How to drive users into your routine?

Why do users buy/participate/take action as soon as they see some sales/activities/advertisements?

But your stuff is always done well, but users never do it the way you want?

How to get your users to take action immediately?

For example, participating in your activities, opening your official account , joining your community , purchasing your products...

The model I want to share with you today is very suitable for this topic. It is BJ Fogg's behavior model.

This article has a total of 4,000 words.

The Fogg Behavior Model is a model used to explore the causes of user behavior . It believes that for a behavior to occur, three elements must be present at the same time: motivation, ability, and trigger.

That is to say, an action may only eventually occur when a person has sufficient motivation and the ability to do it, and there are triggers that can trigger the user to take action.

As shown in the figure below, the part above the blue curve is "where the behavior may occur."

Here, we will talk with you about how to get users to take immediate action from three aspects: motivation, ability and trigger.

1 Motivation

Motivation is the most direct reason for users to act when they expect some kind of reward. For example, seeing a doctor and taking medicine is to expect to get better soon and avoid the pain caused by the disease.

This is the most critical step. If users are not interested in your product, your official account, and have no motivation for the actions you expect of them, then they will not use it at all, so how can they take action?

We often say that we should have insight into user needs and explore their pain points, which is actually about finding user motivations!

What do users hope to achieve with your product? Why should users attend your event? What are the reasons for users to follow your official account?

We can activate user motivation in 6 directions:

1) Find fun, 2) Avoid pain, 3) Find hope, 4) Avoid fear, 5) Find belonging, 6) Avoid prejudice; 7) Find benefits; 8) Avoid anxiety.

In addition, people are born with eight strong primitive desires, which will directly affect our action decisions. They are the best motivations we can use.

● Avoid fatigue and enjoy a comfortable and pleasant life● Enjoy food and drink● Free from fear, pain and danger● Be attractive and seek sexual partners● Stay young and healthy● Compete with others and gain more advantages● Take care of and protect your children, family and loved ones● Gain social recognition and be respected

In short, if we want users to take action, we must first provide the "motivation" of their needs. Activate certain "needs", "pain points" or "interests" of people.

2 Capabilities

However, to increase the occurrence rate of the expected behavior, the behavior needs to be simple and easy to perform, which means that users need to have sufficient ability to do it.

The so-called "behavior should be simple and easy to perform" means how difficult the action you want users to achieve is and how high the threshold is.

People are used to staying in their comfort zone, unwilling to take risks, unwilling to change, and unwilling to think outside the box.

So even if your product, campaign, or some other advertising purpose is worth trying, if it’s not easy to change or take action, many people may give up.

Between motivation and action, there is a ridge that is not easy to cross, which is the cost that users have to pay for self-change.

This cost is often not just a monetary cost, which is only one of the costs. The main costs include image cost, action cost, learning cost, health cost, decision-making cost, etc.

Yale University once conducted an experiment in which everyone went to the school hospital to receive free tetanus vaccinations. They prepared two versions of the tetanus manual, and different groups received different versions.

One group received a high-fear version of the manual, which used exaggerated language and highly stimulating pictures, including examples of severe tetanus patients; the other group received a low-fear version of the manual, which used relatively plain language.

One month later, the results were unexpected. The proportion of students in the two groups who actually got vaccinated was the same, only 3%.

The experiment then continued. This time, nothing else changed, except that the experimenter added two items to the manual: one was a geographical location map to the school hospital; the other was the specific time for vaccination.

However, these two contents seem to have no meaning. Ultimately, the number of students seeking vaccination increased significantly, to 28%, an increase of more than 9 times.

This result actually has nothing to do with the product itself. It is more about the fact that this clear map and specific time make the behavior of "going to the school hospital to get vaccinated" seem easier to achieve, reducing the cost of action.

There is also a jam experiment that provides consumers with a chance to taste the jam. The experiment was divided into 2 groups. One group had 6 types of jams to try, and the other group had 24 types of jams to try. After trying all of them, they could buy any of them at a price lower than the market price.

As a result, 30% of the tasters in the group of 6 jams chose to buy, while only 3% of the tasters in the group of 24 jams ultimately chose to buy.

The reason is simple: low decision costs lead to a high number of actions. The 24 types of jams may seem more tempting, but in fact they increase the decision-making cost for consumers. It is difficult to choose and it is not easy to meet their needs, so consumers may simply give up on buying.

In other words, if you give users too many choices, it will also make them feel "difficult" and stop possible behavior. And here is to reduce the user's decision-making cost.

Therefore, in order to cross the action threshold and ultimately transform motivation into action, what we need to do is to make users more capable, reduce their overall action costs, and enable them to take action more conveniently.

In short, in addition to providing sufficient motivation, we also need to tell users that "it is actually very easy to take action", "it can be done easily", "many people have already done it", etc. This must be done well.

3 Trigger

A trigger is something that prompts you to take immediate action.

For example, if you have a cold, you may not buy medicine even if you are motivated. But when you see a news report saying that you may get XX disease if you have a cold, you will immediately go buy medicine.

This news was the trigger.

We need to figure out when and where users will use this product? What emotions would motivate them to act? What kind of copywriting can impress them? What kind of results are they unwilling to see, etc.

Simply put, there needs to be a trigger to further activate certain "needs", "pain points" or "interests" of people.

This trigger is divided into external trigger and internal trigger.

External triggers: They are relatively simple. They are the stimuli or prompts that we directly see, hear or feel. For example, just search on Baidu and you will know.

Internal trigger: This is mainly psychological. In a certain scenario, the user’s core pain points are aroused again. The human weaknesses, various emotions, and various psychological principles we often talk about are all of this type.

So, what are some good ways to accomplish triggering or suggestion?

I saw that the owner of the public account "少加点班" Li Shaojia had very good insights on this, which has very good guiding significance, so I would like to share it with you:

A large number of scientific experiments have shown that almost all the "cues" of behavioral habits can be classified into the following four categories: situation, time, emotional state, and prelude behavior.

1) Context, that is, the specific and vivid scene or environment in which the user is located.

Generally speaking, we can find the first step to stimulate user habits by starting from the typical situations in which users use the product: user hints.

For example, " Himalaya ": When there is a traffic jam on the road, listen to Himalaya.

2) Emotions, which trigger the user’s mood when using the product, are especially suitable for emotional products.

For example, live streaming products: "Watching TV shows is tiring, and games are expensive, so live streaming is more fascinating." (Example)

3) Time, which refers to the specific time when the product is suitable for use.

For example, Luoji Siwei sent a voice message on WeChat at six in the morning. For example, "Reading at Ten O'clock" , the name alone gives a very clear hint.

4) Prelude behavior, which refers to what you are likely to do immediately after doing something.

For example, if you are operating a product that is used after brushing teeth, you can use "brushing teeth" as a "hint".

For example: "Rinse your mouth after brushing your teeth to make up for the defects that cannot be brushed" (example)

In short, it is necessary to understand the various emotions and psychology that may become internal triggers, and then use external triggers to prompt users to take action.

Now that we understand the motivations, abilities, and triggers that drive user action, let’s look at a few examples.

4. Give some examples

1) Learning community

There are many learning communities now, such as "Change Yourself in 7 Days", "14-Day Learning Plan", "21-Day Reading Habit Development", etc., which are very popular and effective.

The corresponding "Fogg Behavior Model" is:

Motivation: To overcome one's own laziness and solve users' growth anxiety, to make progress together with a group of people with common characteristics, to free oneself from anxiety and find hope;

Ability: It is not difficult to take action. You just need to join a group or pay a certain amount of growth money, and there will be professional teachers and a group of people to complete it together. The monetary cost, learning cost and action cost are all very low.

Triggers: Only 7 days required, lectures by big names, half-price for the first 100 students, guaranteed employment upon completion of study, etc. are all triggers.

2) Official Account Operation

When it comes to public account operation, increasing followers is a big problem now, and to increase followers, the first thing is to get reading users to follow you.

Here we take the example of following the account "Mumu Laozei", and the corresponding "Fogg Behavior Model" is:

Motivation: To solve some knowledge anxiety issues of marketing operators and provide practical suggestions and guidance to help solve problems;

Ability: This is very simple. Just click the [Follow] button. WeChat has done a good job in this regard.

Trigger: header guidance, public account recommendation, follow the QR code plus a sentence guidance, prepare 35G new media learning materials for readers, increase topic interaction, bottom article labels, bold core highlights, etc. can all be triggered.

For details, please see "How to effectively increase the attention rate of public accounts and let users follow you after reading articles? 》an article.

3) The most popular military uniform photos

Not long ago, on the Army Day, the People's Daily client and Tencent Tiantian Ptu developed an H5 for showing photos in military uniforms, which went viral on WeChat Moments and is probably the most popular H5 in the first half of the year.

The corresponding "Fogg Behavior Model" is:

Motivation: To create a photo of myself in military uniform, for fun, to have some fun, and to compare myself with others.

Ability: The cost of action is very low. Just input a frontal photo and you can immediately synthesize military uniform photos of people in different eras, without makeup or photo editing.

Triggers: Army Day, recommendations from friends, reports from major media and self-media , etc. are all triggers.

4) Improve title open rate

A good title is half the battle. This statement should be fully verified in this fragmented era. Nowadays, the opening rate of pictures and texts in public accounts is getting lower and lower. It can be said that increasing clicks has become a matter of life and death for the operation of public accounts.

So in such a tragic situation, how can we increase the opening rate of pictures and texts just by the title?

The corresponding "Fogg Behavior Model" is:

Motivation: Resolve doubts/curiosity, seek benefits, gain advantages, check the news, gain emotional comfort, learn practical skills, seek recognition, care about hot topics, etc.

Ability: Clicking on the title itself is a very low-cost activity, and at the same time, the user’s understanding cost must be reduced, otherwise they will not click if they don’t understand it.

Trigger: Corresponding to the motivation, the triggers that make users click on the title are: creating suspense and curiosity, related to "sex", related to "me", thinking outside the box, chasing hot spots and hanging out with rich people, using contrast, highlighting benefits, creating an atmosphere of urgency, emphasizing scarcity, using endorsements from big Vs , adding modifiers before and after the title, implying danger, directly indicating the beneficiary... and so on.

5) Japanese rice cooker

When rice cookers were first introduced in Japan, their main selling point was convenience, but sales were poor. Subsequent investigation found that the reason was that the housewife felt that using an electric rice cooker would greatly damage her image of hard work, and her mother-in-law would think she was being lazy.

Later, businesses began to promote the selling point of making rice healthier, and rice cookers became popular. In fact, cooking with rice cookers may not be healthier, but merchants’ strategies help consumers bypass the image costs.

The corresponding "Fogg Behavior Model" is:

Motivation: Want to make cooking more convenient.

Ability: This case actually did not change the monetary cost, learning cost, etc., but helped consumers reduce the image cost of purchase, which is the key.

Triggers: Discounts, eye-catching advertisements, and easier cooking are all triggers.

6) Are you hungry?

Why are more and more office workers using Ele.me, Meituan Waimai , etc.?

This can also correspond to the "Fogg Behavior Model", which is:

Motivation: Ordering takeout allows you to enjoy food and drinks without leaving home, avoid fatigue, and enjoy a comfortable and pleasant life.

Ability: You can order food directly by installing an APP, which greatly reduces the cost of use.

Trigger: The first is the trigger of meal time, then there is the trigger of being busy at work or not wanting to cook at home, and another trigger is various discounts, various subsidies, various points systems, and various coupons.

In short, an action is most likely to occur only when a person is sufficiently motivated, has the ability to do it, and has a trigger to remind the user to take action.

Okay, that’s all I have to say. I hope this helps you.