How to activate new users?

New user activation is the first step for users to enter the product. Whether the user can be well activated determines whether he can stay, which is crucial to the product's retention rate.

This article will share with you a case study and analyze the new user activation ideas of the "Mafengwo Travel" APP in combination with methodology.

The analysis idea (process) of this article: formulate activation -> analyze data -> sort out ideas.

First, let’s take a brief look at this tourism product.

• Mafengwo’s slogan: Before traveling, go to Mafengwo first.
• Mafengwo’s self-introduction: Mafengwo is China’s leading independent travel service platform.
• Mafengwo’s app store slogan: Mafengwo is the first choice for global travel guides.
• Mafengwo’s official website SEO slogan: travel guide, free travel, self-guided tour guide, travel social sharing website.
• Official website introduction: Travel websites used more by China's younger generation.

Extract a few key words from Mafengwo’s self-promotion: free travel, travel guide, travel social networking, and young generation.

From these four keywords, we can roughly understand Mafengwo’s product positioning and target user groups:

• Product positioning: A travel social platform that provides more travel guides (core value: travel vertical content);
• User group: young people who like to travel independently.

After having a basic understanding of the product, let’s first find Mafengwo’s aha moment.

1. Find the aha moment

1. Find alternative activation behaviors

Use the key question method to clarify the long-term value of the product, and infer the behaviors needed to experience that value (since this is just an out-of-the-box analysis, no user research will be conducted).

The core value of the product lies in helping users plan suitable travel routes. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to provide users with high-quality travel guide references, including travel destination recommendations, popular attractions/food/entertainment projects at the destination, and destination transportation/accommodation.

Most of the new users who come to Mafengwo for the first time have travel plans or ideas but don’t know how to travel. Therefore, users need to experience the core value of the product, which is to develop their own travel strategies (destination, route attractions, transportation, accommodation, etc.). Then the possible behaviors of users are:

• View/add destinations;
• Browse travel notes/guides;
• Follow the note-taking expert;
• Collection location/content;
• Release notes;

2. Filter activation behavior

First, we need to identify the time window for activating behavior. Mafengwo is a content social product, and its natural frequency of use will be relatively high, so new users need to quickly experience the core value of the product and discover their favorite travel notes.

We locked the activation period to within one week. Since we could not obtain relevant data about the product, we tried to find out whether we could find a relatively suitable time by experiencing some operational methods of the product.

The continuous check-in period is 5 days; the membership experience card is 7 days, and the new member coupon is valid for 15 days.

In summary, we can temporarily set the activation time to 5 days.

Then we start to screen activation behaviors. According to the idea of ​​quantitatively drawing retention curves, we can define the candidate activation behaviors into groups. For example, we set the control group as:

• All new users;
• New users who added a destination within 5 days vs. new users who did not add a destination within 5 days;
• New users who viewed notes within 5 days vs. new users who did not view notes within 5 days;
• New users who followed the influencer within 5 days vs. new users who did not follow the influencer within 5 days;
• New users who saved notes within 5 days vs. new users who did not save notes within 5 days;
• New users who have posted notes within 5 days vs new users who have not posted notes within 5 days;

We choose 30 days as the retention period for new users, then find out the user groups that meet the conditions (the idea of ​​user segmentation), and draw a new user retention curve based on their retention data within 30 days.

Since we can’t get real data here, let’s do some qualitative thinking to analyze whether the alternative activation behaviors can really experience the core value:

• Adding a destination: If the user has a destination that interests them, it means that they have some direction. But it is also possible that the user already has a favorite destination, and there are many different ways to play at the specific destination, so at this step it may not be possible to well express the core value of the user experience.
• Browsing notes: Users are looking for notes that interest them. It is possible that they see travel notes that interest them, or they may not find the ones they like. There is no way to make this clear.
• Follow the experts: If you are interested in the notes shared by the experts and like their style, you can refer to their routes in the future, but it still cannot help you determine the strategy.
• Collect notes: When you find notes that interest you, you can collect them and further organize them to form your own route, or you can directly follow the note route. This should be the closest to the core value, and the operation is also very simple.
• Release notes: Users may have formed their own travel guide or completed a trip; this shows that users have experienced the core value and have changed from a content consumer to a content sharer.

Further screening from the above analysis, the most likely activation behavior is:

• Collect notes;
• Release notes;

Combined with the product design, posting notes in the bottom navigation of the first-level page is a very strong floating prompt. When you slide up the page content, other navigation tabs will disappear, but the tab for posting notes will not. In addition, the display of posted notes and the entry for posting in another first-level page "My" are relatively direct.

As for collections, they are all for travel notes, and are designed to be on the second-level page in "My".

Whether it is a strategic need or some other situation, from this perspective, the act of "publishing notes" is indeed very important to the product; and from another perspective, after users have used it for a period of time, they will be further converted and begin to use Mafengwo as a platform to record and share their journeys.

Based on this, we judge that “posting notes” is a new user activation behavior of Mafengwo.

3. Find the magic number

The magic number can be quantitatively calculated based on the maximum marginal utility method. In the previous step, we simply defined the activation period for new users as 5 days. Since we cannot obtain real data, we make an assumption to explain this method.

Assume that the number of times a new user completes "Publish Notes" within 5 days and the corresponding number of users and retention rate are as follows:

The first step is to make a distribution graph of the number of user behaviors and the corresponding number of users. As can be seen from the graph, 1 and 4 times are nodes where the number of users fluctuates greatly.

The second step is to draw a line graph of the number of activation behaviors within 5 days and the retention rate to analyze their correlation. From the graph, we can see that the slope changes greatly when the number of behaviors is 1, and there is also a slope change when the number of behaviors is 4, but the change is smaller than that of 1.

The third step is to find the number of activation behaviors corresponding to the point with the largest marginal benefit of retention.

From the above two steps, we can lock in "1 time" and "4 times". From the retention rate relationship curve, we can find that the slope change of "1 time" is larger than that of "4 times", and "1 time" is also an easier task to complete, so we finally choose "1 time" as the magic number.

However, the above is just an assumption. Through the experience of the product, no guidance has been found on the number of times users post notes, so it is speculated that the product has no special requirements for the number of times new users post notes. Maybe one time is enough to activate users well.

(Assuming the above hypothetical numbers are true, then we can consider that after a new user completes 1 behavior and is activated, we can continue to find ideas and solutions to guide the user to complete 4 behaviors, which will further improve retention); Therefore, based on the above experience and speculation, we will temporarily define Mafengwo Travel’s aha moment as - "new users" complete "1 time" "posting notes" "within 5 days of registration".

2. Activation Funnel Analysis

1. Clarify activation indicators

Combined with the aha moment we guessed above, we define our activation indicator as:

The ratio of users who reach the aha moment = the number of users who posted a note within 5 days of registration / the total number of registered users

2. Sorting out new user paths

Brief path: App Store -> Download APP -> Launch APP -> Register APP -> Consume content -> Publish notes

Combined with Mafengwo APP, the product path is sorted out as follows:

illustrate:

• As long as there is a button for publishing notes about a specific attraction on the introduction page, there is a button for publishing notes about that attraction.
• There are many ways to enter "Destination" and select specific attractions. Here we only explain the path entered through the "Destination" tab.

3. Build an activation funnel

For a new user of Mafengwo, it is highly likely that he will consume some content before publishing a note, so we can mainly analyze path 2 (of course, we can also combine it with the actual Sankey diagram to see the real behavior path of new users).

4. Analyze data and find clues

After the activation funnel is built, the biggest loss point is found based on specific data, which is also the growth lever for new user activation. Because the biggest loss point also means more room for improvement, other methods such as user segmentation, user research, and track review can be combined to analyze the real reasons behind the loss, which can often lead to greater growth opportunities.

3. Analysis of Excitement Index

1. New User Flow

Here we analyze the relatively simple full-process path: App Store -> Download APP -> Launch APP -> Register APP -> Consume content -> Publish notes.

2. Clarify the excitement index

The initial excitement index is mainly related to the user registration source. Common sources of high excitement index include:

• Download the APP by searching Mafengwo;
• Those who were recommended to Mafengwo by searching for travel guides;
• A friend recommended me to download and register Mafengwo;

Common agitation index is relatively low such as:

• Paid advertising for content consumption such as Tik Tok or Toutiao;
• Others that were directed to download;

3. Evaluation index influencing factors

You can make a rough estimate yourself, or invite users to rate it. Please refer to the following table for record: (Assuming the full score is 10, we will make a simple rating for example)

Based on the scores, you can also make a line graph for easy observation. Of course, in this example, you can quickly obtain information without a chart.

4. Analyze the impact and find clues

Assessment based on agitation index scoring:

• Remove elements or steps with lower arousal index;
• Add elements that increase the excitement level;
• Try changing the order of steps;
• Observe whether the experience before and after the entire process is consistent;

For example, in the above assumption, the excitement index score of launching the APP is the lowest. The reason behind this is that users feel that the waiting time is too long and it is not good to skip it. If we look deeper, it may be that users feel that the content of the launch page is too boring and they don’t want to read it, so they feel that the waiting time is long and want to skip it. The solution may be:

• Optimize the display content of the startup page;
• Enlarge the "Skip" button or click area;

Of course, the startup page will also have some other functions, such as advertising revenue. Companies will also weigh the pros and cons and make the best choice. Sometimes it may also damage a certain user experience, so the issue needs to be considered comprehensively.

4. Mafengwo’s activation ideas

Let’s take a look at Mafengwo’s current design from two major perspectives: “product design” and “operational thinking”:

1. Product path

Based on the user behavior formula "Behavior = [Motivation - Resistance] * Boost + Reward", we briefly experience product design from the four dimensions of motivation, resistance, boost, and reward. The summary is as shown in the figure:

2. Operational methods

1) Medal of Honor

There are a total of 9 types of medals of honor, three of which are "Fengyou Report" (publishing posts), "Note Newbie" (publishing notes), and "Video Newbie" (publishing videos), all of which are about users' active sharing; in a sense, Mafengwo's promotion of user activity is more focused on promoting the transformation of users from content consumers to content producers, which is also in line with its positioning as a travel social network.

2) User level system

From the perspective of user level experience values, the experience values ​​for "publishing travel notes", "publishing notes", "publishing guides", etc. are set higher than others; and then further guidance on sharing high-quality content will increase the experience value, promote user activity, and then transform them into high-quality active users.

But overall, the product tends to be more inclined towards a better solution for product design, and the incentives for operations will not be very strong. It mainly guides users to complete activation behavior through content and product design.

I hope that the case analysis in this article can help you put the theory into practice and provide practical guidance for your work.

Author: Little Things

Source: Xiaoshier Growth Recorder