Double Eleven is coming, have you prepared for risk control in your activities?

Every event operator should consider event risks when planning an event . Are you clear about what activity risks are and how to formulate strategies to deal with them?

1. Activity Process

When discussing event risks, let’s first look at the process an event goes through from planning to development to launch, and who is involved.

2. Internal Risk Control

Although everyone on the team is working on the same project, everyone has different responsibilities, so misunderstandings are common.

1. Marketing staff vs. event operations

Any activity has its goals. Marketing and operations personnel need to be responsible for the KPIs of the activity goals, but are they clear about the specific goals?

We all know that the main business of financial APP requires users to bind their bank cards to complete. So, in a new user gift package activity, user registration is regarded as completing the new user acquisition activity, or in other words, users need to register and complete the card binding action before it can be regarded as completing the user acquisition.

If the person in charge of event planning does not clearly define the event goals, then the subsequent event development and launch will be a mess.

2. Event Operations vs Developers

The event development phase is the most important step before an event goes online. Insufficient communication between event operators and developers will often result in the event being unable to go online in a timely manner.

When evaluating a project, event developers will provide a project schedule table. However, due to lack of experience, the developers may misjudge the development cycle, resulting in the event not being able to go online on time. Another reason is that operations staff constantly change requirements, making activity development more difficult and making it impossible to launch activities in a timely manner.

3. Event Operations vs Customer Service

When users encounter problems during an event, they often seek help from customer service. However, if the customer service is not informed in writing before the event goes online, the customer service may not be able to answer the users' questions.

For example, e-commerce coupon activities, e-commerce coupons come in various forms, such as 100 off for purchases over 199, 100 off for purchases over 188, no-threshold coupons, and discount coupons for designated products. Do these coupons need to be collected before use, or are they automatically deducted when paying? Can they be used in combination? During the shopping process, users desperately try to add to the order in order to get big discounts, but in the end find that they do not meet the discount conditions. When they consult customer service, the customer service cannot explain it. Will the user's favorability towards the APP suddenly plummet to the bottom?

The purpose of customer service is to help users solve problems encountered during the activity, but the prerequisite is that customer service has the instruction document of the activity.

The reason why risks arise within a team is mainly due to insufficient communication. During the work process, good follow-up and timely communication can reduce some unnecessary risks.

3. External Risk Control

After countless overtime nights, your event is finally online. Don’t be too happy yet, a new wave of risks is on the way.

1. Event delivery

Operations personnel need to launch the activities that have been launched online. At this stage, it often happens that there are too few channels for the activity to be delivered and users are unaware of the existence of the activity.

Common channels for event delivery include offline event delivery, web page advertising display, EDM, and text messages. When the activity is launched, if you find that the publicity effect of the activity is not good, you can add more channels for the activity delivery.

Apps with the same target user type also serve as promotional channels for events and traffic sharing for the same company. For example, in the Xiami Music app, you can see the Double Eleven event promotion of Tmall app, which is also part of Alibaba . Another channel to increase the delivery of activities is to use landing pages . Users can actively promote the activities through their social relationships, such as Weibo and WeChat . When other users click on the link shared by the user, the first page they enter is the landing page. Of course, this step also requires the assistance of developers.

Ofo launched a card collection activity during the National Day, which utilized the landing page system to promote its activities through user sharing. If you want to know more about the role and usage of landing pages, it is recommended to read the article "How "Landing Pages" Help User Operations Achieve User Growth".

2. Rules and Rewards

Rules and rewards are essential in activities. During the event, operators should check whether these two are set reasonably based on customer service feedback.

If multiple users ask about the same activity rules, a more detailed explanation of the activity rules is required. If the number of participants is too small, it may be because the event is not promoted enough or the prizes offered are not attractive enough.

When setting up prizes, you can choose more popular prizes. For example, the iPhone X has just been launched on the market and users are rushing to buy it, so you can use it as a prize for the event. If the budget for the event is not that high, you can choose to use limited edition items instead, such as the entrance to a celebrity’s concert or a limited edition pair of sneakers. In short, the more popular the better.

Let me tell you about another more negative activity. I have seen a one-yuan group buying activity for iPhone 7 Plus in multiple WeChat groups . Literally, users only need one yuan to participate in the group buying activity for iPhone 7 Plus, but this is only for APP users. So users downloaded the APP according to the instructions, entered the APP, and after successfully joining the group, they found that they had to wait for the final lottery results to know whether they had successfully purchased it.

This method of using high-priced prizes to attract users to participate in activities can certainly attract a large number of users to participate in a short period of time, but it will damage users' favorability towards the APP. It is better to give users a coupon to appease them when they have not won a prize.

3. The " wool-pulling party"

Wherever there is an event, there will inevitably be people who take advantage of the situation. If you think that people who take advantage of the situation are just taking advantage of a small profit, you are very wrong. In Titanium Media 's article "Deeply digging into the black industry chain of WeChat's "group control": wool-pulling, micro-business, and brushing data", the power of the wool-pulling party is described to us. The Christmas event of the Ele.me APP was forced to stop after only one day, and the activities of the word-of-mouth APP were also plundered by the wool-pulling party.

(Source: Titanium Media)

If your activity involves valuable physical prizes, you will not be able to guard against the army of freeloaders. For specific operating methods, you can communicate with the developers, restrict IP and IMEI numbers, ban suspicious ID numbers, and strengthen protection.

In the external risk control link, in addition to observing user reactions and solving problems in a timely manner, it is also necessary to guard against those who take advantage of the situation to ensure that the activity can proceed smoothly.

Summarize

Although event operators have made assumptions about possible risks when planning the event, these are only the operators' own assumptions. Only when the event actually comes into contact with users will the deficiencies in event planning be truly exposed. Double Eleven is coming, you might as well check your activities to see if there is anything missed and make risk control preparations for the activities in advance.