How to become an operations expert? Here is a structural diagram for you!

Now that we have to build a standard operation structure, we are back to a sentence we often say: " All operations revolve around users ", so this time we have to start with user operations .

It should be pointed out here that content operation , event operation and user operation are not three completely independent modules. Content operation and activity operation are actually also means of implementing user operation. It’s just that the angle of user operation is different. Content and activities are vertical, while user operation is horizontal.

When talking about user operations, we must talk about " attracting new users , retaining users , promoting activation, and converting users ", which are actually the four states of users. When we do user operations, we are actually improving the user's status. There is another situation, which is the “ recall ” of lost users.

Here we need to remember a very important key point about user operations:

• Every improvement in a user's status comes from the user's decision.
• Every decision made by the user essentially creates a "contract" between the user and the product.
• When anyone signs a contract, he will subconsciously consider two things: cost and gain.

What do these sentences mean? Next, let's slowly expand:

1. Attract new customers/recall

1. Attract new customers

New user acquisition occurs in two scenarios: normal operation phase and product cold start phase

Let’s talk about the normal operation stage first. There are two main things in this stage: channel acquisition and referral acquisition . As for channels for attracting new customers, there are three types: proprietary product channels, external free channels , and external paid channels (also including some resource exchange channels) (see the structure section for details | How to become an operations expert (Part 2): See content operations clearly in one picture).

No matter what the scenario is, it must be: a potential user, in a certain scenario, perceives one of our content and activities, makes a decision to "join", and finally takes action to "join".

Let's look at a picture like this:

We have already talked about users, content, scenarios, etc. in our previous articles. Here we want to talk about the user's "perception", which will directly affect the user's decision whether to "join".

In this 0.01 second moment, the user will inadvertently perceive: What is the cost of joining? What will you get ? This is a human reaction. He may not be aware of it himself, but this perception definitely exists.

This is a problem that we must solve when we are operating user operations and attracting new users: we must make users feel at that moment: user acquisition > user cost .

So what does the user cost include? Including actual costs and psychological costs .

• Actual costs include: How long does it take to join? How complicated are the steps? How much memory space is required? wait.
• Psychological costs include: Are there any risks in joining? Will it cause other losses? Will there be any unforeseen bad situation? wait.

After understanding the above, we know the key points of our new customers:

• Step 1: Reduce user costs as much as possible, such as making the joining method convenient, one-click conversion, lightweight application, and highlighting the stability and development of the product in the displayed content.
• Step 2: User acquisition must be designed well at the perception level, so that users can quickly perceive what they can get after joining.
• In the content section, we talked about "user feelings". The difference between it and "user acquisition perception" is that "user feelings" will increase his desire to spread, while "user acquisition perception" will increase his desire to join.
• Step 3: When you create new content or activities, you must think from the user’s perspective: If you were a user, would you join? If necessary, conduct a small-scale test before officially launching it into the market.

Let’s talk about the cold start stage . The cold start is more difficult because the product itself is not well-known at this time, and there are no referral users. In addition to the above methods, we can also adopt an invitation system . Or acquire initial seed users through the founder’s personal connections.

If you can't invite anyone during the cold start phase, and you don't have the resources and money to invest in channels, then you can only say that you are unfortunately dealt a "bad hand". However, as an operator, you can also try to play a "bad hand" as beautifully as possible.

1. The first choice is to do some hard work, such as writing soft articles and spreading them in large quantities on forums and groups. This is to use diligence to make up for one's shortcomings and use hard work to fill the gaps .
2. Try to find channels that can bring you traffic bonuses .

What is traffic dividend? Simply put, the channel has traffic, but it has no money . At this time, he can only sell his traffic at a low price. If you can dig out such a channel, the cost of traffic will be very low. Of course, the bonus period is limited in time. When the channel finds itself valuable, the cost will gradually increase to the market price.

As for how to find channels for these traffic dividends? This requires a certain level of business acumen and it’s hard to explain all at once. Here’s a method that’s not the most rigorous: look for companies with business models that have just emerged, have no monetization methods yet, and belong to the second camp. ( The fact that it can rise means that it can have traffic, the fact that it has just risen means that not many people will look for it, the fact that it has no monetization method means that it cannot make money, and the second camp is because there is a higher probability that it has not received investment ). If you are interested, you can take a look at the classic site where Taobao fought against eBay. It relied on a large number of personal sites to spread its content, and defeated several major portals occupied by eBay. Its investment cost was much lower than that of eBay.

2. Recall

The reason why recall and new customer acquisition are put together is that recall and new customer acquisition are very similar. The slight difference is that when recalling, we have the following two more points:

(1) Record the reasons for user loss at that time

We all know that on PC, when we uninstall a software, an uninstallation reason will pop up for you to select or fill in. Since the uninstall operation on mobile devices is relatively simple, we can only rely on some user surveys to obtain the information.

After we collect these reasons for loss, our recall method is to take corresponding measures based on these reasons and carry out user-targeted push to achieve the purpose of recall.

（2）Records the growth of users

Sometimes user churn is not because your product is bad, but because users have passed the time point for using your product.

For example, if our product is baby care, then the main target group is mothers with children aged 2-3 years old. But this group will definitely disappear after the age of 5 or 6 because they no longer pay attention to infant care. But if we can track and record the growth of users, we can launch a product for early childhood education for 5 or 6 year olds and push it to those users who were doing infant care 3 years ago. Then the recall effect is very good.

2. Retention

Retention is actually the easiest step among several stages. The reason is: for users, there is no actual cost to stay, but there is a cost to leave.

Let’s go back to our theory above. What we need to do is: user acquisition > user cost . In the retention stage, we can change the formula into: user acquisition + user leaving cost > user cost.

So in the retention stage, what we need to do is:

1. Stable output to ensure "user acquisition"

In the previous chapter, we also talked about the concept of "stable output", that is, stable frequency, stable quality, and stable channel. We need to continue to remind users of our existence, deepen their impression of us, and prepare for subsequent activation and conversion. In addition to scheduled push notifications on your own products, low-cost methods such as SMS and Edm can still have good results at this time. Especially when it is a low-frequency product, the above-mentioned high-frequency outputs are needed to assist in maintenance.

2. Don’t make mistakes

The most critical point in this stage is "never make any mistakes". Once you make a mistake, all your previous hard work will be squandered. It’s just like falling in love. If you finally catch the person, the chances of being dumped will be much smaller if you don’t make any mistakes. But if you make a mistake, you’re doomed. Therefore, we must be rigorous and careful. From the company level, at this stage, operations must have a clear division of labor and the progress of work must be orderly.

3. Increase the user's leaving cost

This is also the most useful trick in the retention stage. As we said above, we want the user acquisition + user leaving cost > user cost. So we have to increase the cost of users leaving.

So what is the cost of users leaving? Two categories: interests and emotions . Not to mention the benefits, you will definitely not delete the Alipay account where your savings are stored. When it comes to emotions, we have to talk about the two most effective weapons at this stage: community and user growth system.

What is on the community ? The community contains your connections and your friends. If you leave, the cost will be very high.

The user growth system makes you spend a lot of time and finally get an "honor". If you leave, all these "honors" will be lost, so the cost of leaving is also quite high.

Since the two things "community" and "user growth system" are so important, we will introduce them separately in the later "Methodology" section, so stay tuned.

Of course, there are some other tricks, such as coupons that can never be used up, irregular benefits, etc. In essence, they all increase the user's cost of leaving. Once you leave, it's gone.

 4. Prevent competitors

At this time, if you have done everything you should do, the biggest risk comes from the market. Competitive product analysis is not just something that product managers need to do, operations do as well. If you know exactly what you are doing, you will be very sensitive to the same things your competitors are doing. Even if we cannot be ahead of our competitors, we must keep up with their pace, otherwise users will be "lost". This is very critical. Competitive product analysis will use data, which we will explain in detail in the "Data Chapter".

3. Promote activity

What is activation? To wake someone up is to wake him up who is sleeping . Except for those who are "pretending to be asleep", theoretically everyone can be woken up, but the cost of waking them up is different each time.

Retention is relatively easy, but if you make a mistake once, users may be lost.

It is relatively difficult to promote activation, but as long as it succeeds once, users are likely to remain active.

Let's use a very intuitive example to talk about "promoting activation": "Xiao Wang is sleeping, and we want to wake him up. What is the best solution?"

1. User acquisition > user cost.

To wake up Xiao Wang, it would be more effective to use something as "bait to attract him" instead of just telling him to get up, such as "Wake up and I'll treat you to a big meal."

2. Grasp the time to promote activation

At 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., I used the same method to wake up Xiao Wang, the effect of the latter was far greater than the former. In our operations, every product has an " optimal time to activate users ". We should try our best to find such a point. Of course, this also requires the support of technology and data.

3. Pay attention to user behavior

If Xiao Wang is already "stretching", it means he is not far from getting up. At this time, we just need to urge him a little and he will get up immediately. Therefore, "stretching" is the prelude to promoting activation. We can track users who have this behavior, and the effect will naturally be very good. Suppose there are 100,000 Xiao Wangs, and we conduct a "get up and get prizes" activity for all the Xiao Wangs who are "stretching", the effect is self-evident.

This behavior of users can be expressed in many ways in actual operations: for example, how long the page is stayed on, how many times it is opened per day, the open rate of push notifications, how many new users are referred, etc. If the company is large and has a strong technical and analytical department to support user behavior analysis, then this will be very useful. If not, students doing operations can only try their best to develop a sense of user behavior in actual work.

Through the above three points, we have talked about several tips on how to activate users. However, this only belongs to the first level , and this dimension still remains at the level of user acquisition > user cost.

The second level: making users not realize that their costs are costs.

This sentence sounds a bit incredible. As we said above, the user cost here is not a real statistical cost, but a perception that occurs to the user at the moment of making a decision.

If users do not feel that they are paying a cost, or even feel that they are gaining something, would the effect be good? For example: Starbucks ' points system has been studied thoroughly by many people, and they know exactly how to combine and use it. In fact, when users analyze the Starbucks points system, they pay a lot of time cost, but they don’t feel that they have paid any price. Instead, they feel that they have gotten a bargain. This means that users do not realize that their costs are costs, which is of course what Starbucks is very happy to see.

Take Xiao Wang getting up as an example. If you just ask Xiao Wang to get up, then from Xiao Wang's perspective, this is the cost.

If we say "I'll treat you to a big meal after you get up", the effect is good, and Xiao Wang gets something, but in terms of perception, getting up is still a cost.

If we change the way we say it: "Go to eat within 10 minutes and get a discount", at this time, we deliberately weaken the act of getting up and equate it with getting a discount on food . In fact, they are essentially the same, but the effects are completely different.

Firmly grasp the user's perception and make the user feel that his efforts are what he gains, then activation will naturally be twice the result with half the effort!

So, do we have any better and more efficient way?

Yes, that is the third level: " cost shifting ".

Using the above example, a better way is to ask Xiao Wang's friend Xiao Zhang, who has already gotten up, to wake Xiao Wang up. All we have to do is give the benefits to Xiao Zhang. Because Xiao Zhang had already gotten up, he felt that this was not a difficult task. Xiao Zhang and Xiao Wang are friends, so it is easy to implement. Therefore, the cost we pay is far less than the cost of directly waking Xiao Wang up. In other words, we passed the cost of waking Xiao Wang up to Xiao Wang.

In actual operational work, methods such as " old employees bringing in new employees " and "opinion leaders" are actually a means of cost shifting. The benefits of user segmentation are once again reflected. It will be introduced in the "Method" section later, so please stay tuned.

The most commonly used means of promoting activation is activities . If it is an activity aimed at promoting user activation, in addition to the quality of the activity itself, we must combine some of the above steps and techniques from the perspective of user operation. I believe that we will achieve good results.

4. Conversion

The conversion we consider here is generally the conversion of user payment. In fact, many marketing methods can be used for conversions in operations. For example, make some contrasts, create a lively atmosphere, do some authoritative product packaging, carefully design a set of useful rhetoric, etc.

As an operator, we must master some of the above marketing routines. In addition, we also need to consider from the perspective of operations:

User conversion begins with the conversion from free to paid. After users start paying, the conversion can be from low frequency to high frequency, or from low average order value to high average order value.

First of all, we must understand that when we reach this step, it is based on the preparation of the previous steps (attracting new customers → retention → promoting activation), and whether the previous steps are done well will directly affect the natural conversion of this step . Moreover, the accuracy of users and the product itself are also very important . For example, the "hot items" commonly used in e-commerce can achieve everything from attracting new customers to conversions at once.

Here we will only look at the process and key points from the perspective of conversion.

Let’s go back to what we said before. To get users to convert, we have to make users feel that user acquisition > user cost. In the previous stages, the user's cost is not direct money, so we can weaken it through some techniques. But there is a problem with the "conversion" link, because users have to pay money, they have to spend real money, so it is difficult for us to weaken their cost perception. So what we can do is to strengthen his perception of acquisition.

Okay, let's start organizing our thoughts:

• Ultimately, we want our users to feel that our products are worth paying for .
• If we want to catalyze the perception that " it's worth paying for ", we have to make users feel that " they're getting a bargain ".
• If we want users to feel that they are getting a good deal , there is a necessary condition: users “ want it ”.
• There is also a way to catalyze the user's perception of " wanting ", which is: "I have used it myself or seen others use it."

Next, we start to organize our execution steps:

The first step: divide our products into several levels and the prices into several levels.

This is a necessary condition, otherwise users will have money nowhere to spend. This is very common, such as creating several product packages, or getting gold and silver memberships. The key points here are:

1. The threshold for the lowest payment tier must be low;
2. There must be a clear distinction in access for each payment level.

For ease of explanation, we divide it into three levels: A (free), B (low-paying), and C (high-paying)

Step 2: First, turn free users into paying users .

Everyone should remember that the amount of payment is a quantitative change, while the change between free and paid is a qualitative change. Therefore, our first priority is to enable users to achieve qualitative change. It means to turn A into B. Here is a concept called " sunk cost ". Simply put, if a user has paid you, the probability of him continuing to pay will be greatly increased . (This trick is commonly used everywhere and will be elaborated in the "Methods" section). The methods to achieve it are also very common in our daily lives, such as selling hot items at super low prices, first-order rewards, red envelopes for new members, etc., all of which mean the same thing.

Step 3: We should try our best to let Class C users see Class B users.

Going back to what we said before, if we want B to become C, the first thing we need to do is to let B see C. Therefore, we should intentionally construct several scenarios to demonstrate the use of B, in which B can be aware of the existence of C. The more such scenarios, the better.

Another way is to organize some activities to allow B to experience C for free for a limited time. This is what I said before, "either watch others use it, or use it yourself."

Step 4: Highlight the superiority of Category C users to stimulate Category B users.

This is an exploitation of human nature, and we need to use various means. Simply put, it is to make Class C users become "red flowers" in the occasions of Class B users. Many of the methods here are really not up to standard, so everyone should figure them out on their own. If you really can't understand it, just download a few games that are generally recognized as expensive games, without spending any money, and go and experience it yourself.

Step 5: Launch a membership event at the right time to make Type B users feel that they have gotten a good deal.

After the previous step, some Category B users have already started to convert, but some are still hesitating and waiting. It doesn’t matter, we are going to launch the event at this time. Introduce a price that is more favorable than usual for converting B to C. This is what we said above about letting users " get a bargain ."

Step 6: Give Type B users a reason to convert.

At this stage, those Category B users who have not yet converted are already hesitant. All we have to do is take the final step, and what we have to do is to break through his last line of defense: give him a reason to pay. Yes, at this time the user already wants to convince himself, and what we need to do is to help the user convince himself.

Okay, these are the steps we take for user conversion. If you have read my previous article, you should have an impression of the output process of this step, which is what we said: think from top to bottom and execute from bottom to top. (Please refer to Thinking | How to become an operations expert (I): Think from top to bottom and execute from bottom to top)

Another thing to mention is that it is imperative to keep the user's payment path unobstructed . Don't let the payment get stuck or an error message appear when you are paying, which will result in the payment not being completed, otherwise all your efforts will be wasted. Another point is to make good use of "support" . How to make good use of support? I won’t go into details here in the structure section, and will elaborate on it in the method section.

OK, the user conversion process is also completed. Let’s sort out all the user operations, as shown in the figure:

Finally, we combined all the articles in our structure section and formed a picture like this:

We have finally completed the construction of a relatively standard operating system, with a single diagram showing the operations. Of course, it is impossible for every industry and every company to refer to this chart completely. Everyone will have their own characteristics, and the specific details can actually be further refined. There will be differences, and these are left for everyone to explore on their own.

Okay, we have finished the structure section here, but we must always understand that in a company, operations cannot solve all problems. More often, we discover problems and assist other departments to solve them.

When it comes to how to discover problems, we will move on to our next chapter – "Data".

summary

The structure section is the outline of our operations. It provides us with a structured thinking system and helps us control the overall direction. But in some specific matters, we need to control the time and intensity of execution. We need to implement the three steps of discovering problems, analyzing problems and solving problems one by one, and all of these will rely on our data.

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

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