E-commerce cash back marketing campaign design!

"Are you there? Please help me!" We must be familiar with such conversations. Whether it is Pinduoduo when shopping or Ctrip when buying tickets, we may fall into the circle of helping others or asking others to help us at any time and anywhere.

1. What is cashback?

You should all be familiar with cashback for helping others. Pinduoduo, JD.com, MissFresh, and QQ Music all have this type of activities. You must have been bombarded with invitations for help via WeChat on your mobile phone, right?

What is cashback? In fact, the gameplay is very simple. Users can get cashback by sharing friends’ help, as shown below:

2. Why choose Cashback?

As the cost of promotion and attracting new users continues to rise, in order to obtain more accurate users, in addition to acquiring customers through promotion, the platform will also choose to start from the social circles of old users, use various methods to bring in new users, and inject new traffic at a controllable cost of attracting new users.

At present, there are still many tools for attracting new customers on the platform. We have been upgrading and fighting monsters on the road to acquiring customers. Whether it is good or bad, we will try and make mistakes. It’s just that each marketing tool needs to be modified according to its own business situation. Below you can see my design ideas for cash back marketing tools in luxury e-commerce.

3. Design ideas

1. Product positioning

After the user successfully pays, he/she will be eligible to enter the game based on the order amount, and can get cashback by sharing with friends for help.

Why choose to provide cashback services with a certain threshold? In fact, it was just an accident at the beginning, and I won’t go into the specific reasons. But later I thought that for our platform, it would be better to provide cashback with a threshold than without a threshold.

• Because the prices of goods on the platform range from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of yuan, the average order value of users fluctuates greatly. The same 100 yuan cashback amount will have different appeal for the purchase of a 5,000 yuan watch and a 50,000 yuan watch. Therefore, placing the entrance at the end and matching the corresponding cashback amount by the order amount can increase the attractiveness of the event. For details, please see the following design ideas;
• Raising the threshold can prevent freeloaders to a certain extent and save some technical costs.

2. Product Goals

Through communication with operations, we learned that the product goal of our cashback marketing tool is to attract new users, thereby clarifying our core goal (North Star Indicator) as the number of new registered users.

3. Platform requirements analysis

This time, I mainly looked at the problem from the perspective of platform and product goals. I used the goal decomposition method to do demand analysis, and determined the functional points of the product through three steps: clarifying goals, clarifying strategies, and clarifying solutions.

1) Clarify your goals

After our core goals have been clearly defined, we analyze the user's behavioral journey and, through the method of breaking down the core goals, refine and improve the small goals of each key node, thereby improving the overall core goals.

For example: Based on the entire journey from user participation in the game to receiving cashback, we can analyze that the number of new registered users will be related to five small goals: the number of people who open the red envelope game (opening rate), the number of people who share, the average number of shares per person, the friend support rate, and the recovery rate.

2) Clarify your strategy

After clarifying the small goals for each step, we need to analyze what strategies we should adopt to achieve each goal.

For example: In order to increase the open rate, you can increase the cashback amount to make it more attractive to the target group, or increase user trust, or increase the exposure of multiple cashback activity entrances and other strategies.

3) Clarify the solution

After clarifying the strategy, you can give a clear implementation plan for the strategy. For example, to increase the attractiveness of the cashback amount to the target group, we can postpone the activity so that users can be eligible for the activity only after they have completed the payment. We can also distinguish different target users based on the order amount and match the corresponding cashback amount.

4. User needs analysis

Of course, any product design cannot be separated from the user, so the following opportunities are generated by analyzing the pain points and behaviors of different users in different scenarios.

1) Contact-More attractive

• Set cashback amounts in a targeted manner based on order amounts and user group characteristics to increase the attractiveness of cashback amounts to different target users;
• When designing the cashback red envelope pop-up window, add information about the user who receives the cashback to enhance user trust.

2) Participation - Easier

• In addition to sharing and inviting new friends to register for help, you can enrich the task types, such as sharing with old friends for help, completing personal information, following public accounts, turning on app push settings, etc. to obtain help amounts (based on the fact that the target users are old users and the platform user characteristics have a low repurchase rate, so setting tasks such as browsing the activity page is not very attractive to them at this time);
• Clarify the details of assistance, so that users can urge or share again;
• There are various sharing channels, such as sharing in WeChat Moments or sharing with WeChat friends.

3) Get - clearer

• Combined with the WeChat ecosystem change arrival function, send users a notification of the cashback amount arrival;
• The page clearly states the cashback status and cashback payment channels to reduce user concerns.

5. Integration requirements

Integrating the platform needs and user needs summarized above, whether from the user's perspective or the platform's perspective, it all follows a large closed loop.

Starting from the product goal, which scenarios in the user behavior journey are related to this goal, what pain points do users have in these scenarios, and what strategies do we need to adopt to solve users' pain points and improve our goals.

4. Data Analysis

1. Business data analysis

We should not only pay attention to the improvement of "quantity" but also pay attention to the improvement of "quality": first, we need to review our North Star indicator - the number of new registered users; secondly, it includes the cost of attracting new users, the viral coefficient (k factor), the number of new registered users with paid conversions, the number of orders placed by new registered users, and the order amount.

There is no harm without comparison. Even if you have data, you need to compare it to know whether the product is good or bad. First, you can make a horizontal comparison to compare the new customer acquisition situation with similar marketing tools on the platform. Then you can compare vertically to see how new customers are gaining compared to yesterday, a week ago, or a month ago.

2. Behavioral Data Analysis

It includes the number of users who are qualified for the activity, the number of red envelopes opened, the number of people who share, the average number of shares per person, the number of people who browsed the page (yourself/friends), and the number of times the page was browsed (yourself/friends).

Through the above behavioral data, we can analyze the conversion rate of each stage through the funnel and optimize the stage with low conversion rate. For example, the opening rate = the number of red envelopes opened/the number of users eligible for the activity*100%. This low conversion rate means that users are not very interested in red envelopes. At this time, some countermeasures can be taken to improve it.

5. Finding growth points

Grasping the user's psychology, providing sufficient communication power and lowering the user's operation threshold, we can do better in the above three aspects both in terms of functional design and page design. Pinduoduo is our role model, haha. There is no detailed explanation based on examples here, only simple ideas are provided.

6. Some practical thoughts

1. Is luxury e-commerce suitable for cashback assistance?

Just looking at the problem from the perspective of the number of new users: due to the characteristics of the products on our platform, the user repurchase rate is very low, so we need to continuously attract new users and expand new users to increase GMV.

In the short term: As a purely profit-driven marketing tool, cashback can certainly bring good results in attracting new customers and meet the current needs of the platform.

If we only look at the quality of new users, the problem is: because the target users for our cash back assistance are relatively low-value users - working-class users and student users. Their social circles are almost all users of the same type, with the characteristics of a long decision-making process and a low average order value. At the same time, luxury goods are not high-frequency commodities with rigid demand.

Therefore, the possibility of converting this type of users into paying users on our platform is not high. Even if there are some, they are users with relatively low average order value and low quality. In other words, it may not be very accurate.

2. Don’t just focus on generating new users. Is there something else you can do?

Since the above round of analysis shows that the quality of users brought in is not high, you can actually try not only to do sharing fission, but also consider adding other tasks that are valuable to the platform to allow users to get more support.

For example, tasks such as completing user information and opening app push settings are all helpful for the platform to awaken users to repeat purchases or maintenance behaviors.

Author: Pork Instant Noodles

Source: Pork Instant Noodles