How to cultivate "user habits" like Didi: Every time you activate, your retention rate increases

For a good product, attracting users is only the beginning, retaining users is the key, and cultivating user habits is the culmination. If you also want to master the method of cultivating user habits like Didi, you may wish to take a deeper look at the content shared in today's article.

From the Hundred Regiments Campaign, the food delivery war, to the mobile payment war between Alipay and WeChat , and the taxi war between Didi and Uber , these companies seem to have endless money, and they spend a few dollars on subsidies for every order. People always ask, why? Why are there crazy subsidies and selling prices below cost? Why can it get the next round of financing even after losing hundreds of millions of dollars and its market value also grows exponentially? Answer: Cultivate "user habits".

So, what exactly are these “user habits” that cost billions of dollars to cultivate?

User habits are to cultivate users' subconscious behaviors without thinking, and become a subconscious reflection. Just like when we buy things now, we will naturally open Alipay/WeChat when checking out. This has become a "user habit" we have developed.

Why is it so important to form "user habits" for a product? Let's take an example that everyone is familiar with: the Didi/Uber taxi war that lasted for several years, with very low prices and occasional discounts, made office workers who originally took the subway and hailed taxis on the roadside form the habit of taking taxis.

Whenever I go to meet clients, go to get off work, or go out to eat, I have to open the taxi app first. At the craziest time, Uber even launched a free ride campaign. Until everyone uses Didi/Uber to take a taxi, sits in the car lazily, checks their phones, and crosses their legs.

Then, they raised their prices. Will the users accumulated before leave one by one because of the price increase? It seems not.

Just like last weekend, I went from Wangjing to Yuyuantan Park, and it cost me more than 60 yuan to take an Uber, which was almost twice as much as the cheaper price. I felt very heartbroken. However, I took a taxi back.

Why didn’t I lose customers because of the price increase?

Of course it’s not because I’m rich. Because the cost of changing a habit is too high, I have become accustomed to sitting in the car, being lazy, browsing my phone, and crossing my legs. I don’t want to walk 1 kilometer to the subway station, change trains several times, and then walk home.

I would convince myself, “It’s the weekend, be nice to yourself” (just like their ads say).

So whenever I needed to go out, the car was already parked before I even walked downstairs. All this happened unconsciously and very naturally.

This is why investors will continue to provide transfusions to ride-hailing apps and help establish travel habits. Once a habit is formed, users will stay for a long time and remain active, so the user's LTV (Life time value) will be quite high.

So, how do product managers and operations cultivate "user habits"?

1

Quickly acquire users

Having a considerable user base is a prerequisite for cultivating user habits. At this stage, it is necessary to quickly acquire a large number of target users. In the process of acquiring users, it usually takes a considerable amount of real money, which is what we often refer to as the "customer acquisition cost."

There are many channels to acquire users, usually various types of advertising, search engine optimization ( SEO ), new user registration discounts, and coupons for referring friends. But as a startup company, the funding is far less than that of a large company. At this time, we need to focus on the efficiency of user acquisition.

In short, invest more money in the best channels.

How to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of channels? This requires channel/source analysis of acquired users, monitoring of various customer acquisition situations, including the number of users from different advertising channels and search engines, as well as subsequent continuous conversion and retention. For example, by using GrowingIO to create various charts such as bar charts, bubble charts, and stacked charts, we can see the specific number of users from different channels, as well as core indicators such as usage time and page dwell time, to understand the efficiency of acquiring users:

GrowingIO’s dashboard is very intuitive

2

Cultivate user habits

Cultivating user usage habits is not something that can be achieved overnight. It requires guiding users to complete the core usage process again and again, that is, the entire process from users entering the product to finally solving the problem. This process is different for different products. For example, Uber’s core usage process should be: "Open the App" - "Determine the destination" - "Enter the pick-up location". When users go through this process many times, user habits are gradually established.

On the contrary, once users fail to complete the core usage process, they may eventually leave. How to measure the conversion of core processes? The funnel can be used to understand changes in conversion effects, identify the causes of loss, and build a more efficient conversion process.

After defining the core conversion steps as a funnel, you can track the total conversion rate of users and the trend of the conversion rate, and optimize the steps with unsatisfactory conversion rates. For example, in the funnel chart above, we can see that the conversion rate between the second step "determine the destination" and the third step "drive into the pick-up location" is only 28.9%:

Analyze conversions with GrowingIO’s funnel tool

If we split it by different dimensions, we will find that, for example, in the Android 4.1 operating system, the churn rate is very high. This may be because the performance support for this version of the operating system is not good enough, resulting in lag when selecting a destination. Based on these judgments, we can make some preliminary adjustments.

3

Continuously activate users

After completing a conversion, users usually choose to exit. Before the usage habit is formed, users may not actively enter the process. At this time, it is necessary to continue to "stimulate" users, for example: push notifications to users, issue coupons, or hold large-scale promotional activities. The purpose of activating users is to encourage users to enter the conversion process again and continue to consolidate the habit.

Retention analysis is usually used to measure activation effects, which allows you to intuitively see how many old users are brought back after each activation.

For example, the operations department launched a taxi voucher campaign to recall users. During the same period, the user retention rate increased significantly compared to before, showing the following trend:

This shows that this activity has caused some users to become spontaneously active and formed more stable habits. Through repeated operational activities, old users can be periodically stimulated to use the product, which is conducive to forming spontaneous activity among users.

We need to integrate our products into daily life and make users feel that this is how life should be: using WeChat/Alipay to pay, using Didi/Uber to take a taxi, and using Ele.me/Meituan to order takeout.

In this process, it is necessary to acquire users, cultivate users to use core functions and other series of products and operations, use data analysis methods to detect at each stage, optimize and adjust in real time, and finally form user habits to achieve rapid growth of products and companies.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

This article was compiled and published by @王柳由(APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!