus in the industry that all products have a life cycle, and WeChat is no exception. Public account products have reached their decline stage. The product life cycle is tied to the user life cycle. Generally, orthodox Internet companies have an average user life cycle value, such as 100 days, 200 days, etc., which will not be extended here.

Retained users (please note my definition of retained users again) can also lose users, so in addition to converting a large number of users into retained users during the activation phase, there is another important thing for operations: recall.

Recall is the most demanding operation wisdom and is also a hurdle for ordinary operations to move towards advanced operations. For example, user stratification operations, message mechanisms (push, SMS, email), event planning, copywriting strategies, etc. Of course, whether lost users can be recalled and retained depends on the charm of the product itself. Operations are helpless and can only continuously expose the product to more users and intentionally extend the user life cycle.

In my small circle of friends, many people asked me how to find reliable products when changing jobs, because only when the products are reliable can our operations be happy. I usually say: You can ask your friends to experience it privately for a few days and then do a disappointment survey. Why look at disappointment instead of satisfaction. This is a suggestion given to everyone by Sean Ellis, the founder of Growth Hacker . He believes that when investigating the magic of a product, it is better to look at disappointment than satisfaction, as disappointment can better measure user loyalty. He gave a value: 40%, which means that if you do a survey and ask users, will you be disappointed if you no longer use my product? If 40% of people are “very disappointed,” then the product is in jeopardy, growth will be in big trouble, and the probability of success is very low. Just like WeChat, if you don’t check it a few times a day, you will be very disappointed, so WeChat has the product magic that sweeps the world.

Based on the interpretation of the above three parts, I believe that readers have understood my understanding of operations. It may not be correct, but it is gained from practical experience. I also want to communicate with everyone, because only collision can create sparks.

3. Summary

1. Definition of Operation

Operations are project-based, with a starting point and an end point, and the key word is tuning variables. This means that operations need to discover the key issues that affect the performance of the ultimate business goals through data analysis, and then find key variables (correlated variables or causal variables), establish projects and coordinate product, technology and other advantages to overcome this problem. Ideally, all variables that affect key business indicators should be adjusted to the appropriate level and finally combined to achieve the goal of automatic and efficient business operation.

2. Definition of retained users

Loyal fans of the product are those users who have discovered the product’s surprising moments and use it frequently and cannot do without it in their daily lives. In user stratification, it is independent in a retention pool.

3. Three major responsibilities of operators under the AARRR model

(1) Attracting new customers: Find channels that are highly compatible with the product and design methods to maximize new customer acquisition, thereby optimizing customer acquisition under the condition of cost control.

(2) Conversion: Continue to conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis, gain insights, and provide feedback to product and R&D to expand the size of the retained user pool. Through the joint efforts of product and operations, convert users and maximize business value.

(3) Extend the life cycle: In the operation of retaining users, assist the product, use operational thinking and wisdom to recall lost viewers in the retention pool, and deliberately extend the user life cycle.

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

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