Get rid of miscellaneous tasks and start by building an effective user operation system

User operation work is often considered to be very complicated by practitioners because it involves all aspects of users. It includes both introducing new users and maintaining core users, such as managing QQ groups and WeChat groups . How to find the most core points in complicated work and improve operational efficiency requires building a complete user operation system.

1. Identify the top issues at the current stage based on business goals

We attach importance to operations because operations can maximize the value of products and better promote business development, so we must clearly define the goals of user operations. Each product has different goals at different times, which is determined by multiple dimensions such as product positioning, market competition environment, and product functional points.

The first question faced when a new community product is launched is where do the users come from? How to enable users to communicate in the community? What kind of content should users be guided to post? Moreover, the content of the communication must be consistent with the positioning and tone of the community. We usually call this process cold start . Therefore, the focus of user operations at this stage is user introduction and community atmosphere cultivation. During the rapid growth period of the community, the community atmosphere has basically been formed, and how to produce richer and higher-value communication content has become the new focus of user operations. When the community enters the mature stage, if it is an independent product, it needs to consider commercialization, such as launching value-added services. How to guide users to pay becomes the new focus of user operations. User churn occurs throughout the growth, maturity and decline stages. When the user churn rate exceeds an acceptable range, warning of potential user churn and recalling lost users become the focus of user operations. It can be seen from this that different periods have different user operation focuses depending on the product status and data results.

When an e-commerce platform is newly launched, the first thing it faces is the source of merchants. Merchants and buyers are both platform users. No matter whether it is a B2C or C2C product, merchants must first settle in, otherwise what will the sellers buy when they come in? Therefore, the user operation of e-commerce products starts from the merchant side. First, through brand invitation or open investment, a group of merchants are introduced to set up their own stores, release enough products, and then introduce buyers. When the platform enters a period of rapid growth, both merchants and buyers need to expand rapidly at the same time to ensure a balance between the two ends.

For merchants, there must be both a sufficient number and high-quality merchants. Therefore, large e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Tmall have separated the position of merchant operation from the user operation function, which is specifically responsible for the user operation of merchants. For buyers, high-net-worth users deserve more privileges and benefits to encourage them to complete more transactions and increase transaction amounts, so Taobao has launched a user level system and a membership system. It can be seen from this that in the same product, there are different user operation focuses depending on the different roles within the product.

2. Break down the expected user behavior

After clarifying the primary issue at the current stage, the expected user behavior should be broken down into details, that is, what kind of behavior the product wants users to complete that can best help solve the primary problem of the product at this stage.

(1) Number of users

The number of users is the goal pursued by most products, so installation or registration by new users is an expected behavior. Take Sina Weibo as an example. When it was first launched in 2010, Sina Weibo competed with Tencent Weibo for users, and the core indicator was new registered users. Many O2O products, such as Uber and Didi , offer high subsidies to new users.

(2) User activity

Users are valuable only when they are active, so daily active users and monthly active users are also common indicators in operations. Here, activity is an expected behavior, which is specifically manifested in visiting web pages and opening apps.

(3) User-contributed content

It’s not enough for users to just open the app, they also have to contribute content. A community product can only function if users publish content and interact with other users' content. Therefore, interaction rate and new content contribution rate are also common indicators of operations.

(4) User payment

When a product enters its mature stage, commercialization must be considered. Direct payment by users is a form of commercial operation, and payment is an expected behavior.

(5) User dissemination

When the cost of acquiring new users is too high, guiding users to recommend products to their friends and bringing in new users is a word-of-mouth method that is gradually being adopted, and user-initiated dissemination is an expected behavior.

3. Establish user operation strategy

Martial arts novels talk about countering each move with a countermove. The so-called user operation strategy is to develop a set of means to stimulate users to complete the expected behavior based on the expected user behavior. This involves two aspects: user stratification and user incentives. The two have a progressive relationship. User stratification is to more conveniently and focusedly incentivize the role that contributes the most to the product.

Not all users are the same. User stratification is to identify different user roles within the product, and user motivation is to develop incentives based on different user roles to stimulate them to complete the desired behavior. Taking Jianshu as an example, Jianshu includes three user roles: writers, readers, and topic managers. The official expected behavior of each role is different. For example, writers are expected to produce more high-quality article content, readers are expected to spend more time reading articles on Jianshu, and topic managers are expected to manage independent topics so that similar content on Jianshu can be effectively aggregated, providing writers with more exposure opportunities and helping readers find the articles they want to read more easily. It is particularly worth mentioning that these three user roles may overlap, that is, the same user can be a writer, a reader, and a topic manager, which requires users to be stratified according to their roles.

E-commerce platforms are usually divided into two user levels: buyers and sellers. After further subdivision, seller users can be divided into big brand sellers, small brand sellers, and individual store owners according to the operating entity. They can also be divided into crown sellers, star sellers, and ordinary sellers according to the user levels set by the platform. Buyer users can be divided into senior loyal users and ordinary users based on the frequency of transactions on the platform, and can also be divided into high net worth users, medium net worth users, and low net worth users based on the transaction amount.

After the user stratification is completed, targeted incentives will be given to different user groups. For example, big brand sellers contribute an important proportion of the GMV on the platform, so the focus of user operations for big brand sellers is on resource allocation and support to help these sellers achieve higher sales, thereby increasing the GMV data of the entire platform. The official can participate in the seller’s store operations to a certain extent and provide sellers with all-round support.

You can see that most of the sellers recommended in the carousel on Taobao’s homepage are from well-known brands. For buyers with medium and low net worth, the focus of user operations is to find ways to increase transaction conversion rates by stimulating users to make purchases through various means such as conducting user activities, issuing coupons, establishing growth systems, point systems , and personalized product recommendations. The significance of doing so is to continuously develop medium-net-worth users into high-net-worth users and increase the absolute number of high-net-worth users, which is of great help in boosting the overall transaction volume of the platform.

4. Execution is the key to the success or failure of user operations

As long as you follow the above three steps, it is easy to build a user operation system. In fact, it is execution that determines the success or failure of user operation. Everyone understands the principle, but producing different results must have a lot to do with execution.

Meituan 's ground-based marketing team is world-renowned for its powerful and efficient offline promotion capabilities and is known as the Ground-Based Marketing Iron Army. It plays a vital role in the development of O2O products and merchant users. Why are there only a few companies left after the battle of thousands of groups back then? This has a lot to do with execution.

User operation work is tedious and fragmented. New practitioners may quickly get bored and feel that they are repeating mechanical work. For example, when inviting expert users to join, they need to contact the experts one by one, and then communicate with them one by one to help the expert users open platform accounts and guide operations. There is a lot of fun in this process. The skills and rhetoric when communicating with industry experts is a big learning. Smart user operations staff will use it as a kind of communication training and network accumulation, which is a gain outside of work.

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