How to improve user loyalty to products?

This is a "red ocean era". Due to the rapid development of technology, people's needs have been met unprecedentedly and product homogeneity has become increasingly serious. The company's operations and marketing teams are forced to build high walls to prevent users from running to competitors. This high wall is the user loyalty management method, which builds user loyalty and keeps users on your plate.

This article is very long. Considering the user experience , the following is the framework structure of this article. You can request it on demand.

1. The concept of user loyalty

You should also be a loyal user of a certain product, like me, I am a loyal user of Apple. If you are loyal to Apple, you may be loyal enough to visit the local Apple Store and check in every time you arrive in a city, and you may be loyal enough to buy every new generation of products. The concept of user loyalty is the degree of user's attitude towards and preference for a product or service, as well as the amount and frequency of repeated consumption.

1. Customer Loyalty Model

Based on the depth of users’ behavioral loyalty and attitudinal loyalty, we establish the following two-dimensional model.

1) Disloyalty

Disloyal users often do not make or make few repeat purchases, cannot remember the specific name and characteristics of the brand, and have no preference for the brand.

2) Inertial loyalty

Inertial loyalty is mainly due to the convenience and habits of users, which leads to a high level of behavioral loyalty to the product. Inertial loyalty is generally only reflected in users' repeated use or purchase of the product, but users will not show much attitude towards the product, and users will not spread word-of-mouth for the product. This is like the breakfast shop downstairs from your house. You may only know that there is a steamed bun shop there, but you can't even say its name.

The bun shop downstairs from your house may not be perfect, but you are used to it.

3) Employment loyalty

Employment loyalty can be understood as the product paying or returning some benefits to the user in order to gain repeated use or purchase by the user. It belongs to the dimension of low attitudinal loyalty and high behavioral loyalty. For example, for every 15 yuan spent on China Guangfa Bank's China Southern Airlines SkyPearl Card, one China Southern Airlines mileage will be given. China Guangfa Bank tried to use the benefits of China Southern Airlines miles to bribe users to use the China Guangfa Bank card. However, one day when I found out that I only needed to spend 10 yuan at Guangzhou Bank to earn 1 China Southern Airlines mile, I immediately gave up my original China Guangfa Bank card and applied for a Guangzhou Bank credit card.

I'm not saying that employment-based loyalty is bad. Employment loyalty is also an important component of user loyalty. Major e-commerce platforms, airlines, banks and other companies bring a lot of additional value and platform benefits to users by establishing employment loyalty.

However, mercenary loyalty has its limitations. Users often seek gifts and lower prices, and competitors can snatch users away through higher-value gifts and lower prices, just like the example I mentioned above.

China Southern Airlines Sky Pearl Card, for example, cash back on airline points to encourage continued use by users

4) Potential loyalty

Latent loyalty is a very interesting situation, typically manifested in users just shouting but not buying. This is a common dilemma for some current Internet products: users are highly active and have high return visit rates, but the paid conversion rate is low.

For example, when I was in college, my classmates did not have much purchasing power, so we all wore domestic brands such as Anta and Li Ning when playing basketball. However, Nike still comes to our school every year to hold a league and places advertisements on the stadium. This is a typical loyalty building strategy that first establishes the attitudinal loyalty of potential customers. Once this group of potential loyal users have the ability to consume, they can easily be converted into users with high behavioral loyalty and high attitudinal loyalty. This is indeed the case. After we started working, when we went out to play ball, everyone was wearing foreign brands.

NIKE holds campus activities

The same example happened to Xiaomi. As a free product, MIUI accumulated a large number of loyal fans in the early stage, but Xiaomi did not have paid products to convert these potential loyal users at that time. When Xiaomi mobile phones were launched on the market, these users turned into determined and fanatical analysts, who in turn generated strong word of mouth, and Xiaomi took off.

5) Steadfast Loyalty

Firm loyalty is a state in which users have established a solid emotional attitude towards a product or brand, and will give priority to and continue to make repeated purchases when making purchasing choices. Even if competitors offer lower prices or more attractive gifts, users will not easily adjust their purchasing strategies.

6) Fanatic Loyalty

Fanatical loyalty is the highest level of user loyalty. Users will not only make repeated purchases of products, but will also feel proud to be fans of the brand. These fanatical fans will also become mobile loudspeakers, continuously spreading the word of mouth about your brand to their friends.

Are you OK? Make the fanatical fans scream.

Our product user operations and user loyalty building is a process of continuously improving user behavioral loyalty and attitudinal loyalty.

2. The driving force behind user loyalty

1. User Perceived Value

When users make usage or purchasing decisions, most of the time they behave rationally and decide whether to use or purchase based on their perceived product value.

User perceived value = user overall benefit - user overall cost

The overall benefit of users is a combination of economic, functional and psychological benefits that users obtain from a product.

The overall user cost is the combination of money, time, energy and effort that customers spend on using or purchasing a product.

User perceived value is a prerequisite for maintaining customer loyalty. Before implementing any operational measures, user operations personnel must first assist product managers in maximizing the overall user benefits of the product and reducing the overall user costs.

2. User satisfaction

User satisfaction is the basis for user loyalty. Satisfaction refers to a person's feeling of pleasure or disappointment after comparing the performance and perception of a product with expectations.

User satisfaction = user perceived value - user expected value

Combining the above two theories, we can conclude that user satisfaction = user overall benefit - user overall cost - user expected value

3. External Motivation

Motivation refers to the factors that stimulate an individual's desire and vitality, enabling him or her to continue to focus on and devote himself or herself to something, and to achieve a goal with unremitting efforts. External motivation means that the incentive you receive comes from something you want to obtain, such as goals (such as medals, achievements), items (such as reward points), and other things you long for.

4. Intrinsic Motivation

Compared with external motivation, internal motivation refers to things that you want to do without getting extra rewards, such as spending time with friends, exploring the unknown, etc. These things are innate, and the things themselves can activate the brain's reward mechanism. Looking back, since we entered kindergarten, we have taken the initiative to make friends. The teacher does not reward us with red flowers for making friends, but we enjoy doing it.

Everyone has a little red flower in their heart

3. Strategies to Improve User Loyalty

1. Improve behavioral loyalty: Problems that can be solved with money are all small problems

Behavioral loyalty is the specific manifestation and landing point of user loyalty. If users do not have behavioral loyalty, then the boasted brand awareness and user attitude loyalty will become insignificant. However, pure behavioral loyalty is not solid, and users may leave because competitors offer greater concessions.

1) Improve user satisfaction

User satisfaction = user overall benefit - user overall cost - user expected value

As mentioned above, the basic indicator that affects loyalty is user satisfaction. The key to improving customer satisfaction is to enhance the value that the product brings to users, that is, the product can meet the various needs of users. For example, when users become senior members of an airline, when they purchase air tickets , they can not only meet their needs to fly, but also meet their needs to use the lounge and dine in the lounge at the airport. For some people, it even satisfies their self-esteem. Therefore, airline loyalty programs can effectively improve customer satisfaction.

In addition to increasing the value that the product brings to users, we also need to reduce the overall cost of users. User costs include not only economic costs, but also time costs during use and the physical and mental costs of obtaining and using the product. Reducing the economic cost of users is a common way to play the user loyalty system, such as giving users coupons after purchase to give them rebates when they repurchase: JD.com 's Jingdou, Vipshop 's Vipcoin, and Suning Cloud Diamond can all be used for cash discounts on the next purchase. These post-purchase rebates help increase the value of repeat purchase behavior to users.

Reducing the user's mental and physical costs is an advanced way to maintain loyalty. For example, Didi Taxi 's big data algorithm can automatically guess the destination based on the time and starting point of your taxi, reducing the user's operating costs.

Using artificial intelligence , Didi Taxi can provide users with destination predictions

If your product is an oligopoly, such as Sinopec, then you can ignore user satisfaction and sell your product at will. But for most products, we can find several competitors, even Boeing competes with Airbus. Without customer satisfaction, there is no repeat purchase, let alone user loyalty.

Boeing and Airbus continue to develop more comfortable and fuel-efficient passenger aircraft

2) Use money to buy user loyalty

As mentioned above, improving the overall interests of users involves economic interests. User loyalty in attitude may be difficult to bribe with money, but behavioral loyalty can.

Establishing a customer reward system is a common reward method for Internet products, such as payment cash back, payment points return, direct gift giving, etc. The core idea is to distribute part of the company's economic benefits to users to stimulate them to take certain targeted actions, and these targeted actions are often related to user loyalty. This article mainly discusses fan user loyalty from a macro perspective and will not discuss the points mall in detail. But let me briefly mention the points mall. The points mall is not something that can bring user loyalty in a short period of time. It requires a lot of manpower and material resources to develop and operate. It is recommended that startup companies do not do this, and it is also not recommended to do this during the product introduction period. There are many ways to achieve economic benefits for users, and it is not necessary to use a points mall.

Coupons like this are simple and easy to operate, so startups with insufficient resources may want to start with this.

2. Simultaneous improvement of behavioral loyalty and attitudinal loyalty

1) Market segmentation and personalized operation

Personalized operation is a CRM strategy in which operators communicate with each user in a way that is personal to the user, providing personalized products and services to improve customer satisfaction and thereby increase user loyalty.

Due to the communication characteristics of the Internet and my country's population base, most C-end user operators are operating a large number of users. User segmentation is the first step to achieve personalized user operations.

There are several common methods for user segmentation:

• First, segment according to the user's life cycle. Taking e-commerce as an example, there are unregistered users, registered users but no order was placed after PV was less than a certain amount, registered users but no order was placed after PV was greater than a certain amount, the following first order, second order and repeat purchase, no PV was generated for N days, no purchase was generated for N days, etc.
• Second, segmentation is based on user attributes, such as gender, age, income, region, and even sexual orientation.
• Third, users are segmented according to their behavioral attributes on the product, such as the channel through which they download the APP, the version of the APP they are currently using, the frequency of opening the APP, and even whether they have uploaded avatars, the frequency of signing in, etc. Fourth, it is classified according to the user’s payment habits, such as payment frequency, unit price of single consumption, etc.

By operating by user segments, users with different attributes can feel that the product is speaking their language and recommending content they like, making users feel that the product understands them, thereby effectively improving user satisfaction with the product.

2) Operations should interact with users

User-centricity is the core concept of Internet thinking. Allowing users to participate more in the design and operation of products or having more user-related elements in products can effectively improve user loyalty.

We now have more and more touchpoints at which we can contact users. In the past, we may have been limited to one-way promotion channels such as text messages and emails. But now, two-way channels such as Weibo, WeChat, forums, and live broadcast barrages have given us more and more channels to interact with users.

Users will change their attitudes depending on how close they are to things or people, and the "insider" mentality is a common mentality among users. In addition to allowing users to participate in interactions, the open source attitude of Internet products can even allow users to participate in the design of the product. Those users who can participate in product design will eventually become the product's most fanatical fans.

NetEase Cloud Music turns netizens’ comments into subway ads, allowing users to participate in the product’s advertising design

3) Build your brand into what your fans want

Users choose a certain brand of product because using this product represents their own identity. This is particularly evident in traditional marketing. Many business people will buy luxury cars such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW to prove their identity and enable them to gain a higher social status in the business world.

Once again, we would like to remind you that building user loyalty is not just a matter of user operations. The brand department also plays an important role in building user loyalty. When producing marketing materials, the brand department should pay attention to being based on users but also above users, and packaging the tasks in the advertisements into what users themselves want to become, so as to make the brand "cool".

A cool brand is derived from life, transcends life, is based on the brand, and does not deviate from the user. It allows users to see a better version of themselves in the advertisement.

3. Lead users to determination and enthusiasm:

1) Database Marketing: Knowing Users Better Than Themselves

When you open Zhihu and look at the bare search bar, it seems that you don’t know what you want to see. But after you have read several questions in the question list, every time you reopen it, you will always see the content you want.

Vipshop doesn’t have a search engine , but you can always buy what you want on it, and always exceed your budget.

Thanks to recommendation engines, these products seem to know users better than they know themselves. A recommendation engine is an information network that proactively discovers users’ current or potential needs and pushes information to them. Explore users' preferences and needs, and proactively recommend objects that they are interested in or need.

The introduction of recommendation engines is an important approach to maintaining massive user base in the era of big data. Internet products that can build recommendation engines must have massive user data and a big data team. Of course, there are now some suppliers who provide corresponding recommendation engines integrated into their products. Leading users to determination and enthusiasm is not suitable for products to be implemented from 0 to 1. This is an advanced operation method, and the operation team must work together with the data development team.

10,000 people, 10,000 Amazon homepages

2) Embedding internal motivation (this is important)

At the end of the article, I will use a few words to introduce internal motivation. Points mall, rebates, achievement medals and other types of motivation are all external motivations. External motivation has a certain promoting effect on loyalty, but internal motivation is more obvious and is a fuel that promotes users to become fanatical and determined.

For example, when you go to a casino to gamble, you will definitely lose more than you win. If you are given two options now, the first is to sit in the casino for 4 hours and get 100 yuan, and the second is to gamble anywhere in the casino, but you may lose 1 million. Most gamblers choose the latter because the gambling process designs two important internal motivations: creativity and uncovering the unknown.

These are all motivations that get people’s adrenaline pumping.

a. Unleash personal creativity

I don’t know when it started, but I no longer see the instruction manual when I buy a new mobile phone.

If a person spends his whole life on simple operations and does not use his personal creativity to solve problems, he will lose his enthusiasm for life. If a product itself, or the corresponding loyalty system of the product, can give full play to the user's personal creativity, the user will develop a huge sense of dependence on the product.

NIKE withdrew its NIKEid service in my country in 2008. The most popular feature of Nike ID among shoe fans is that they can personalize their favorite sneakers, clothing and sports accessories. By choosing a variety of colors and materials and adding personalized symbols, they can design a Nike ID product that is unique to them.

Through NIKE ID, users can design their own unique shoes

Taobao and UI China launched the "Thousands of Taobao Paintings" Taobao Mobile Theme Skin Design Competition in mid-2017.

b. Social and influence

People always say that products made by Tencent are always able to achieve rapid success, and some people attribute this to the outstanding capabilities of Tencent's product team. This is certainly an important factor, but what makes Tencent different from other companies is that Tencent has QQ, which is a social software for all the people. Tencent can quickly connect all its products with social products so that all its products can have social attributes. Which WeChat friend drew you into the extremely popular game Honor of Kings? If Honor of Kings cannot invite WeChat friends to play together, would you still play it?

In the King of Glory game , users can directly invite WeChat or QQ friends to play the game

Meituan Waimai is a good example of a social game that can be completed with coupons. Meituan Waimai has two red envelope social games. The first one is stealing red envelopes, in which users can steal red envelopes from friends when ordering food. The second game is sharing red envelopes after ordering food. When a certain number of people receive red envelopes, the user will be able to get a big red envelope. Meituan has embedded social interaction in the user rebate process to encourage users to share red envelopes to attract new customers , and uses social interaction as an internal motivation to make users feel fun and promote user usage.

Meituan Waimai is connected to WeChat address book, you can steal red envelopes from your friends at will and generate social interaction

c. Explore randomness and the unknown

Mahjong, as a game with a long history in the Chinese nation, has always been popular among the general public. Like most card games, every game of mahjong is full of fun due to the randomness and uncertainty of card dealing.

Exploring the unknown is human instinct. When faced with unknown things, humans will instinctively feel excited. This feeling of excitement is the internal motivation for users to explore. We try to embed it into product design.

NetEase Yanxuan will give users a certain amount of rebate after they make a purchase. They package this rebate into a small game of exploring the unknown - flipping cards. This is a good example of embedding internal motivation in loyalty building.

To sum up, internal motivation is often based on human instinct. Product operations must be realistic and people-oriented. Studying the motivations behind people's behavior can often help us find the key to solving operational problems.

Final Thoughts

Building user loyalty is not a small matter that can be accomplished with a set of point system and membership rights system. It is a major matter at the product strategy level that requires cooperation among major departments such as operations, products, and brands to complete.

This article will first analyze what loyalty is, then study the factors that affect loyalty, and finally introduce specific implementation methods to improve user loyalty. I hope it will be helpful to you. If you have any feedback or communication, please leave a message.