If you want users to actively help you spread the word, please do these things first!

If you want users to actively help you spread the word, please do these things first!
When doing operations , one of the most important tasks is to attract users. We always hope to attract more users with less cost. In addition to conventional methods of attracting new customers, users recommending your product to their friends is a very good way to attract new customers. 

 Not doing user-recommended design is a huge loss  Users referred by friends not only have a high conversion rate , but more importantly, the cost is much lower than directly attracting new users. The famous consulting firm Nielsen has published a report titled "GLOBAL TRUST IN ADVERTISING AND BRAND MESSAGES". This report mainly uses rich data to describe the research and analysis of user trust in different ways of advertising and brand marketing . It found that the trust level from recommendations from friends was the highest, reaching 92%, and in the Asia-Pacific region it was even higher, reaching 94%. Compared with advertisements and editorial recommendations on TV and magazines, users recommended by friends have greatly improved their trust, so much so that the conversion rate increased by 50%, which is of great significance to the growth of new users. 

Image source: referralcandy Data source: Nielsen Now think about what products you recently purchased or downloaded based on recommendations from your friends? If it wasn’t recommended by a friend, would you buy it? Take a quick look back and you'll realize the power of recommendations from friends. Has your product designed a reasonable user recommendation and referral mechanism? If you don’t invest in this area, you’re losing out on one of the most profitable channels. In the current decentralized era, the cost of advertising on traditional media is getting higher and higher, and the effect is declining year by year. For startups , media advertising is even more out of reach, so driving users to recommend products to their friends is an important new source of revenue. In addition to high conversion rates, friend recommendations have another benefit: they will increase the recommender's activity and retention in using the product. Because people will subconsciously constantly maintain that their cognition and decisions are correct. After introducing the brand to others more often, they will become more loyal to the brand. 3 driving forces behind user recommendations  To inspire more user recommendations, you must first understand why users would recommend you.

 There are three main driving forces for users to refer others: ❶ Word of mouth drive Because the product or service itself is very good, users are very willing to share it with their friends. After using the product, users often exclaim, "It's so easy to use!", "It looks so good!", "It's so convenient!", "It's a great experience!" and other comments.  

This requires that the product be polished to be significantly better than its peers in one of the aspects such as experience, model, service, and cost-effectiveness.  ❷ Spiritual drive The reason why spirit-driven is different from word-of-mouth-driven is that it is not the user’s actual needs that are solved, but the spirit of the soul of the product that inspires the user. For example, you may have heard sentences like "This phone is so sentimental!" and "We all owe him a movie ticket!" These two sentences are very familiar. This type of user recommendation comes from the drive to satisfy the user's spiritual needs. Sometimes we hear that "sentiments are rampant" nowadays. On the one hand, it is because many people find that sentiments are very valuable and begin to rely on them. The reason for some disgust is that many founders just "talk" and do not really show "sentiments", but the use of sentiments is still very valuable. 

 In some entertainment products, "helping celebrities to get on the charts" is also a way to utilize the spiritual drive of fans, and it is indeed quite effective. For example, on Lu Han’s birthday on April 20, Lu Han’s fans spontaneously organized and called on other fans to leave a large number of comments. There were 200,000 comments under a single Weibo post, just to celebrate his birthday. However, the fans were not satisfied with this, and on the Chinese Valentine's Day, the number of comments reached 13.14 million, which directly broke the Guinness World Record as a fan confession on the Chinese Valentine's Day! 

 A year later, on his birthday, there were 42 million comments, oh my god! Then, in pursuit of “one heart, one hundred million”, the fans pushed the number of comments to over 100 million. Now the number of readings of the topic #鹿涵# on Weibo has reached over 70 billion! As an operations cat, I was also shocked when I saw it. This is what I call the power of the ancient times! ❸ Profit drive Because of the recommendation mechanism designed into the product itself, you can gain certain benefits by sharing and recommending friends. 

 These benefits include direct benefits such as cash back, coupons, discounts, and free products, as well as the use of some virtual products. For example, sharing can unlock certain functions and extend the VIP usage time. For some group-buying products, the price is one for direct purchase and another lower price for grouping up with three people. This is actually a good way to encourage users to invite their friends to use the product together.  Since user recommendation design is so important, what are the common mistakes?  

 I believe that if the core experience is not done well, any action to increase the number of users in large quantities is unnecessary and even harmful. At this stage, if the core experience is not done well, the retention rate will definitely be very low, and a large influx of users will only bring more negative word of mouth, which is not conducive to later efforts. "Material incentives are used to promote communication, not to create it." When providing material stimulation, we must ensure that the product itself has a certain degree of natural spread. Material stimulation only accelerates and amplifies this behavior. Otherwise, if word of mouth is not good, the users invited may only be those who come for material rewards, and they will not be the seed users needed at this stage. Whether the core experience is good depends on whether the users have good word of mouth and the retention rate, which is an important indicator to decide whether to start efforts to attract new users.

 What is the core value of your product? What kind of people and what pain points have been solved? This is a question that operators need to think carefully about. Some products have not yet become big, but they have a little bit of every function, and none of them are particularly outstanding. Users are confused when using them, and it is even more difficult to spread the word. Not every user is a master of summarizing and distilling. If he does not know how to express the benefits of a product, it will not be easy for him to make a successful recommendation. Therefore, extracting the core value of the product will not only make it easier for new users to understand, but also easier for old users to spread the word. To give a counterexample, there is a company called Yunlai. From my experience, their core business is marketing H5 production services, but they have created a new term in marketing - scenario application. This is really a very difficult term to understand. Even after listening to their CEO explain it for several minutes, I still didn't quite understand it. Many of their clients are bosses of traditional businesses, and they will probably be even more confused after listening. To this day, the term "scenario application" is still not widely recognized by users. The company's products are mainly driven by sales. If the core value is refined more accurately in the early stage, there will definitely be more users to spread and recommend it, without having to rely too much on a group of sales staff employed by the company to sell products every day. If you really want to create a new concept, you should use metaphors that can help users understand and remember the product, such as some concepts in Internet terms, such as "pig on the vent", "capital winter", "small steps and fast progress", and "cloud spare tire". These are concise and clear and can be understood at a glance without much explanation. 

 Another problem that is easy to occur is that your understanding of the product and the user's understanding of the product are very different. Have you tried asking users how they understand your product? If you were to recommend it to a friend, how would you introduce it? You may unexpectedly discover that users mistake your product for something else.  To give a counterexample, a friend of mine owns a company that claims their product is a social marketing solution, but after reading the introduction and using it, I can only think that it is just an event registration website. It does not have any functions that can really solve pain points in social marketing. This is not a problem with the positioning, but the product functions fail to allow users to perceive the product's positioning. They will have a hard time in marketing and communication, constantly telling users about one product positioning, while users actually perceive the product as another positioning. This sense of difference will make both users and operations feel embarrassed. What should I do then? Think clearly about the exact positioning of the product, and use product functions that solve needs so that users can clearly perceive it. 

 A: "How can users share this page?" B: "Users can take screenshots..." A: "Uh..." This is mainly a problem of awareness. Many applications do not have sharing methods on some major pages, and the entrances are hidden very deeply, so users can only share by taking screenshots. Not only is taking screenshots difficult, but some users are not very good at it. More importantly, new users who see the screenshots after sharing them cannot easily return to the product. Even if it is an H5 page in WeChat, users should be prompted that they can share it. Of course, we know that the share button on this H5 page cannot directly trigger WeChat sharing, but at least a mask can pop up to inform users that they can share by clicking the upper right corner. Some people may say, isn't this just making it more troublesome for users to take one more step? Can't you just share it directly? Yes, it seems like there is an extra step. Without this prompt, many people would not realize that this page can be shared. For products that will cover second- and third-tier users, this sharing button needs to be more convenient to operate.  When designing sharing links, the experience of the referral end is often overlooked. ❶ New user awareness For a new user, he may have never heard of this product, does not know what it is used for, and may be completely unaware of the functions and columns within the product. Therefore, the design of this page must fully consider the experience and cognition of a new user. ❷ Minimum cost perception experience Before users are aware of what the product is, try to do as little as possible. For example, if a friend shares a piece of content with you and the other party clicks on it to view it, they may be prompted to register and log in first. In this case, it is easy for the user to be prompted to log out. Is there any part that can be experienced and perceived in WeChat? We will try to develop support for it. With experience and trust, the next step of guidance will be more likely to succeed. ❸ WeChat link design The most important channel for sharing with friends is WeChat, so you should fully consider the characteristics of WeChat. For example, the link title may not be fully displayed on a small-screen mobile phone, so put the important content in front of the title! Make users want to open the page even if they haven’t finished reading it. WeChat sharing links often capture the user's avatar and nickname and embed them into the title and thumbnail of the sharing link. Compared with the same old advertisements, this is a more realistic and personalized link, and more suitable for the scenario of friend recommendation. 

 Unless it is absolutely necessary, it is best not to return cash directly to users. The reasons are: 1. Cash expenditure is a direct cost to the company and directly reduces profits. 2. Giving away coupons and products can at least drive other indicators, such as shipment volume. 3. Cash rebates can easily attract some non-precise users who come only for the cash rebates, including causing fake orders. 4. Direct cash rebates between friends through introductions can easily cause resentment and bring about moral burdens. When rewarding users for recommendations, it is best to give products that are highly relevant to the target audience rather than cash. For example, if it is a sports app, it may give away sports equipment, personal training coupons, etc. This can screen out some irrelevant users and will be more conducive to the gathering of high-quality target users. I have personally seen a shopping O2O company promoting itself at the entrance of a supermarket, offering cash returns upon downloading and registering. As a result, a large number of middle-aged and elderly people from urban villages flocked to the company, and I felt really sorry for the investors ' money. In addition, it is also related to the temperament of the product. For example, in a learning and growth community, it is not advisable to add too many cash back referrals, as this will destroy the atmosphere. Most people stay in learning communities because the communities can create an open and growing atmosphere. If they get direct cash back by introducing friends to the community, they will feel like they are making money from their friends. In the Chinese cultural atmosphere, this will feel like it will destroy relationships and make it difficult to make successful referrals.  In order to acquire new users and secure the next round of financing, some teams spend money on subsidies to attract users. However, due to lack of experience, they just decide on a number and start providing subsidies, but in the end they fail to make ends meet and close down. So how do we calculate the reasonable range of subsidies that should be given to each new user? Here we can make an estimate using the average user value of the next round of valuation.

 For example, through contact with the capital market and comparison with peers, you find that the valuation in the next round is expected to be 60 million when the number of users reaches 2 million, which means that the average user value in the next round is 30 yuan. So the subsidy is 30 yuan? Definitely not! It is not certain that the money can be raised, the valuation may be cut, and new users may not be retained. Moreover, you cannot use all the money to subsidize users, so it can only be a part of the 30 yuan. The specific proportion of this part will vary greatly among different industries and products, but at least it is a very important reference standard. If the subsidy amount is close to half of the average user value, then the risk must be very high; if the cost exceeds the average user value, the company is basically doomed. Therefore, in order to catch up with their competitors, some companies have been frantically subsidizing without any cost accounting. The amount of subsidies even exceeds the average user value of the next round of valuation. Even if they attract users, they will soon fail. In order to leave its competitors behind, Lashou.com spent a lot of money on marketing on TV and subways and poached employees with double salaries. The risk of its capital chain increased sharply, and it finally failed on the road to IPO and was overtaken by Meituan, a company that was good at calculating costs. According to a sharing by Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen, Meituan tried offline advertising at the beginning and found that the average customer acquisition cost was very high, so it withdrew all offline advertising and switched to online advertising that can be tracked and calculated. Although the user growth rate is slightly slower than its peers, the capital reserves are very solid. When the O2O winter comes, it can show off the 300 million cash in the account and finally defeat its opponents. It can be seen that when attracting new users, we must carefully calculate the cost of new users. Other suggestions ❶ Sharing display optimization When users are eager to share something worth sharing, we should make some optimizations in the sharing display, especially for some content-based products. For example, the sharing design of NetEase News’ replies is very good.



 ❷ Trigger the recommendation at the right time : when the user’s emotions are at their highest, so that the success rate of referring friends is the highest. There are two key points here. One is to do it when the user is close to the highest point, because this is the stage when they are most satisfied with the product. The other is to do it right after the end to avoid interrupting the best experience. For example, when a user finishes reading an e-book, watching a movie, or completing an online course, combining this scenario with a sharing or showing-off page will be more easily accepted by users. Of course, the choice should also be made based on user satisfaction. For example, when conducting some product satisfaction surveys, if the score is higher than 90 points, a share button will automatically pop up after filling out the form. When users exhibit behaviors that may be unsatisfactory, do not make recommendations to them. For example, if a user keeps fast-forwarding through a movie, it should be considered that the satisfaction level is not high enough, and it is unreasonable to pop up recommendations at this time. Appendix: Some user recommended interface reference

↑ WeChat reading sharing page

↑Get the golden quote sharing page

 ↑Get the column sharing page ↑58 Home Recommendation Page 

 ↑ Invite friends page

Uber invite friends page

↑Yidao invite friends page ↑ A group buying page on a certain group buying mall



Mobile application product promotion services: ASO optimization services Cucumber Advertising Alliance

The author of this article @飞鱼船长 is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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