Pinduoduo Operations: What tricks does Pinduoduo use to get things for free through bargaining?

The bargaining and free-getting activities that have become popular all over the country have reduced Pinduoduo's customer acquisition costs by half compared to its peers. Let's take a look at what's going on here?

A complete bargaining activity is mainly composed of five modules: activity product selection, path design, data analysis, cost management, and risk control. In order to better analyze this activity, this time we will mainly analyze it from the aspects of activity product selection and path design, and we will discuss the rest in another chapter later.

1. Product Selection

To study Pinduoduo’s product selection strategy, let’s first look at the picture below. What can you find?

In terms of categories, Pinduoduo's free products are mainly concentrated in electronic products or home appliances. The prices of these products are particularly high, but the actual purchase prices are not expensive. Pinduoduo simply gives up the profit in the middle, which can make consumers feel the sincerity and super high value products. In addition, Pinduoduo’s prizes also revolve around children’s toys, stationery and other daily necessities, which can be said to have fully captured the needs of the mothers.

In terms of price, bargain-priced items range from 20 to more than 6,000 yuan. High-priced items can build user awareness and inform users that they can get an iPhone 12 for free here, which instills the perception of low prices in consumers' minds. At the same time, low-priced prizes can increase users' trust in the activity itself and completion rate, and cultivate user habits.

To sum up, Pinduoduo’s product selection dimensions are roughly as follows:

• Choose products that are versatile, valuable, and inexpensive, such as Bluetooth headsets and robot vacuum cleaners.
• Select products that users need, close to their actual needs, and explore their real-life scenarios and needs to make choices;
• It is best to cover a wide range of product prices, both high and low. This will not only enhance the brand tone but also greatly increase the user participation rate. If the price is too high, users will feel that there is something fishy or that the task is too difficult to complete, and thus give up participating in the event.

2. Path Design

The purpose of this activity of bargaining for free is to make full use of the user's love of bargains and constantly encourage users to invite their friends. Therefore, the design of the activity path is very good. Let's carefully analyze Pinduoduo's path design and how it grasps the user's psychology step by step and guides users to share.

1. Stimulate user desire

Whether you enter from the bargaining section of the Pinduoduo App or help a friend complete a task, there will be a [Flip Card Lottery] event waiting for you. No matter which red envelope you click on, you will be able to draw a One-Knife Cut Card, followed by a [Lucky Red Envelope] from your friend to get a golden sword. Then you will be asked to select the product, fill in the address, and use the One-Knife Cut Card to complete the task in one go, leaving only 6% of the task progress. Two more group chat shares will reduce your task progress to only 2.6%. At the same time, the [Big Wheel Lottery] allows you to draw the task with the least number of invitees, as if telling you that you are the one chosen by the king today, and the winner is none other than you.

Here, Pinduoduo takes advantage of the public's "fascination with low-probability events". Through a simple operation (sharing a link), it is possible to get huge returns, just like people like to spend 2 yuan to buy lottery tickets. Therefore, it is also called the "lottery effect". To take advantage of this psychology, we have three principles to pay attention to:

1. Small effort, big reward. Users only need to do some simple actions to meet the activity threshold. Once they win, the prizes will be very generous, which is the core motivation to attract users to participate.
2. Sense of control (immediate feedback). The so-called sense of control is to make users feel that they can influence the progress of events through their own behavior and obtain the desired results. In Pinduoduo's bargaining activities, we can see that as long as users share or take other actions, their progress will be improved, letting users know that as long as you work hard, you can complete the task.
3. Continuously strengthen the protagonist effect. Through multiple simple interactions in different forms, you can constantly make users feel that they are the one chosen by the god of luck today, so that users will decisively follow the path you designed.

2. Improve trust

Through the "lottery effect", we have successfully stimulated users' desire for prizes, but this is not enough to get users to participate in the event, so we must establish trust and let users know that this event is real. There are three ways to enhance user trust: authoritative endorsement, factual proof, and resolving concerns. Let’s take a look at how Pinduoduo operates.

Authoritative endorsement:

In the section where celebrities give out benefits during bargaining activities, Pinduoduo and celebrities are successfully tied together through Wallace Chung’s blessing video, making everyone feel that companies that can afford celebrities are always reliable and will not cheat me of my small amount of money.

Facts have proved that the bargaining and order-posting modules are all records of the bargaining completed by your own WeChat friends. At the same time, during the event, you will be constantly reminded of what prizes your friends have won after completing the bargaining, so that you will believe in the event. To resolve concerns, Pinduoduo did not make too many promises. It only stated in the activity rules that user privacy is underwritten by China Insurance Group, which can be regarded as solving the problem of users' concerns about privacy leakage. The reason for doing so may be that it is enough to play friends' prize-winning messages in a loop and no additional reminders are needed. This has become a point that can be optimized. It is recommended to learn from Meituan Guoyuan and say which notary office notarized it, which may greatly increase the user participation rate.

3. Guide user operations

The previous series of operations are enough to make users want to take action, so Pinduoduo’s approach to guiding users to take action is relatively simple and direct, mainly using two routines: time limit and silent cost.

After the user initiates an event, the task must be completed within 24 hours, otherwise the task will become invalid immediately. The 24-hour setting is neither too long nor too short, allowing users to have sufficient time to complete the invited task, while at the same time not wasting time so that they forget about it. After all, the number of invited people is quite large. What is worth improving is that the countdown prompt here is not obvious and not easy to be noticed.

After all our operations, we found that it was too difficult to bargain in the later stage. When we really wanted to give up, the silent cost effect would come into play. After all, we had mobilized most of the resources of our friends, and how could we give up when we were about to complete the task? So I had no choice but to go on. But I must boast that their motion effect design is simply amazing. The motion effects of the buttons make it difficult for users to resist clicking them. But I think there is still room for improvement. Can we add audio and vibration here? When users bargain, sounds and vibrations will be made, which will stimulate the sense of hearing and touch and enhance user participation.

4. Eye-catching title

Good copywriting determines how many people can come to participate in the event after the user shares it, so we might as well learn from Pinduoduo's sharing copywriting. First of all, the copywriting is written in advance to help users. Users only need to copy and paste and send it to friends, which greatly ensures the effectiveness of sharing. Secondly, Pinduoduo's copywriting focuses on the routine of chatting with friends, which makes people can't help but click on the chat window to see what friends said. In addition, I think you can also try sharing practical tips, surprise discounts, and unexpected stories, and you may gain even more.

The above is my analysis of the product selection and activity path design in Pinduoduo's bargaining for free activities. In general, Pinduoduo has a thorough control over the user's mentality and has gained a large number of users at a very low cost by using the power of social fission. Finally, I hope that everyone can gain something from this article and make such a hit case famous as soon as possible~

Author: Wang Qi

Source: Wang Qi