About improving operational conversion rate (Part 2)

When users use a product, there are always two opposite forces that influence their behavior, one is motivation and the other is resistance. In order to improve the conversion rate , it is necessary to analyze the resistance and motivation of users in the purchasing process, analyze the specific resistance and motivation, and then reduce or lower the resistance as much as possible, continuously enhance and increase the motivation of users, and ultimately maximize the operation results.

Continue to improve conversion rate (Part 1) for more unfinished methods.

The impact of warm and cool colors on users

Color has a great impact on people's psychological changes, and this influence works without the user's awareness.

Color is a very vast subject, which cannot be fully covered in several books, but here I will share an aspect that is easier to understand and change, which is the impact of warm and cool colors on user behavior.

Do you know why most fast food restaurants are decorated in warm colors? Why are hospitals and stations usually decorated in cool colors? Psychologists who study color have conducted experiments and found that when people are in a red environment, their pulse speeds up, their blood pressure rises, and they become excited and impulsive; while in a blue environment, their pulse slows down, their blood pressure drops, and their emotions become calm and rational. In this experiment, red and blue represent warm and cool colors respectively.

On the one hand, fast food restaurants designed with warm colors allow users to feel the potential for enthusiastic service. On the other hand, it will prompt customers to be more impulsive and excited, finish their meals and leave faster, thereby increasing the turnover rate and ultimately achieving an increase in sales. The cold colors used in hospitals and train stations are intended to help passengers feel calmer and reduce the irritability and discomfort caused by waiting. Think about it, what kind of places have warm colors and what kind of places have cool colors? Do they match the main scenes they correspond to? Now that we know about warm and cool colors, what impact does this color have on our operations? Will it affect the conversion rate? Products have usage scenarios, and it is necessary to use color schemes that match the psychological requirements of the scenarios.

In usage scenarios, warm colors are more suitable for those that tend to be emotional and impulsive; on the contrary, cool colors are more suitable for those that tend to be calm and rational.

Specifically speaking of the interface, if it is an interface that requires users to wait, it is best to make it relatively cold; if it is a page that wants users to take action as soon as possible, it would be better to use warm colors. Using colors that don’t fit the scene will affect the conversion rate. One of the main characteristics of e-commerce is to use discounts, promotions, etc. to put users in an irrational and impulsive state, allowing users to buy more things, or even buy some things that are useless after taking them home. Therefore, in the e-commerce scenario, putting users in an "emotional impulse" is something that many product managers , interaction designers, and operations managers often think about.

Shhh…don’t let the users know!

For a large company, overturning the original color system and replacing it with warm tones is a very costly thing, which shows how important color is to conversion rate. Warm colors can make people impulsive, but lack a dignified and high-end feeling, so high-end brands have more cool color elements. Color has three main elements: hue, purity, and brightness. Its impact on human psychology, from perception, emotion, memory, thought, will, symbol, etc., is very complex. If you are interested, you can read more books on color psychology.

Establishing standards of excellence

In the process of studying user purchase and usage, I found a common obstacle for users, that is, customers don’t know how to choose, are not sure which product is best for them, and don’t know whether the current product or service is the best. During the hesitation process, most users gave up, especially some novice users, who did not quite understand the sophisticated technology used in the production process. To reduce customer hesitation, you can tell users the criteria for judging the quality and gain their recognition, so that users can draw the conclusions you want based on your guidance, thereby helping users to quickly understand and choose. Among all the advertisements I saw when I was a child, the one that made the most extreme use of it was the Robust advertisement. At that time, many domestic mineral water brands were competing. Since mineral water itself is pure and there are not many functions that can be packaged, there is serious homogeneity in the market. After Wahaha mineral water invited Wang Leehom to be the spokesperson, it led the market. If other companies wanted to break through, they could not just rely on advertising.

Through research, the marketing team of Robust discovered that the purification process of mineral water is very long, but consumers are not aware of it. So a great advertising idea came up. Robust promoted its water as "purified through 27 layers of water". After informing users of this established "standard for judging quality", users would not hesitate to buy, so Robust regained a large market share.

In fact, most mineral waters at that time met this standard, but Robust was the first to promote the 27-layer purification standard as a selling point. When users saw multiple mineral waters during the purchasing process, they would quickly decide to buy. When Lei Jun first launched the Xiaomi phone, he was guiding the audience to feel the importance of "price-performance ratio" throughout the process, and even let users ignore other factors.

For a period of time, Mi fans who had heard this speech would use the price-performance ratio as the "standard of excellence" to measure mobile phones. They thought that Xiaomi phones were the best, and did not consider other factors (quality, craftsmanship, brand, battery life). They looked down on Lenovo, Coolpad, ZTE, Huawei and other brand phones at the time.

Luo Yonghao will use his emotions to tell you that a good mobile phone must have user experience and texture; LeTV will tell you that a good mobile phone has a so-called "complete ecosystem" in terms of cost-effectiveness; Zhou Hongyi will tell you that the criterion for judging the quality of a mobile phone is the security of the underlying system. When Xiaomi started talking about craftsmanship, it started talking about "the artistic journey of a piece of steel plate":

It took 40 manufacturing processes and 193 precision operations to transform a 309-gram steel plate into something gorgeous. During the 193 steps of planning, design, precision machining and production, it gradually came to life, integrating engineering and art, pursuing the ultimate precision and quality, giving life to a 309-gram steel plate, and after 32 hours of processing and carving, it finally condensed into the 19 grams in your hand.

Before he said it, I didn’t know that the iron plate on the mobile phone was so complicated, so I thought “the other craftsmanship of this mobile phone should be good too”, so this method was successful.

You want to say that your APP is the best among its peers. How do you prove it? It also establishes standards for judging quality. Toutiao, "The headlines are what you care about", focuses on recommending personalized news reading based on personal browsing history. Once this "standard for judging quality" is established, some users who accept this standard will no longer hesitate between different news clients, but will directly choose to download the Toutiao APP to get a personalized reading experience. When Baidu was competing against Google , it launched the slogan "understand Chinese better" and won most of the market share in Chinese search. From the time Google entered China to the time it exited China, it has never surpassed Baidu in market share, which has a lot to do with this slogan. Generally speaking, users often use brand awareness as a criterion for judging products. However, when faced with unknown products, users lack the criteria to make their choices. Therefore, start-up products need to establish and communicate "standards of excellence". If you shop on Taobao frequently, you will find that this method is most commonly used by Taobao copywriters . You can pay special attention to it next time you shop.

What are the criteria for quality in your product operations ?

The quality of traffic sources

In the early stages, many novice operators use various means to attract users in order to achieve traffic goals, but the quality of traffic is not high, which will greatly affect the conversion rate.

A common mistake in the past was to use a completely irrelevant picture of a beautiful woman, hoping to generate clicks and thus achieve conversions. For products that are not related to pornography, this is a really naive approach. All traffic has a cost. Even free traffic requires time and energy. The free traffic with a very low conversion rate does not necessarily have a lower average activation cost than paid traffic. Therefore, we also need to calculate the average activation cost of users from different channels. When choosing to cooperate with other companies, you should also ask yourself a question: do the existing users of the partner overlap with your target users? If there is no overlap or too little overlap, cooperation will be meaningless. Generally speaking, traffic from point walls and pre-installed apps is often of poor quality, with relatively low retention and activity; traffic from ASO is relatively more accurate, with very good quality and data. Some channels even inflate the traffic, and some even simulate the user's next-day retention behavior, making it difficult to distinguish the real from the fake. To ensure the quality of traffic, the most important thing is to mark different traffic sources and ensure that user data from different traffic sources can be monitored. On the web side, URL tags can be added to different pages. On the APP side, tags need to be added to different APP download channel packages to count the quality of the channels. WeChat generates a QR code with a marking function. Note: Through the WeChat advanced portal, it is already possible to identify different sources of new user attention by generating different QR codes. This may require a little development cost. If you are interested, you can ask your company's development partner to study WeChat's development documents.

In the O2O industry, many applications only focus on quantity but lose supervision when promoting them offline , resulting in a large loss of funds. Once in a small supermarket near my home, I saw many aunts and uncles in their forties queuing up to install an APP to receive 10 yuan in cash. After installation, they immediately received a 20 yuan shopping voucher, which could be used directly at the checkout of the supermarket. This means the installation cost for each user is 30 yuan. I paid the money and tried it for a while. After choosing something worth 25 yuan and paying 5 yuan, I uninstalled the app because I felt it was really useless. However, the elderly usually have plenty of time on their hands and are unlikely to use the "One-Hour E-Commerce" APP to save shopping time when there are no discounts. Very few users will use it after a week. According to this calculation, the average cost of acquiring an active user for this activity would be several hundred yuan, or even thousands of yuan, which is simply suicide for a startup company. Controlling the quality of traffic is an important task to maintain conversion rate in the long term.
Lower the threshold for first-time use

Users will naturally have concerns and doubts about products, especially when others have to pay. Most businesses require users to pay before they can start experiencing the service.

The user usage threshold includes the need to pay, register, download, and complete information. Before the user formally pays, the threshold can be lowered to allow the user to experience the product first, so that they begin to rely on the product value and eventually become customers.

If some products can experience more complete functions in WeChat official accounts , users can use the functions through service accounts without the need for users to download the APP to register and activate, etc. This is also a way to lower the user threshold. In short, you can think about and observe users, and think about what barriers will hinder users from coming in before the first use or payment, and then lower all possible barriers, and the conversion rate will inevitably increase.

Reduce dropouts

Traffic is brought in with great difficulty, and it would be a pity if it leaves easily in the process. Users should not be allowed to jump out too easily in the core process of the product. The option of an extra step to confirm leaving. Users may leave due to accidental touches or hesitation. An extra step of confirmation can win back many users who do not strongly want to exit.

Web page loading speed and stability

While waiting for the web page to load, many users will jump out of the page or close the APP, which will also reduce the conversion rate. Amazon once released a study showing that every 100ms loading delay on the website would result in a 1% drop in sales. To speed up page loading, the commonly used methods in the industry are: give priority to loading key elements, asynchronously load js on demand, use a good structure, do not overload the layout, do not use images to represent text, compress JavaScript files, use Hypertext Transfer Protocol, optimize CSS files, use PNG images as much as possible, cut large images into multiple parts, set a fixed size when possible, use AJAX for asynchronous updates, take full advantage of multi-threaded loading in modern browsers , merge multiple interfaces into one, and reduce the overhead of multiple http links. At the same time, we also need to consider the possibility of page crashes and APP crashes. The technical details here will not be elaborated.

The ultimate fate of conversion rate

When the conversion rates in all aspects are optimized to the extreme, there will be more competitors, profits will gradually decline, and eventually be replaced by new products. In order to prolong the product's market position, when the conversion rate has been increased to near the limit, the product life cycle begins to decline. At this time, the only way to deal with it is to continuously innovate products, services, and models. It’s innovation, not optimization!

It means jumping into a new dimension and breaking out of the original business and product framework. If you want to make a horse run faster, the question is no longer how to train a faster horse, but to develop cars , airplanes, rockets, and even time machines. Optimize after creating the product, innovate + optimize after encountering bottlenecks, innovation + optimization, this is the inevitable path for the development of an industry. The ultimate fate of the conversion rate is not the sadness of operations, but the wonderful thing about operations. There is no need to repeat the same work, and there are always new opportunities and challenges.