5 issues to pay attention to in retention activities, starting with clarifying the two activity purposes

Attracting new users and retaining existing users are directly related to the product’s “popularity” and are very important to product operations . Previous article " Event Operation : How to conduct activities aimed at attracting new customers? 》 has made some elaboration on the issue of attracting new users, so how can we enhance the sense of belonging of new users and the sense of presence of old users through activities? Increase user loyalty to the product? This article will start from improving user activity and reducing user churn , and talk about the precautions for retention activities. There are a total of 5 points. Let’s start with the purpose of retention activities:

1. Retention activities can be divided into two major purposes

From Zhu Zhu’s experience, retention activities can be divided into two categories according to their purpose:

(1) Activities that simply awaken dormant users, increase user stickiness, and enhance product ownership

Online activities are commonly seen in the app’s daily sign-in, points redemption, and follow-up discussions, while offline activities are mostly gatherings and exchanges. This type of activity requires a long-term, themed, and periodic series of activities in order to cultivate good habits among users.

(2) Activities to increase user engagement and collect UGC

Most of them are online activities, and the activities can be in the form of online essay writing, posting comments and sharing pictures, etc. This type of activity will cost users a lot of time to create UGC and has a certain threshold for the activity. When planning such events, in order to increase participation, it is necessary to find attractive gimmicks. The next article will focus on how to increase participation in online activities. Interested students can pay attention to it.

The purposes of the above two types of activities are summarized by Zhu Zhu based on the users themselves and the operators themselves. The ultimate goal is to increase product usage and cultivate user loyalty to the product.

2. Serialize activities to enhance user participation

A series of activities with clear themes and periodicity are conducive to cultivating user habits; secondly, they are conducive to creating a brand effect and establishing industry authority. These two points of experience are also summarized by Zhu Zhu from his experience in nearly a hundred events. Below, Zhu Zhu provides a targeted explanation using two cases from his own activities.

At the end of 2014, I took over the operation of a wedding industry platform. At the beginning, the platform’s vertical labels were unclear, there were no targeted activities, there were few users and it was basically dormant.

From 2015 to 2016, I started a makeup trial event called “The Most Beautiful Bride” for brides-to-be, which was held once a month for a total of 10 events. The initial purpose of the event was simple, which was to provide brides-to-be on the platform with an opportunity to try on makeup and dresses for free, and to provide a certain reference for their makeup choices on the wedding day. As soon as the activity was launched, users responded strongly and they were quite interested in this form of activity. So, I continued with the second and third issues on this theme... Gradually I found that many users added me and asked about the activities. Many users even took the initiative to bring their friends to the platform to participate in the activities together. User groups and communities would discuss activities from time to time.

On the other hand, the uninterrupted activities also produced effects in vertical industries, and gradually the partners evolved from "I look for" to "look for me". In one year, the "Most Beautiful Bride" makeup trial series of activities activated more than 20,000 dormant users and served a total of 30 local businesses. All of this laid the foundation for the subsequent brand label shaping and monetization.

Another case is that in the same period of 2015, I organized an offline event called "Party in the Same City" with the aim of leading the platform's users from online to offline and transforming their weak relationships into strong relationships. The first and second phases received very good responses, but due to some other arrangements, the event was temporarily suspended after three phases. It wasn’t until four months later that I started this series of activities again, but I found that users had completely lost their enthusiasm for participation. Therefore, this series of activities was terminated.

Serialized activities are very helpful in cultivating user habits. However, the serialization of long-term themes may also lead to "aesthetic fatigue" among users, which in turn affects their enthusiasm for participation. In response to this situation, we need to follow two points when planning activities. 1. Under the big activity theme, regularly change the small themes of the activity by taking advantage of hot spots or festivals. 2. Regularly collect user opinions, understand user psychological changes, and let users participate in event planning.

3. Innovate activity rules to allow more users to participate in activities

After activities are launched on a regular and serial basis, it is inevitable that the same user will grab a spot to participate in the event multiple times. This situation seems to go against the purpose of our activity of "awakening the majority of sleeping users". But if you think about it carefully, this also proves from another perspective that the event is attractive and a successful event.

To avoid this situation from happening on a large scale, we can leverage users' enthusiasm for participation to modify some activity participation rules and increase certain activity thresholds. For example, setting activity thresholds such as "share activities to Moments ", "invite friends to help", and "invite friends to use products to get multiple activity opportunities" can help stimulate users' enthusiasm for participating in activities. On the other hand, it can also increase brand exposure and attract new users to a certain extent.

4. Offline activities transform online “weak relationships” into “strong relationships”

Online relationships are a kind of “weak relationship” social interaction , which lacks a certain degree of stability and certainty. When online activities are launched on a certain scale and users have a certain basis for familiarity with each other and participation in activities, you can try to use offline activities to increase stickiness between users and transform this "weak relationship" into a "strong relationship." Let users actually participate in offline interactions, experience it realistically, and increase their trust in the product. At the same time, offline activities themselves are also a good activity threshold, and offline activities can be used to conduct a new round of user segmentation.

5. Community exchange, convenient communication

I won’t go into too much detail here. What Zhu Zhu would like to add here is that when editing and promoting each event, you can include the event community address to guide users to the community. In this way, on the one hand, it is more convenient to answer questions about the event and communicate with users; on the other hand, it is also conducive to later promotion of the event and soliciting activity suggestions from users.

The above are some of Zhu Zhu’s new insights on “retention activities”. In the next article, Zhu Zhu will talk about “how to increase user participation in online activities” based on five questions . If you need, please continue to pay attention.