Event operation: How to attract new customers at zero cost?

Today I would like to share with you a growth activity case that has just been completed, as shown in the title.

This article is compiled from an internal review, which is more of a review of the process of event planning and execution. I hope it will be useful to you.

Insight into user needs

The first step in marketing is to understand user needs, and the same is true for marketing activities.

The origin of this activity is: the author has recently frequently seen information such as "make the most of spring", "enjoy watching the sea in spring", "where to go in spring"... in the circle of friends (related to the nature of work).

So I realized that "Spring Outing" might be an excellent marketing hotspot at the moment.

First, in order to verify the idea, the author searched for the keyword "Spring Outing" through Baidu Index and WeChat Index, and it was true.

Querying the data of the past 30 days, Baidu's peak mostly occurs on Sundays, and WeChat's peak mostly occurs on Fridays.

Determined by the nature of the content of the two platforms, the peak cycle provides a reference for the launch time of subsequent activities (laying a foreshadowing).

Secondly, the author checked the weather forecast for Chengdu. The weather will be sunny in the next 20 days, and the Qingming Festival will also be in between, which is a perfect time to go out and play.

At this point, I had a preliminary idea in my mind: to use the spring outing to carry out a marketing campaign .

What specific activities are we doing?

Product

Our company is engaged in the development of a content + tool platform for higher education. Our style has always been rigorous, and it has little direct relevance to spring outings, and we also lack directly available products.

What do users care about when they go out for fun?

Going out for fun→Where to go? →Visit scenic spot→Scenic spot ticket→Ticket…?

Suddenly I remembered that the staff of Sunac Park contacted me not long ago and expressed their willingness to provide redemption codes for four tickets of Sunac Park (their purpose was to attract new users through the Sunac Culture and Tourism City mini program).

At that time, I thought it was just a ticket for a single project, and the location of Chengdu Sunac Park was too remote, so I didn’t think much of it and put it on hold for the time being. Now I can use it.

So I contacted the other party immediately to confirm that the ticket redemption code was available, and obtained the redemption code and redemption process.

Although the event product was completed at zero cost, there are still several potential problems hanging in the author's mind:

1) Compared with Happy Valley, Guose Tianxiang and other Chengdu amusement parks, Sunac Park is not well-known.

2) Chengdu Sunac Land is located more than 70 kilometers away from the city center and can only be reached by car or high-speed rail.

3) The scenic spot only provides 4 ticket redemption codes, but there are dozens of projects in the entire park.

4) The redemption process is relatively complicated, and registration, authorization, and redemption require more than 10 steps.

But on the other hand, the advantages of the product are also particularly obvious.

1) Sunac Park tickets have a unified selling price and a clear sense of value.

2) Redemption codes are free of charge and unlimited in quantity, making event design more flexible.

The next step is how to design the event?

Activity Creativity

Once the event product was determined, the author quickly drew a creative outline for the entire event in his mind.

1) Event gimmick/theme

With reference to many marketing activities using amusement park tickets, the author set the theme of the activity as: Grab Sunac Park parent-child tickets for 9 yuan.

a. Why should I pay instead of getting it for free?

There are too many free activities of the same type (free tickets), and in the minds of many parents, free = trick = not free, so buying at a low price seems more reliable (of course this is our attempt).

b. Why is it 9 yuan instead of 9.9?

When doing activities, people like to write 8.8 or 9.9 yuan. They have to differentiate the prices from the common selling prices. In addition, 9.9 yuan = untrue, and 9 yuan is relatively more reliable (of course, this is also our attempt).

c. Why do we emphasize parent-child tickets?

If the emphasis is not on parent-child tickets, the core theme of the event is that you can buy four tickets to Sunac Park for 9 yuan. An adult would definitely resist taking the high-speed rail to an amusement park dozens of kilometers away to play four projects.

However, if the emphasis is on parent-child tickets, the core theme of the event will shift to parent-child fun. Taking the children into consideration, the number of items included in the ticket may be easily overlooked by users.

2) How to play the activity

The activity was designed to increase the number of followers of the official account, so the following two ways of playing were proposed.

Solution 1

Solution 2

Both modes have two options: 9 yuan purchase and free acquisition.

The 9 yuan purchase is just a gimmick of the event, and the number of people who will be attracted by the free access is the actual goal.

However, purchasing for 9 yuan can make users feel more accomplished after getting it for free (you see, I saved 9 yuan) and reduce the resistance to recruiting people.

After evaluation, if option one is chosen, the activity may not be able to run if there are too many users who are hesitant about whether to pay or go free in the early stages.

Choose option 2. No matter which method the user chooses, it is guaranteed that the official account will gain followers.

At the same time, the gap between the first-order threshold number (3) and the second-order threshold number (5) is very small, which can guide more users to complete threshold two.

After all, the main goal of this event is to increase the number of fans of the official account, not to make money by selling tickets .

3) Authenticity

The previous content belongs to the underlying design of the event, but in order to perfectly convey the ideas of the event planner to the users, the event poster actually occupies a large space.

When we review common Taskbao activities, what users can actually experience are posters, scripts and processes.

Because the event products and themes have been determined, this event poster focuses on authenticity.

What is authenticity?

Let users feel that this is an official discount ticket purchasing plan organized by Sunac Park. (Official special ticket promotions are usually limited-time flash sales, but they cannot motivate users to actively share and spread the information)

Focusing on authenticity, the event poster mainly did the following details:

c. Clearly mark the dates on which weekends are available and those on which they are not available.

d. Put the logos of Sunac Culture and Tourism City and Chengdu Sunac Theme Park in the center position for endorsement.

There is a small episode here: the design colleague thought that a photo of the amusement park should be added to the poster (instead of a virtual card), otherwise some users would not understand what Sunac Park is.

Event poster changes

However, such a design would make the poster look mediocre, and I would hardly even click on it when I put it on WeChat Moments.

Of course, this has a lot to do with the popularity of the Sunac Park mentioned earlier. If the popularity is high enough, photos of the rides would be completely unnecessary.

However, we still made two versions of the event poster for A/B testing.

Channel and time

Because this event is quite different from the company’s brand image, if all channels are used for promotion (especially official accounts), it would be suspected of advertising for Sunac Park.

Therefore, we actually only used the template message push and community push of the service account, and added a patch message at the end of the subscription account article.

Share the push message of the service account, the final effect is very good.

Screenshot of service account template message

Now that the event promotion channel has been determined, when will it be launched?

As mentioned before, the peak of Baidu Index is on Sunday and the peak of WeChat Index is on Friday. We can imagine the following scenario:

On Fridays, most users will actively search for and follow travel information on the WeChat ecosystem and travel on weekends. The crowded tourist attractions on weekends will attract news media reports (which can be found on Baidu).

Is the event going to be launched on Friday?

No, according to surveys, Friday night is the time when people relax the most (what do you do after a busy week?), and if the event is launched online on Friday, it will inevitably be disturbed.

Therefore, we finally chose Thursday afternoon to launch the event.

At this point, all preparations have been completed. Now let’s start pushing.

Activity Test

No, any activity needs to be tested and verified before it can be launched online on a large scale.

First of all, there was a shortage of staff for this event. In fact, there were only two people, me and my community colleagues, who were responsible for maintaining and executing it, so possible problems had to be nipped in the bud.

Secondly, the activity involves the manual issuance of coupon codes, which requires a lot of effort, and problems in other aspects of the activity must be prevented as much as possible.

Finally, the author’s concerns about the product have always existed. The author even considered that if the testing process showed that Sunac Park was not attractive enough, the gimmick could be immediately replaced with other well-known amusement parks.

Fortunately, the test results gave me peace of mind. The test results of nearly 350 people in two new communities showed that:

R&F Park is well-known and most users are familiar with it, which proves that the product can be used for activities.

Some problems exposed during the testing process were also dealt with in a timely manner, such as:

1) I don’t know the exact location of Sunac Park.

I vaguely answered that it was in Dujiangyan because I was worried that once I replied with the specific location, some users would complain that it was too far away, and that it would affect other users in the group (social media opinion is very important).

2) Ask about the specific projects.

Because it is not a pass, it has been vague before (with emphasis on parent-child tickets). However, we are worried that users will find that it is too different from their expectations after arriving at the site, so we will inform users of the specific items when they receive the redemption code.

3) Not knowing how to help

Some users directly forwarded the posters in the group to their Moments, rendering the support ineffective. Urgently add the user's avatar parameters to the poster (either the Taskbao tool or any other tool can do that)

We also found a bigger bug during testing:

After registering for the Sunac Culture and Tourism City Mini Program, you will be given 3 limited-time amusement projects; the Sunac Mini Program official is also holding a support event, and the prize is Sunac 6-item ticket.

Our redemption code only contains 4 items. If users know about Sunac’s official event, it will definitely have an impact on our event.

After urgent negotiations with the Sunac staff, I was able to apply for an additional youth ticket for four items (some of the attractions were the same as the previous ones).

Finally, including the registration free items, parent-child tickets, and youth tickets, the number of amusement projects that the event can actually provide has increased from 4 to 7 (after removing duplicates), which gives us great confidence.

Problems encountered during activities

1) WeChat

The original design gave users the option of "buy for 9 yuan", just considering that more users would choose "get it for free" through comparison, and even believed that no user would choose to pay, after all, the threshold difference was so small.

The planned user paid purchase process is:

Complete 3 people to help → add teacher's personal WeChat → send WeChat red envelope → invite to join the parent-child ticket collection group

Here, people directly send red envelopes instead of using third-party shopping malls such as WeChat Mini Stores to pay for purchases. Considering that there will be multiple jumps, the experience is too poor.

I never expected that after the event started, users would continue to add me to my personal WeChat account. Worried about my WeChat account being blocked, I had to keep changing the WeChat QR code configured in the Xingyao backend.

However, many users, after adding the teacher’s personal WeChat and receiving the payment purchase prompt message, do not choose to pay for the purchase, but choose to continue to help get it for free.

Why is this?

Analysis found that when users complete the first-level threshold of 3 people helping, they will receive a prompt to "add WeChat to purchase tickets." Many people don't understand why, but just add WeChat first.

Therefore, we urgently modified the push wording after the first-level assistance was completed, emphasizing that "you need to add personal WeChat to pay, and you can get it for free if you invite 2 more people", and only then did we resolve the crisis.

By the way: For the Internet products made by my company, considering the maintenance costs, we mainly connect users to corporate WeChat groups rather than personal accounts; because it is impossible to send red envelopes to corporate WeChat, we had no choice but to choose personal WeChat.

2) Group acceptance

Considering that there is only one community colleague cooperating in distributing redemption codes, all users who have completed the second-level task will first scan the code to enter the WeChat group, and then receive the redemption code according to the prompts. The process is as follows:

Complete the assistance of 5 people → Scan the QR code to enter the WeChat group → Get message notification → Add the group owner to get the redemption code.

However, there were too many users joining the group in a short period of time, which led to too frequent automatic replies. On the other hand, the teachers were too busy and could not respond to questions from users in the group in a timely manner, resulting in many voices in the group questioning the authenticity of the activity.

We urgently made the following improvements:

1) Adjust the push time of the group welcome message.

2) Sort out the questions from group users, compile them into cards based on the parent-child ticket item list and send them to the group.

Social Cards

3) Take the initiative to privately chat with several active users in the group and act as a temporary KOL to maintain order in the group.

3) High churn rate after scanning the code

This event uses a subscription account. After users scan the QR code on the event poster, they will first see a jump web page. They need to scan the QR code again + reply with keywords according to the prompts on the web page to trigger the event.

During the event, other colleagues reported that the small text at the bottom of the jump page was too eye-catching. After comparing the data with the background, it was suddenly discovered that after users opened the jump webpage, only 76% continued to act.

After emergency adjustments were made, the tie rate at the end of the event increased to 85.7%.

4) How to solve the psychological gap of users?

Because the event poster does not clearly state that it is a single-item combination ticket (intentionally weakening the message), many users will assume that it is an amusement park pass. If they find out after paying that it is only a ticket for a few items, the gap will be huge.

In order to alleviate the psychological gap of users, we did the following two things:

a. After paying users send red envelopes, we will not actually receive them.

On the one hand, it creates an illusion for users: this activity is so popular that even teachers have missed out on receiving red envelopes. On the other hand, it will give users a feeling of "getting something for free/making a profit", which will make them more receptive to it.

b. When all users receive the ticket redemption code, we will remind them: If your parents are traveling with you, please apply for an extra set of ticket redemption codes from Teacher Tangyuan. First lower your posture and show sincerity.

5) Inadequate estimates

The first time I tried to use the template message of the service account, the number of inquiries was too large in a short period of time, and I could only rely on manual replies. The community teacher and I were overwhelmed by the issuance of redemption codes.

The originally expected rhythm of social media push was disrupted, resulting in the social media push effect not meeting expectations.

Finally, considering that the workload to be undertaken manually was too heavy (the process needed to be optimized), the activity was immediately stopped when the number of people completing the second-level task reached 200.

Finally, attach the data of the activity:

Here’s a little Easter egg: When designing the event theme, we considered both the user perspective and the product perspective.

1) If you want to emphasize that spring weekends are not to be missed, you should take your family to Sunac Land.

2) Emphasize that you can buy a family ticket for Sunac Park for only 9 yuan, which is very cost-effective.

Everyone can think about it and talk about which topic you prefer?

Author: Operation Brick Expert

Source: Operation Expert (yyzj19)