How to use “message push” so as not to harass users? ——Taking financial apps as an example

Imagine this scenario:

On a clear autumn afternoon, the sun shines brightly but not hot. You sit by the window in Starbucks , listening to melodious music, sitting quietly alone, drinking your favorite coffee, while watching the beautiful girls and handsome guys coming and going outside the window, thoughtfully.

Suddenly, the pleasant music on Starbucks' radio disappeared, and was replaced by an advertisement for a new product - "Our store launches banana flavored coffee, with a trial price of 19 yuan. Only 100 cups are available per day. The quantity is limited and it's on a first-come, first-served basis."

“What’s going on? Why is Starbucks advertising?” You must be thinking this in your mind. Then I continued to drink coffee and daydream. Ten minutes later, the music was forced to stop again, and an abrupt advertisement sounded on the radio again.

You were thinking of enjoying the tranquility after an afternoon, but it was ruined by these two advertisements. At this time, you had to get up, shook your head helplessly, and walked out of the coffee shop with a frown.

Currently, most APP push notifications in the financial industry are just like this advertisement. They do not distinguish between user groups when pushing, but send all the notifications to all users at once. Therefore, there will be a phenomenon of losing followers every time a push is made . However, APP message push is an excellent channel to increase user activity and reach users. By delivering core values ​​to users, a company can build a brand image and increase the transaction frequency and amount of users. Therefore, APP message push is a very good communication channel, the key lies in how to use it.

(It should be noted that since Internet finance has many sub-sectors, such as banking, securities , insurance, P2P , etc., different sectors involve different supervisions, and different companies in the same sector interpret regulatory policies differently, so this article does not involve discussions on compliance)

So, how should APP push be done in the Internet finance industry?

Message push can be divided into APP push and SMS push. Of course, there is also WeChat public account push. Here we only discuss APP push and SMS push. Because the two can be combined with each other. When the user turns off the message push function of the APP, we can push it in the form of text messages.

Message push is a tool that helps users better meet their core needs. Therefore, the content of APP message push is something that meets user needs.

The core value of APP is to meet the core needs of users. Once you understand the core needs of users, you will understand the core value of APP. Before starting APP push, we should ask ourselves a question: Why should users use your APP? What needs do users use your app to meet?

The core value of P2P apps is usually to make money through financial management (of course, security issues are of paramount importance). The core value of securities apps is usually to meet users' needs for stock trading (and also some financial management needs). Bank apps meet users' business needs for saving, transferring, and financial management. Insurance apps such as car insurance are designed to meet users' needs for quick resolution when traffic accidents occur.

Of course, these are core requirements. In the actual development of APP, in addition to meeting the core needs of users, we will also add some additional requirements, which requires operators to fully understand the users.

The core value of Internet financial apps is usually:

1) Help users make money ;

2) It brings convenience to users , as business transactions can be handled directly on their mobile phones without having to travel far to a business outlet.

Take the stock trading APP as an example. For novice users, we should help them get started with stock trading as soon as possible. Specifically, we can start from the following aspects:

• Convenient for users to open accounts;
• Help users become familiar with the relevant rules and operating procedures of stock trading through the stock investor school;
• Help users select popular stock sectors and individual stocks;
• Help users obtain the latest stock information;
• Help users learn stock trading strategies;
• Allow users to participate in new stock issuance, etc.

From the perspective of financial management apps, we should:

• Help users quickly understand various financial products;
• Be familiar with the yield, investment period, risk status and investment direction of various financial products;
• Able to help users build personalized investment portfolios.

APP message notifications can be divided into three categories based on their form: activity, notification and content . What type of information is pushed in what circumstances depends on what aspect of product value is to be delivered and the limitations of each method.

Most platforms would like to send every marketing campaign they make to all users of the platform. Their logic is this: send one more and bring one more to the event. But for users who have no demand, it becomes harassment.

For example, for brokerage apps, if they push fixed-income product activities to users who only trade stocks, that would be harassment, especially when the market is booming, because many users think the yields of fixed-income products are too low (the current annualized yields are generally between 2% and 5%). Because brokerage apps usually have many functions, users can use them to trade stocks as well as to purchase financial products. Corresponding taxi-hailing apps, such as Uber , have a lot of marketing activities. That’s because the main demand of Uber users is transportation, and the reason users like them to push promotional activities is that it can reduce their travel costs.

We should push marketing information to users with needs in a targeted manner. Similarly, fixed income products can be pushed to users who have purchased fixed income products before, users who have purchased equity financial products but are in a loss-making state, etc.; paid stock trading strategies can be recommended to stock trading users, but they do not need to be recommended to senior users, especially institutional users.

Message push is triggered based on the user's own behavior on the APP, and highly relevant transactional messages are pushed, such as successful financial product transactions, successful stock trading, etc. Since the content of this type of message is strongly related to users and the degree of interaction is relatively high, users can usually understand the reasons why the message is triggered, so they have a higher tolerance for this type of message notification.

We can add push links for marketing messages in this type of message. For users who want to receive financial product transaction information push, we can add content about financial product activities in the push, so that the correlation will be higher. Recommendations can also be made on margin trading and securities lending functions, financial management functions, etc.

However, the shortcoming of this type of message push is that it covers a narrow population. Users need to have sufficient interactions with the product before the message notification is triggered, and it cannot reach some low-frequency or new users.

Push content that users are interested in, generally providing personalized content recommendations based on users' browsing, collection, likes, comments, and other behaviors. For example, if a user frequently clicks on the "Stock Investor School" column, we can assume that the user is interested in learning how to trade stocks, and at this time we can push information such as stock trading strategies and individual stock recommendations to him/her. Since the user is purchasing a financial product for the first time, we can push knowledge popularization about the financial product to him/her.

When securities companies make this type of push notifications, they can target user-related behaviors and recommend individual stock information, hot sector information, financial product information, stock trading strategies, and financial management knowledge to users.

The advantage of content push is that it can achieve high interactivity through highly customized content related to users, which is usually second only to the click-through rate of functional notifications. The disadvantage is that if users interact less with the product, the product will obtain less user information or the content will not be accurate enough, resulting in lower interactivity.

The first two steps have clarified the meaning and content of the push, and the next step is to clarify to whom the push will be sent. From the above two steps, we all know that APP message push must be targeted and personalized to achieve better results. When pushing, give flowers to beauties and give cow dung to dung beetles.

It is very important that you push information that users need . We also believe that the platform pushes what users need, but not all users need it, especially some event information and promotional information. Therefore, we can first make a selection of push content for users, let users choose by themselves, and then push the content of interest to users. For example, for users who only manage their finances and do not trade stocks, there is no need to push daily stock trading strategies.

Now that we already know that we need to be selective in terms of push user groups, how do we choose personalized push user groups in a targeted manner?

There are usually two methods:

Based on the current technology, any behavior of any user on the APP can be recorded. Therefore, we can simply segment user behavior, draw different user portraits , and push personalized information to different users in a targeted manner.

• Based on the user's basic attributes : gender, age, registration time...
• Based on user interests and preferences : different types of financial products, stock trading, new stock issuance, activities, business operations, transfers...
• Based on user behavior classification : life cycle, transaction type, transaction amount...

Here we also need to consider the issue of enabling the push function . Many users will choose to turn off or not allow application push notifications when installing the APP, so there should be a place in the APP to tell users that they can turn on the push button here to get the information they need or are interested in, so that it is convenient for users to enable push.

When you invite people to a banquet, you cannot just ask them to eat fried dough sticks and drink soy milk, as those are what they should eat for breakfast. The same applies when pushing content. If you want to increase activity, you should start from the user scenario and choose the appropriate push time.

Stock trading strategy information can be pushed before the stock market opens in the morning, before the stock market opens in the afternoon, and during the afternoon market break. If you push information about financial products, it should be done when the sale starts. If you push information about flash sales, you should give users time to familiarize themselves with the rules of the event and recharge their accounts. For example, for securities companies, if a novice is willing to learn how to trade stocks, they can make a learning plan for the user, allowing the user to learn a little bit every day, and push a piece of learning information to the user at a fixed time every day. This feels great for novice users.

If our Internet finance platform truly achieves that APP message push is to meet the core needs of users rather than harassing users, then we don’t need to be too concerned about the push frequency, but it should not be too excessive either. Boyfriends and girlfriends will get bored if they are together every day, let alone with a financial app. If I have to give a number, I think 1-2 are usually enough, but specific problems need specific analysis.

So here comes the question,

Which APP’s push notifications do you like the most?

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @黄卫权 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map