Where to buy Qunar? How to use vouchers to attract new users and promote their activation?

There is less than a month left until Chinese Valentine’s Day . As an operator , this is a rare opportunity to attract new users and activate their activities. So are there any good operational methods to activate your users?

Take Qunar.com’s marketing on 520 as an example. Qunar.com took advantage of the popularity of Valentine’s Day and used the method of distributing vouchers to gain a group of new users.

Qunar.com first launched gift packages on a large scale and across multiple business lines. Whether it is air tickets , hotels, tickets, etc., users can obtain corresponding gift packages to meet their various needs . In addition, users can also enter Qunar.com through multiple channels such as QR codes, H5, and short links. Qunar.com also chooses to cooperate with Baidu Takeout, financial service apps, etc. to expand its user base and effectively attract new users.

Of course, just doing the voucher part is not enough. Qunar.com also held an activity of "Wear a wedding dress and stay in a hotel for free, and Happy Valley tickets are 13.14 yuan" , which attracted a large number of couples to choose Qunar.com App. At the same time, 520 is also the graduation season, so Qunar.com also launched the " Graduation Travel Confession Season: Fly to Southeast Asia for 1,000 yuan" , which attracted a large number of college students in the graduation season. Through these effective new user acquisition activities, new users enter the App, and then use coupons to encourage them to decide to consume , thus achieving the ultimate operational goal.

In addition to Qunar.com, OFO ’s red envelope marketing is also a classic case.

In the early days of OFO, users chose to ride OFO for almost no money. OFO would deposit some initial coupons into our accounts. After each ride, users could get coupons again by sharing with friends/ circles of friends , so that they would not have to spend money on the next ride. This gave users an extra opportunity to ride for free, and OFO was spread. This sharing incentive model is realized in the form of coupons .

How the voucher strategy can continue to drive user growth

Attracting new users, promoting activation, conversion , and repeat purchases are the four key points of user growth

What is the core value model of vouchers? It is to promote the continuous growth of users on the platform , and the most important logic is to transfer users from low frequency to high frequency . Vouchers are used throughout the entire user journey and throughout the product life cycle.

New user acquisition is to acquire new users outside the platform, and activation has entered the platform products, that is, how to attract active business modules; the third is conversion within the business module. Users have already had some search or browsing behavior, but have not completed the final booking. Leveraging conversion improvement at this stage is our growth goal. The fourth is repeat purchase . After users make a purchase, some strategies are needed to encourage them to continue purchasing.

In the stage of attracting new users, try to share and spread the word.

First, the types of vouchers are designed, and the basic elements corresponding to the vouchers are differentiated . Secondly, for users who want to share and spread information, we design shareable travel packages and other discounts in pop-up windows on the user’s App homepage. Users can receive the packages themselves, and vouchers are used as promotional items. When distributing gift packages, we will combine hot topics and distribute large-value vouchers through sentimental theme activities, small games , etc.

For low-frequency businesses such as hotel bookings, this type of voucher does not have a strong explosive point in promoting user sharing and dissemination . However, there is still a certain proportion of users who are willing to share and spread the word, so this form is currently a relatively common way to attract new users.

Cross-industry cooperation is the mainstream of attracting new users in the second half

As the Internet enters the second half, the speed at which various platforms acquire new users is slowing down. The explosive growth model of the past basically no longer exists, and some differentiated cooperation is becoming more and more accepted by everyone. This form is quite common, where both parties can obtain traffic from each other without spending any money. Qunar.com has also carried out a lot of such cooperation in the form of vouchers.

Although the scale of Qunar.com's distribution of vouchers is not particularly large, after operating continuously for a period of time, it has developed a more flexible cooperation tool , namely travel gift packages .

There are several advantages of travel packages.

The first point is to focus on a single business line while implanting the rights and interests of each business line to maximize the effect of attracting new customers.

Secondly , there are multiple ways to contact for promotions, supporting redemption codes, interface judgment, and operational configuration capabilities.

The third point is that it has high flexibility and low cost, and can achieve the best effect by using differentiated UI styles and combinations of promotional materials in different channels .

Fourthly , the delivery format is very flexible, supporting both QR code and H5.

We have currently tried some cross-industry cooperation, such as life service apps or food delivery including shared bicycles , cooperation with offline chain stores such as KFC , as well as large-scale events and marathons, cooperation with IP channels, or points platforms such as Duiba, which provide exchange and swap of coupons. At present, there seems to be a lot of room for imagination.

Scenario-based cross -channeling

When distributing vouchers, we will capture three scenarios: before decision making, after decision making, and before departure. What do we do before users make decisions ? For example, in the case of air tickets and train tickets, users search but do not complete the booking, or complete the booking but do not convert and leave the app for more than half an hour. We believe that the user may have exited the app, so we will recall the user and bring him back to our platform.

The second scenario is when the user completes the reservation and proceeds to the stage of placing an order. For this cross-traffic, we will have in-site message prompts and cross-traffic positions on the booking completion page, which will remind the hotel of its rights and interests in the form of personalized copywriting and provide a convenient jump entrance.

The third scenario is before the trip begins . Such scenario-based pull is based on a large amount of behavioral analysis. We found that the hotel booking decision cycle is very short, 1-5 days, and the proportion of same-day decisions is very high. It is very common for users to book their own travel, perhaps seven days to two weeks in advance.

This creates a misalignment in the decision-making cycle . Users can be drawn to the hotel to become active when booking a departure, but there are still users who have not reached their decision-making cycle. At this time, a supplementary strategy is to make some cross-reminders when matching the hotel scenario before the user sets off on the trip. Two days after the user completes the booking , we analyze the user's transportation needs. The next two days are the peak time for hotel bookings, as well as one day before departure . There is also a group of users who are more casual and make random decisions. The proportion of decisions made on the day of departure is very high, so we supplement three scenarios to maximize the cross-pull effect. Actual data shows that the effects of these scenarios are indeed good.

Qunar.com has many product forms of bundling vouchers. The other party's business is bundled with our hotel. The other party focuses on providing value-added services to users, or increasing revenue of business lines. For us, we focus on improving cross-traffic.

This kind of cooperation model has several value points for us .

The first is that before making a decision , our product promotions are actually placed in a very advantageous position for users to see, which actually strengthens the perception of the business. Qunar.com is very familiar with air tickets, so we have a large user group of this type. However, they may not think of booking hotels on our platform . When users' awareness and trust in us are not yet fully established, exposure in front of users is helpful to us.

Second, if the user spends money to buy a large amount of vouchers, his willingness to use them will be very strong. The conversion rate after purchase is very high. For such users, we will also remind them of cross-flow after the booking is completed, and quickly let them jump to the hotel for use.

Comprehensive promotion of in-site activities

For active users of scenario-based business lines such as non-transportation, it is difficult for us to capture user demand scenarios. The proportion of users without scenarios or small business lines is relatively low, but we still set up a bottom-up activation strategy.

There are three main things to do: recall active APP users after they quit, operate potential travel and existing APP silent users in the near future, and attract new customers for the App.

If we find that he is not active in the hotel after jumping out, we will set up a more attractive hotel benefit for this part of users, which can achieve a certain proportion of active recall. Regarding existing users, we stratify users who have traveled recently and then operate them on a rolling basis. When the user has just completed the registration, giving the travel gift package benefits to the new user and embedding the hotel vouchers into the novice gift package can attract the user to be active in the hotel to the greatest extent.

Personalized and differentiated recall to improve conversion

In the conversion process, Qunar.com did two things

The first is exit recall . After the user leaves for 30 minutes, we will launch a discount strategy, and 5% to 10% of the users will be successfully recalled. Why 30 minutes? We have done analysis and found that users have some pauses when browsing, but if the average pause period exceeds 30 minutes, it can be determined that they have bounced.

The second is to make recall more personalized . For higher-value users, we can give them more differentiated preferential strategies.

Experience optimization is also very important, so we have made a lot of special designs for discount perception in the entire experience closed loop.

Starting from the homepage, our hotel entrance has a ribbon prompt , which tells users the promotional benefits and vouchers they hold in a clear form. Next is the list page. We have some prompt bars at the top, displayed according to priority, and there are some auxiliary filtering tools. If you come for promotional benefits, you can find the discount you want to use more quickly. Then below are the form filling pages and auxiliary tools. The form filling pages have continuous exposure of promotional items, and the completion page has an announcement of the discount strength.

Increase repeat purchases by issuing vouchers strategically

Perhaps in the past year or so, Qunar.com's biggest benefit has been the increase in repeat purchases. We did two things at that time. First, after users completed their hotel consumption on our platform, we issued a voucher to low-frequency users to encourage them to come to our platform to make a purchase next time. Three sequential coupons are used, with a validity period of 30 to 90 days, and the discount level ranges from low to high.

The second is for silent users. We will regularly reactivate these users in batches, and the most important tool is still vouchers. Vouchers are distributed regularly. Through this strategy, we have conducted AB testing to objectively and scientifically measure the effectiveness of our activities. AB testing is the most convincing. We distributed vouchers to three types of users and found after comparison that the transaction volume of low-frequency users and silent users increased significantly. The transaction activity may have increased less, but the input-output ratio can still be covered.

After the launch of Qunar.com’s voucher operation system, the most important indicator is the pull for repeat purchases. Before we made these targeted efforts, our overall repurchase rate was very stable. However, after the subsidies were recovered, our repurchase rate has begun to decline. However, after the vouchers were launched, we found that they had a significant impact on the repurchase rate. The repurchase rate of Qunar.com is now steadily increasing and is at a relatively high level in the industry.

The revenue control mechanism of voucher operation

When implementing a promotional strategy, it is necessary to measure the return on investment, or ROI . When measuring ROI, we must be goal-oriented and confirm whether the goal is scale growth or increased revenue. Different ROI control lines need to be set for different goals. If the goal at the current stage is scale growth, and the platform can afford a certain amount of cost investment for the current scale growth, then the strategy can allow the incremental profit to be negative and the ROI can be less than 1. However, if the goal at this stage is to increase revenue, then the ROI must be greater than 1 and the incremental revenue must be positive. However, the scale of the positive revenue depends on the demand, so we need to estimate the ROI in advance for any marketing strategy we implement.

The issuance of vouchers involves the cancellation of vouchers, which generates a voucher usage ratio indicator. There are two results after using the coupons. One is the increase in investment, and the other is the growth in scale . One is the subsidy growth coefficient and the other is the scale growth coefficient. These two indicators correspond to our incremental costs and incremental benefits respectively, and ROI is the relationship between these two indicators. Incremental revenue to incremental cost constitutes our incremental ROI. Why look at incremental ROI? This is equivalent to how much incremental profit you can get in exchange for spending more money. ROI is greater than 1 or less than 1, which involves whether it is a loss or a profit .

When conducting project evaluation, we often evaluate the relationship between these indicators to estimate whether our model is reliable. Once the estimation is wrong, it will be very terrible. For example, can spending 10% more cost result in 10% growth?

In fact, input and output are definitely not linearly related, and marginal costs tend to increase gradually. It is necessary to have a relatively reliable estimate of the multiple relationship between input and output. It is best to have relevant references. If there are no reference values, a relatively conservative estimate needs to be made. At the same time, a more feasible way is to increase the proportion of coupon usage, find the break-even point, and assess the risk points in advance. If the risk point is later, the risk will be relatively small and the project feasibility will be higher. Once the relationships between these coefficients are determined, the existing ROI of the business will also affect the space and results of the incremental ROI. Referring to the industry’s experience, only when the current ROI reaches at least 3 or above will there be room to implement such marketing strategies; otherwise, there will be a great risk of profit loss.

There are many ways to regulate cost-benefit and input-output ratio.

First, improve the attractiveness of coupons, optimize the touchpoint experience , and try to maximize the scale increase;

Second, improve the perception of discounts and increase the increase ratio by using reminders, lowest price calculations and other strategies.

Third, implement precise delivery, conduct scenario segmentation, differentiate users , and improve the accuracy of coupon issuance. If the marketing strategy is too linear, it will be easy for the fake order group to grasp it. Therefore, we need to make precise delivery, promote personalization and differentiation, and make it difficult for the fake order group to control the rules.

Fourth, unified regulation is carried out on the issuance of various coupons, and mutually exclusive and coexistence logic is set up . A user may be able to achieve our pulling effect by subsidizing one voucher, but we do not set a limit on the issuance and issue several vouchers one after another, resulting in uncontrollable cost investment. Therefore, when designing a voucher strategy, the mutual exclusion and coexistence relationship with other strategies must be set in advance.

Fifth, develop an anti-cheating strategy for vouchers . There are some groups that specialize in fake orders. When designing a marketing strategy, the first thing to consider is how to prevent the coupons from being easily taken away by groups that you don’t want to attract, leaving room for fake order profits.

Promote the tooling of the voucher operation system

How to achieve convenient operation configuration and save operating costs

In the user growth system, there are many strategies for the voucher system, involving user segmentation, scenario segmentation, and different groups and strengths of vouchers and validity periods . So how do we ensure its orderly and efficient configuration and operation? The cost-saving solution is to build a voucher strategy operation platform to realize the release of strategy accounting configuration. The main part of the platform is divided into three modules, with corresponding configuration functions set in ticket design, strategy configuration, and access method .

How to turn vouchers into a real marketing control tool

We need to conduct continuous testing to understand the flexible regulatory space of the voucher strategy between scale growth and revenue growth, and turn the voucher into a marketing regulation tool . For example, the scale leverage range, ROI control range, and how to balance the relationship between short-term and long-term goals. If the boss says that the current goal is to achieve a certain scale of expansion, and you can clearly tell him what the feasible strategies are, how much investment is required to achieve it, and what the input-output ratio is, then it means that the voucher operation strategy has reached a very mature stage and has become a truly controllable target regulation tool.