With the development of the Internet, traditional securities firms have also joined the ranks of online operations. According to data from iResearch Qianfan, the monthly active users of the old Internet finance product Tonghuashun reached 40 million, a three-year high; the monthly active users of Oriental Fortune reached 15.9 million, a month-on-month increase of 11.5%. Among the brokerage firms' proprietary applications, Huatai Securities' Zhanle Wealthtong had monthly active users exceeding 10 million in July, a month-on-month increase of 10.6%, followed by Guotai Junan Junhong and Ping An Securities. In terms of growth rate, CITIC Securities increased by 24.9% month-on-month, followed closely by Niuguwang and Everbright Sunshine.

When talking about the rapid growth of monthly active users of securities apps, we have to say that it is due to the favorable market conditions. How to take advantage of this favorable market conditions to quickly attract new users, split the users, and retain them in the later stage is an important issue for each operator.

I had intended to finish the story in one article, but as I was writing I realized that I couldn’t finish it in a few words, and the cycle would be extended too long, so I decided to serialize it. Basically, we will first discuss the common methods in each stage based on experience using AARRR as a model, and then focus on the retention issues after attracting new customers.

Why do we need to focus on retention? First, as mentioned earlier, when the market is good, user growth is like riding the wave of the wind, but when the market is bad, it takes real effort to maintain existing users. Second, we have found at work that conventional new user acquisition activities, such as inviting new users to give cash, stock trading competitions, etc., although they can bring in a large number of new users, have a terrible retention rate, not to mention the most important indicator of brokerage business: the number of accounts opened.

When it comes to retention, operations are only a small part; the most critical aspects are content and product. Therefore, after discussing the operational methods for retention, we will talk about each company’s high-quality content and product design from a product perspective.

This is the general plan, I hope it won’t lag behind the changes. Let’s get to the main topic of today – new customer acquisition operations.

New chapter

There are 6 main forms of APP customer acquisition

1. Human marketing

That is what we often see, such as flyers, door-to-door promotions, and door-to-door sales. This type of machine is more commonly used in securities products. For example, when giving a lecture in a university, the user would ask if they want to open an account after the lecture; or when teaching stock knowledge to elderly people in the community, the user would also bring a card and account opening machine with him.

2. Cross-industry cooperation

Traffic exchanges between non-competing products include Ele.me co-branded credit cards and Alipay membership benefits. In securities products, it mainly manifests itself in content cooperation, friendly platforms of financial big Vs, etc.

3. Advertising

You all know this, so I won’t say much more. Here are some pricing methods:

• CPC (pay per click): For example, companies with no shortage of traffic and precise users, such as Baidu and Google
• CPA (pay per performance): Douban users are loyal and wealthy, and book recommendations are CPA
• CPM (pay per impression): Most of the advertising platforms with large traffic and precise customer groups, such as Moji Weather and Tencent Advertising, adopt CPM, which is low-cost and effective.
• CPD (pay per day): more practical for industries with relatively limited traffic but vertical users, such as medical vertical communities.

The most common advertising methods used by large brokerage firms are CPA and CPC. For example, the account opening recommendations that we often see in the articles of financial influencers are paid based on the number of accounts opened.

4. ASO Optimization

The abbreviation of “App Store Optimization” is the process of improving the target app’s ranking in various app store/market rankings and search results. Taking the App Store as an example, its distribution volume includes search, rankings, recommendations, and external traffic (such as the scan-to-download APP function we see on various websites). More than 65% of the distribution volume comes from search, and at least half of the remaining distribution volume comes from lists. For apps that are not on the list and have no external traffic, search is the only exposure portal in the early stage.

Among the segmented search traffic, precise brand words account for 70-80% (such as WeChat, QQ, Taobao, etc.), and non-directional feature words account for 20-30% (such as music, games, comics, browsers, videos, etc.). Therefore, word selection is very important to optimize search rankings. For an APP, the parts that require careful word selection are mainly concentrated in the name, keywords and tags, application description, etc. I have seen a rather excessive game software before, which added tens of thousands of conceivable game-related words such as Honor of Kings, LOL, etc. in its application description. In addition, ratings, download volume, etc. are also important factors affecting ASO.

5. Social Communication

When talking about this, we have to give the example of Pinduoduo, an APP that has made social communication very creative. Since Pinduoduo, this social way of attracting new customers has become more and more common. The most annoying thing is that even Xiaomi’s latest K30 Extreme Edition has begun to help, and Xiaomi has confirmed it.

At present, securities apps still seldom adopt this method, but it is slowly penetrating. You can wait for the baptism of bargaining and sharing gifts for securities products.

I prefer to understand this type of technique as fission. There is a lot of knowledge involved and it is also difficult to develop. I will talk about it in detail later in the section on fission.

6. Internal Conversion

The so-called internal conversion means that products within the enterprise ecosystem direct traffic to each other. For example, there will occasionally be products on Taobao that need to be purchased on the Xianyu APP. As for current securities products, the main focus is on directing traffic from web pages to APPs.

Author: Azai's Product Notes

Source: PMZZnote