How to establish a user system with sustainable growth?

The user system did not come into being after the emergence of e-commerce, but developed with the birth of business and has a long history. As the importance of users gradually increases, all industries have strengthened the construction of their user systems. This is especially true for the e-commerce industry, which attaches great importance to private domain traffic.

This is a series of special articles on private domain operations.

The concept of private domain traffic was first proposed by Alibaba and then entered the vision of major companies. Its popularity continues to rise. Its core is the transformation of traffic thinking in user operations to user social thinking. The essence of e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com is that they gather traffic, but traffic is actually just a passerby for merchants.

Merchants are unable to obtain sufficient user information to accumulate it as corporate user data. Faced with the increasingly fierce e-commerce competition for traffic, operating costs are gradually rising.

For example: One year ago, a keyword click in a big promotion event cost 2 yuan, but now it can increase to 10 yuan. When an industry rises and reaches its peak, new things will definitely emerge to reconcile this situation of one industry standing out from the crowd, and private domain operation is the key point. This solves the business's operational thinking problem, not just the cost of acquiring traffic. The core is to build the business's own healthy and sustainably growing user system.

This article will focus on how the e-commerce industry can establish its own user system for sustainable growth.

Article content outline:

1. 6+1 Business Strategy
2. Capture missed traffic and balance “free” and paid
3. Refined Operations: The “Human” Attribute of Users
4. Private domain realizes user accumulation and closed loop of operation

1. Clarify business strategy and find operational direction

To operate e-commerce well, you first need to clarify your own business strategy. This is not only something that needs to be considered during the establishment of a business, but it is also extremely important during the operation process. Positioning your product category and choosing the track are the key steps to finding yourself.

Then you need to find the strategic population that the product corresponds to, what kind of user group, including gender, age group, region, spending power, interests and other population package labels to develop an operation and promotion plan. The e-commerce industry has the highest degree of dependence on operations, so the operations process will directly implement brand planning work.

Store visual specifications: Online store decoration, product image design and other visual designs directly affect the final conversion rate, so in visual design, you need to pay attention to unified style and high recognition.

The product aspect mainly includes the construction of product system and new product research and development system. According to the rule that product selling points radiate to the crowd, a good product system architecture is the key point to clarify the matching degree between products and the needs of specific groups in the market.

The establishment of a new product research and development system is to enable enterprises to quickly respond to the demands arising from market changes and explore new demands of corporate users. Finally, it is the implementation of the plan.

Clarifying a company's business strategy is the process of positioning the company, and then developing operational plans and programs based on the positioning. This is generally common to almost 99% of companies and is also the most important step before operations.

2. Capture missed traffic and balance “free” and paid

In the process of acquiring customers and traffic, we can focus on two directions. Internal enterprise traffic: traffic controlled by the company's founders, employees, and customer service staff; public domain traffic: traffic from e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com, social content platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Zhihu, and search engines such as Baidu and Sogou.

There are many platforms that merchants choose to obtain traffic. Currently, content seeding is effective in operations, which is also related to the weakening traffic of e-commerce platforms. The general trend of e-commerce operations is to rely more on content to connect with users, establish a trusting relationship with users and then enter the conversion stage.

During the e-commerce traffic bonus period three years ago, content seeding was a method that merchants would not consider adopting. The changes in the e-commerce industry in recent years have shown changes in consumer consumption habits that are worthy of our consideration in operations.

To expand traffic means to clearly classify the sources of traffic for the enterprise and explore potential user platforms.

In addition, capturing the traffic scattered throughout the company should not be ignored, and it can be unified and classified. In the process of acquiring traffic, there needs to be a good and healthy ratio between natural traffic and traffic obtained through paid promotion.

On the selected self-media platform, a relatively healthy traffic source ratio should be controlled at 1:1 between natural traffic generated by content seeding and paid advertising or SEM delivery. A healthy ratio of traffic sources is an important factor in establishing a sustainable user growth system.

3. Refined Operation

The prerequisite for building a user system is to have users, and traffic is not the same as users. If we want to achieve healthy self-growth of users, we need to first make a clear distinction between user thinking and traffic thinking.

The attribute of users for enterprises is "people", and the attribute of traffic represents a numerical value under a calculation formula.

For example: Traffic has its own calculation formula: human attributes allow the operation plan to focus on using social and refined operations to meet users' needs for professionalism and online experience, so that users can trust the company and complete the final conversion.

For example: In the operation process of communities that enjoy an important position in the education industry, experienced operators in the past two years will tell you that users should first add the group owner’s personal WeChat and then invite them to join the group. This is done to prevent users from leaving the group. Now, an education company has achieved a 30% increase in conversion rate by adjusting the order of the two.

This example shows that the current operation trend is refined operation, and making users feel beyond their expectations is the essence of refined operation.

For example: the same event information may not be suitable for all user groups. In order to reduce disturbance, we need to use marketing tools to label users according to different marketing events, form different population packages, and then do targeted push or delivery work.

The China 4A Creative Festival just ended last month. Linkflow, the founder of a technology company background, attended the 4A advertising circle conference. In fact, this indirectly reflects the data-oriented trend of traditional marketing. At the same time, in the process of e-commerce operations, data-oriented is also an inevitable trend.

Whether it is the classification of user groups in refined operations or the control of user life cycles, it is all achieved through marketing tools. Especially for enterprises with many sources of users and a large number of users, refined operations need to use some marketing tools, and it is also necessary to accumulate enterprise user data.

Only after satisfying user experience needs and establishing a good trust relationship between the company and users will users be harvested and converted, or in other words, users will be transitioned to the conversion stage.

4. Private domain realizes user sedimentation and closed-loop harvesting

The node where traffic is converted into users is the node that enters the private domain, so it is necessary to clarify the role of the private domain in building the user system. To put it simply: allow companies to convert traffic into corporate users, and provide a place to accept, settle, and convert these users.

When we talk about conversion now, we mean more about converting users rather than converting traffic. Whether it is the continuation of traffic after acquisition or the refined operation carried out based on it, the private domain is needed to help achieve it.

After the traffic enters the private domain, the purpose of operation often varies depending on the attributes of the product and the user life cycle. For example, the conversion cycle in the TO B industry is often longer, so it is more inclined to user retention.

For some fast-moving consumer goods, which have a fast conversion cycle and a high repurchase rate, the operational focus will be more on repurchase.

Because of the repeated reach and social attributes of users in the private domain, companies can use these characteristics during operations to use content and activities to achieve user fission and traffic acquisition, which is also an important point for sustainable user growth.

Building a user system with sustainable growth is conducive to achieving sustainable growth of corporate business. From the 6+1 business strategy to acquiring traffic and then to user sedimentation and refined operations, we can extract several key words: private domain trend, marketing data trend, shift from traffic thinking to user thinking, and refined operations are essentially the "human" attributes of treasure users.

Author: Linkflow

Source: Linkflow