Analysis of customer acquisition from 0 to 1

Magical 2020, all the anxiety is generated on "user growth". We noticed that at various Internet conferences this year, almost all the keywords revolved around "growth, low cost, efficiency, and rapid customer acquisition."

There is one necessary condition for related activities to be carried out smoothly and on a large scale, that is, someone has to pay for it. It also reflects that we have the same world, the same dream; the same KPI, the same anxiety.

Faced with such an environment, I sorted out some of my thoughts when I was doing fission customer acquisition last year. They are all stories and experiences that were earned with real money. Let me make it clear first, using cases as illustrations is definitely not to copy other people’s cases, or to think that others have something unique. It’s just that they happened to get things done at the right time and with the right business.

Differences in industry, environment, user attributes, etc. will inevitably lead to different results. Therefore, we need to analyze specific issues based on actual conditions.

There is a lot I want to say, and I will finish it in several articles. I hope it can be of some reference value to everyone and share useful information with those who are interested.

Let’s get started.

01 Dream Back to 2019

That was still an era of fierce competition in K12 online programming.

The first round, elimination round: the rabbits on the track are running non-stop, and if they stop, it’s game over.

The second round, qualifying: no matter where you are, as long as you are still on the field, you still have a chance.

Round 3, Finals: All eyes are on the champion, runner-up and third place. Only the ranking matters, not winning or losing.

The only martial arts in the world that cannot be defeated is speed. Books such as "Lightning Expansion" and "Growth Hacker" have been hailed as masterpieces. In this contest, Xiao Man appeared with empty eyes, a hint of confusion, and inner fear: Who am I? Where am I? What should I do?

Someone saw my uneasiness, drew me a huge whiteboard process sketch and pointed to a point and said: Here is where we are now. What we need to do is to attract users to take free courses through certain means and methods. The North Star goal is:

What we are doing now is to find new channels and test which channels can effectively increase the amount of new customers. Running through the entire process proves that this approach is feasible.

I nodded, rolled up my sleeves, and felt that I had to start from scratch. Just start from scratch and start with exploring channels.

02 Know your location

At that time, I was in the event operation (growth operation) position, and the purpose was to gain growth through various activities. Physical fission was one of the mainstream ways to acquire customers at that time. So we are just trying to do a separate line of work. Only after stabilization will we look for the second growth curve.

If you look closely at the picture above, you will find that the principle is a popular statement based on the AARRR model. But it is omitted, and direct monetization and subsequent recommendations are made.

Of course, judging from this year’s gameplay, many growth models have shifted from AARRR to RARRA.

AARRR Model

RARRA Model

User retention (Retention) - User activation (Activation) - User recommendation (Refral) - Commercial realization (Revenue) - User acquisition (Acquisition)

The overall model change is the shift from traffic thinking to user thinking, which will not be elaborated here. Let’s talk about physical fission, which is what everyone calls the “free giveaway” activity. You can get physical rewards for free by inviting others to help.

03 Everything can be fissioned

As the saying goes, everything can fission.

When I received the target, I had only one belief: I could definitely split it. Why? Because of human nature. For example, if I ask you to invite 3 people to follow my official account and give you an iPhone 12, you will definitely be willing to participate in the event.

If it doesn't crack, there is only one problem: the thing you gave me didn't touch my heart, and didn't make me feel that my efforts were less than my gains.

Back to the case, after clarifying the purpose and taking inventory of existing resources.

The first confusion Xiaoman encountered was:

To answer this question, we can derive several directions of thinking accordingly.

1. What kind of crowd do you want?
2. Where might they be?
3. How can we get their attention?
4. How can we motivate them to take action?
5. …

The core of thinking is to exhaust all resources to find useful and effective channels.

How to do it specifically? List all the places where your target audience is located in your mind and in the minds of your friends. For example, you can divide them into internal channels and external channels, and you can consider both inside and outside the WeChat ecosystem.

For example, if you are a sports product developer, in addition to various sports-related public accounts, communities, and personal friend circles of big Vs, you can also check out some related sports live broadcast platforms, stake out their web page advertising locations, and then calculate traffic, funding, etc.

In short, list all the channels you can think of.

The second step is to use the quadrant method to sort the channels you have counted based on which ones are easy to operate, have a higher priority, or have greater benefits.

Just give an example👆

The third step is to conduct tests one by one according to needs after taking inventory. When A/B testing, it is best to test only one variable at a time. For example, when you want to test whether the traffic from this channel is ok, try to keep other things unchanged, such as gameplay and threshold.

Product selection, event rules, etc. remain unchanged. Of course, it is best to set the lowest threshold in the early stage. Let as many users as possible participate in your activities.

While keeping costs under control, you can be relatively generous with your testing; after all, quick testing buys you more time.

Core: fast testing and continuous iteration.

With pressure and hard work, I believe you will soon solve this first problem. You have already started to have some fixed channels that can provide you with some traffic. The next thing you need to do is to make them more effective.

The test needs to be fast, so the cost is relatively high. How can this be possible? The boss shook his head and said: It's too expensive.

At this point, when there are already several fixed customer acquisition channels, the second problem arises.

Excessive cost is also a common problem in a fission activity. Unless it is done by an experienced person, the control is very precise. What should we do if the cost is too high? There are two main points: 1. Improve conversion rate 2. Reduce fan cost

1. What are the ways to improve conversion rate?

1) Test precise channels/pan-channels

Among the channels tested previously, we have found that several are usable, but some channels are not so effective. However, while ensuring the quantity in the early stage, we cannot directly pass over such channels that are not so OK. Therefore, it is necessary to make a detailed division of the sources of these channels. The benefit of this is not only that different strategies can be adopted according to different users, but it is also more conducive to controlling costs in the future.

2) Test for accurate product selection

If you want to invite people to your class, the effect will definitely be different if you invite people who want toilet paper to participate and those who want books to participate.

Product selection is actually particularly important in fission activities. For example, toilet paper has too large a target range, while a book in a certain niche field is too niche and the number of participants is generally low. Both are not desirable. It is best to choose products that are needed by the target group but are not easy to buy on the market. It is strongly recommended to refer to the fission product selection in three classes.

How to test? Refer to A/B test as above, find one variable, and keep other influencing factors unchanged.

3) Test push methods and copywriting

If you want to improve conversion rate, one particular factor that affects it is click-through rate. If the click-through rate opening is large enough, the number of people falling through the funnel will be correspondingly larger. There are two factors that affect click-through rate: 1. Push method. 2. Copywriting

How to verify is still to set up different versions for quick testing and continuous iteration.

In addition to the above optimizations, if you want to increase conversion rates, a particularly important core is to let your target audience see the content you want to push as much as possible. How to arrange the insertion can draw a user path and think about the actions you can take in a certain link or process.

Taking the free course with fission as a traffic generator as an example, the overall user path is:

For example, the corresponding scenarios for following a public account include: replies to new followers, the bottom menu of the public account, and many third-party tools also have 48-hour replies.

During the event, every time you get someone to help, you can push content to the target audience. Even when completing the task and filling in the address, there are some ways to reach the user.

Remember to break down the bold lines further.

2. What are the ways to reduce fan costs?

1) Testing activity threshold

The cost of spending 1 dollar to get a fan is obviously different from spending 10 cents to get a fan. In many activity thresholds, you often see numbers such as 12 people, 16 people, 18 people, 24 people, etc. What is the setting standard? In fact, the prices of the prizes are determined based on the experience.

For example, the free product I’m giving away today is worth 12 yuan, so my target is 0.5 cents per fan, so it’s relatively reasonable to set the threshold at 24 people.

2) Choose cheap products

For example, in fission activities, we can often see some fission using virtual items, such as various learning materials, test papers, etc., all of which are possible. Fission product selection does not necessarily require money. For example, the activities of "Get" and "Fan Deng" are very good at using social currency to generate fission and attract new users.

04 Conclusion

Based on the above, if the entire route can be completed completely, a relatively stable fission route is actually OK. However, of course, the constant problems that follow will bother you.

For example, whether the quality of this group of people who are crazy about fission is really OK; continuous fission causes user fatigue; after fission reaches a certain level, it is impossible to obtain new volume, or the efficiency is getting lower and lower; the number of users increases but the conversion rate is getting lower and lower, etc.

The data when we were doing fission was that the matrix account gained 1 million followers in 3 months. Looking back now, the rough way of increasing followers at that time was actually a bit problematic and wasted a lot of resources. However, the above is just a reference. You can take what you need based on the actual business situation.

It all sounds very empty, we need to make the empty things real, let's encourage each other.

Author: Xiaoman

Source: Wearing running shoes to operate