In the mobile Internet, there is a saying that goes: "Everything is a tool."

Each APP is a tool, including entertainment tools, chat and work tools, security tools, etc. The interactive experience between users and applications (APP) ultimately exists to solve a specific problem of the user.

However, is the value of every APP really just to solve a certain problem/type of problem?

Since each APP appears to solve specific problems at the beginning of its life cycle, it will only be used in specific scenarios. Outside of this scenario, the APP will rarely be opened or deleted. Because of this, if you want an APP to achieve a breakthrough in commercial value, improving user stickiness and retention is a topic that every product manager and designer needs to pay attention to.

Of course, the functional efficiency of the core scenarios of the APP itself is the basis and foundation.

1. The importance of user stickiness and retention (activity)

As a breakthrough point for expanding product value barriers, the importance of user stickiness and retention (activity) is self-evident. It can improve user retention, build product ecosystem, increase advertising revenue, and promote high corporate valuations. With more and more homogeneous applications and increasingly fierce competition, everyone has long realized the need to have a place in the mobile Internet, and user stickiness has become the first point that needs to be conquered.

Profits from Internet products are often post-provisional, and the profits they can bring are generated through user services and operations in the future, rather than making money on a per-order basis like selling offline products. Therefore, an app without user stickiness and retention is worthless and will bring neither commercial returns nor investment.

There are many dimensions to increase user stickiness and retention, which can be from the strategic level, business level, or operational market level. Let’s first look at understanding stickiness and retention from the dimension of the product itself.

2. Stickiness and retention are more important than operations and new users

Many people may say that to increase product activity, you can just attract new users through operations. In fact, in my opinion, "retention" is more important than "attracting activity" in "attracting activity and retaining".

Stickiness and retention mean that most users will come back after using the product, which means that the product can continuously bring value to users, whether it is practical value or entertainment value. Users who behave like this are called retained old users.

In the past, some operational activities generally involved attracting new users through various activities and converting more people into new users through traffic costs. But if the product has no value, new users cannot become old users, and attracting new users becomes weak and useless.

A lot of data clearly show that the cost of retaining an old user is much lower than the cost of acquiring a new user, and operational activities are high-cost behaviors. Truly doing a good job in outputting the value of the product itself will be a very profitable thing.

3. Analyze the product’s capabilities and fundamental attributes

When it comes to design strategies to improve user stickiness and retention, you need to first understand the interactive properties of the application and their relationship with users.

• In terms of application capabilities , the needs that an application can meet are diverse, and the depth to which it can meet a single need also varies. For example, social applications, the most superficial ones are text messaging apps and phone apps, which are also the narrowest social tools. As they have developed to the present, the experience has become diversified and multi-dimensional. Social interaction methods include voice, video, shared location, and even "emoji exchanges".
• If we understand application properties from the perspective of information interaction, we can divide applications into two categories: two-way information interaction and one-way information interaction. Two-way information interaction means that the application provides tools to users, and users also provide information feedback to the application. For example, photo editing, video editing, and article typesetting have natural potential for tool contentization , and tool contentization can be considered in the future to expand value.
• Corresponding to two-way information interaction, one-way generally means that users only use tools without any feedback, such as weather inquiries, maps, security, etc. The application of two-way information interaction can break through the value barriers in terms of content, while one-way information interaction can generally only transform into content-based and social applications by increasing communication with users through entertainment.

To sum up, when formulating a retention strategy for an application, we should start from several dimensions.

1. In terms of core functions, we focus on user scenario behaviors, find the behavioral differences between new and old users, inactive users and active users, and explore the factors that truly affect retention.
2. In terms of function and experience expansion, we can expand the demand pool, that is, look for linkage scenario needs while satisfying the core scenarios; we can also dig deeper into the original functional modules to explore diversified and multi-dimensional experiences.
3. From the perspective of information interaction, tool contentization and socialization are good choices for retention.

1. Analyze the behavioral characteristics of active and inactive users

By analyzing data or user interviews, we can find the positive correlation between "product function points-user behavior characteristics-user retention/activity". When the positive correlation is very high, we can find the behavioral characteristics and product function points that are affecting the activity. Then, we can simplify functions, increase exposure, and put information in front , which can improve user activity conversion.

In theory, when doing product planning, it is necessary to determine the data of various buying points to facilitate the subsequent analysis of all interactions between users and the APP. This analysis helps product/designers discover user retention issues.

Generally, after finding the key indicators that affect retention, you can conduct A/B testing for further verification to see whether these key factors can effectively affect user attention and user retention.

2. Expand the demand pool and extend the service value chain

Expanding the demand pool does not mean arbitrarily adding features to the application. I will add whatever features are available in the market/competitive products.

APP was created because of demand, and its existence is to solve this rigid demand. It is this rigid demand scenario that will bring 100% user activity, so on this basis we can explore related scenarios and even replace similar rigid demands that are already being met in the same field.

One point that needs to be noted about related scenarios is that they can trigger scenario-based associations in users. For example, the errand service extended from a food delivery app is easy to remember. Another example is the taxi-hailing function extended from a map app, which is also a supplement and expansion of its own service design chain, in line with user psychological expectations and easy to remember and associate with.

As the demand pool expands, the more demands the application can meet, and the more times and durations users open the application.

3. Make scene tools more interesting

When deeply exploring the functions of a single scene, we can think in the direction of fun.

The design strategy of making tools interesting is generally used in functional modules with monotonous requirements, small amount of information interaction and low frequency. Adding interesting interactions is to break the barriers of one-way information interaction between users and applications and increase interactivity.

[The idea of ​​a user growth system can be appropriately introduced here], for example, communicating with users through some super-fast mini-games, accumulating points, packaging experience results, and attracting users to play again or share next time.

For example, the fun game design in Meituan - Kangaroo Run, is both fun and practical:

Making the app more interesting can also increase users ' "scenario-based impression" of the app. Scenario-based impression is a powerful guarantee for user activation and retention. When users encounter a similar scenario next time, they will actively think of this function.

4. Product Ecosystem Content

For applications with natural content accumulation and two-way information interaction, contentization is the best choice.

Contentization is actually another manifestation of socialization, which is equivalent to an information tool that connects people. For example, the super APP Meitu XiuXiu, if users only use it for beautification, it will probably only be used more frequently when taking photos outside, and the total demand will have a certain bottleneck.

However, Meitu XiuXiu has the characteristic of a large amount of user input information, so it is possible to consider value expansion and content-based value output. The content starts with beauty, skin care, and photo editing, educating users to become familiar with this field, growing with users, and building stickiness.

There is actually a very good breakthrough point for content/socialization, which is the weekly/monthly report, or even the annual bill (annual report) that was previously popularized by Alipay. Such content that is closely related to the users themselves will naturally become the most popular point for attracting traffic.

In summary, for an APP that needs to improve user stickiness, retention, and activity, you can start from the APP attributes and do a good job in the experience design of the core value, and then make breakthroughs in the three dimensions of expanding the demand pool, making core functions interesting, and making the application ecosystem content-based, and ultimately achieve the extension and expansion of product value and achieve business goals.

We can think of the user operation system as a big tree with spreading branches and leaves. Each part of the system provides the necessary "photosynthesis", that is, the input of nutrients, to maintain the normal life operation of the tree.

When we start operating a product, we need to develop some user operation rules documents in advance.

It is a complete process system, including all documented operating rules for organizational operations, corresponding organizations set up to achieve goals, and external interfaces related to them. Input is refined through a process with corresponding rules and becomes the output of the organization's existence, ensuring the continuation and development of the organization and making work more organized.

4 ways to improve the user operation system:

1. Establishment of User Information System

The user information here is a broad concept. Starting from the marketing launch, the user's source, user purpose, user basic information (age, gender, region, etc.) and user consumption information, etc., all need to be classified and organized.

The source of users can not only show whether your activities and delivery channels have achieved the expected results, but also for users coming through this channel, you can clearly know what type of activities this user likes, or which keywords he is interested in, thereby forming conversions.

If you make good use of the user's basic information, the repurchase ability of your existing users can be greatly improved, the conversion cost can be reduced, and the word-of-mouth communication effect among users can be improved. User basic information is an endless treasure mine. With the iteration of Internet technology, we can gradually dig out the iceberg of user information.

2. Establishment of User Level System

Regardless of whether your Internet platform is monetized through content or products, users are the foundation. Giving users different rights and services can make them more loyal to your products.

The establishment of user levels is a response to people's competitive psychology, or a demand for users to obtain higher-level services. To put it more precisely, it is about increasing the level of user recognition of your product.

If a low-level user recognizes your product, he will try his best to complete the requirements for upgrading his level. To establish a user level system, you first need to formulate the rights and interests that users of different levels can obtain based on the product.

Just like in a game, high-level players will have certain advantages over low-level players in terms of attack power, defense, health, etc. Once users discover this difference in advantage, they will try their best to complete the tasks or thresholds you assign and improve their levels. Then, user operations personnel can formulate different upgrade strategies, activities, etc. according to different levels of users to make users active.

At this time, the operator must be very clear in his mind what you want to gain through users of different levels? Is it to bring more profits? Or can it help you manage? Or provide content?

3. Establishment of User Incentive System

Why should we establish a user incentive system?

I think this question is not difficult to answer. As a user operation staff, you certainly don’t want to see your users only complete one consumption, or publish content once. We attract a new user to complete the first transaction or content production at a high cost, and we must want this user to continue to contribute to us. Every time the user contributes, your new customer cost will be lower.

Your incentives must make users want to contribute or pay, so you must develop your incentive system based on the essence of user needs.

1. User positioning

There are two most common types of company incentives we see in the workplace. One is the incentive for sales, that is, bonuses. For every sale, there will be a corresponding commission ratio. This is the simplest incentive. Now many companies have made sales commissions into a complex and complete system.

Divide the bonus commission into several stages. For example, the commission ratios for a single sales of 10,000 yuan and 100,000 yuan are different. There will be additional commissions for monthly, quarterly or annual sales of 100,000 yuan, 1 million yuan or 10 million yuan. In this way, sales staff will always be affected by the commission ratio and will constantly improve their performance in order to get more bonuses.

Another incentive measure often used by human resources is recruitment referral rewards. Recruiting suitable personnel has always been a big problem for companies. Even if HR has three heads and six arms, it is difficult to recruit personnel who meet the functional requirements of each position.

Because the most important bottleneck is that HR does not have a complete grasp of the work content and professional knowledge of other departments. If an HR can understand development, draw prototypes, do operations, sell products, do design, and do accounting, then please introduce this person to me.

HR can avoid this bottleneck through a simple incentive and simplify things. By introducing employees from different departments, technology can introduce technical personnel, and operations can introduce operations personnel. People in the same department will best understand the capabilities required for the position. All HR needs to do is to understand what the interviewee needs to know.

The common point level rewards we see are just the tip of the iceberg. For different products, not every incentive method is the same. We need to solve the differences in user needs from the user's perspective based on the product positioning and business. The real user incentive method may not be the same in the implementation of the same plan, but there are still certain ideas on how to solve the problem of user incentives.

Before doing user positioning, we must be clear about what our purpose is in positioning users?

The purpose is to motivate users and prevent other users’ negative actions from bringing devastating disasters to the product.

For example, the game product Honor of Kings not only encourages paying users to continue paying, but also designs different charging categories.

For example: skins, first-charge unique hero rewards, props, etc., and guiding non-consuming players to become paying users as soon as possible, allowing non-spending users to become paying users, and grasping the user's vanity and sense of superiority. In order to have better-looking skin than others, to be different from other user heroes, and to achieve good results in the game, the King of Glory team can be said to have taken user incentives to the extreme.

User positioning is actually to create a user dimension portrait for product user classification. For our own products, we need to know what kind of users can correctly push the products forward, what position they play in the products, and what kind of value they can bring to the products. Once we have clearly defined the different user positioning, we can get to the point more accurately when building a user incentive system.

2. What kind of users can be motivated

After completing user positioning, start from the product and think carefully about the core value of the product's business model. Analyze which actions users take that can provide value to the product. Do these users need to be incentivized? Which users' actions are harmful to the product? These users need to be punished or optimized.

Therefore, the incentive system cannot simply reward users, but also impose corresponding punishments on users who bring negative impacts to the product.

For example, Toutiao’s practice of clearly distinguishing between rewards and punishments is that it will periodically publicize Toutiao accounts suspected of plagiarizing content, and the punishment will be either a ban or a closure of the account. In addition, Toutiao accounts with high originality will be pushed to a large number of users, and each time the reading volume reaches a certain level, they can receive a reward of a corresponding amount.

Doing this is actually encouraging everyone to continue to create original works, while avoiding the impact of plagiarism on original creators. We must all remember the incidents involving many singers and musicians and Baidu and some music product platforms regarding pirated audio and video products. Pirated and plagiarized content is, to a large extent, a psychological blow to the original creator.

On the other hand, as a recognition for the original creator, if the original content is of high quality, Toutiao will display it to many online users, which will increase the number of readings, which means that the original creator can get a certain degree of cash reward.

3. How to motivate users to benefit the product

Common incentives include user behavior constraints, levels, points, material rewards, or cash rewards. When it comes to our own products, we need to think about human nature. Which does the user value more, vanity or profit? Which one do users prefer in terms of constraints and levels of speech?

Here I have to mention human nature and what aspects of it we can exploit: lust, greed, laziness, vanity, arrogance, snooping, etc. Corresponding to different human characteristics, we can formulate different user incentive plans.

This third aspect is a very important step in implementation. Only when we fully understand the relationship between products and users can we accurately formulate an incentive system. Whether users need spiritual satisfaction, material satisfaction, or dependence on products, we can create a very perfect user incentive system.

The establishment of a user incentive system cannot be done by an operations department alone. It requires not only product work, but also cooperation from all operations departments. For every link of the entire product, including positioning, planning, execution, data collection, optimization, and improvement, after building a user incentive system, we can form a closed loop of this system and continuously optimize and improve it.

The incentive system can be infiltrated from the moment the user registers. For food delivery software, newly registered users can enjoy free delivery for their first order, and can receive cash coupons of random prices for each subsequent transaction. This way, users will know that they will get a discount every time they place an order. Although the amount is random, users do not care about the amount, but care about the surprise of getting a different price discount each time.

Tmall sends out discount coupons from time to time, driving users crazy again and again. In fact, the most direct way of motivation is financial stimulation, which is also a way of motivation used by such products.

But for the incentive system, this approach needs to be comprehensive. If you are doing a discount event, you must calculate the price well. For example, your platform products are priced at 39 yuan, 49 yuan and 59 yuan to participate in the event. Then the method I suggest is to use the strategy of discounting a certain amount when the purchase reaches 199 yuan, 299 yuan or 399 yuan, so that you can always sell one more product.

For UGC platform products, the user incentive system is to encourage them to provide high-quality content and to provide incentives for interaction among users.

There are three types of users of this type of product:

• The first type of users are writers who like to express their opinions. They like to express their views or some practical information on their professional fields or some real events.
• The second type of users are media, who need to establish their exposure and authority through various channels;
• The third type is enterprises and founders, who need a platform to introduce and promote their products.

4. Establishment of User Question System

User questions can be user suggestions for products, complaints, or obtained through data analysis of user habits. On the one hand, the question system is established to better iterate one's own products, and users are the best product managers. On the other hand, for transaction-based platform products, they can be collected and organized as Q&A scripts, and customer service staff can understand each user's previous records to determine the user's attributes (does he complain frequently? What is his personality like? Is he a difficult user?).

When establishing a user question system, you need to pay attention to: what type of product you have. Based on the product direction, we need to circle the questions that our users may ask, the ways to ask questions, and the channels to provide feedback to users. It is also necessary to clarify the departmental process allocation after collecting user issues, how to solve the problems, the processing progress, the priority (urgent but not important, important but not urgent, urgent and important), etc.

For example: a user complains about a problem with a product function. The customer service staff classifies the problem into product or operation (depending on the company structure) through the background or established process system. After the product or operation receives the bug, they solve the problem through the problem handling process of each department and provide feedback to the user through operation rewards or customer service care.

Users will appreciate the efficiency (professionalism) of this platform and the importance it places on users. Users will share their experiences with their family, friends or colleagues over chat and conversation.

A small action, without paying a high cost, can not only solve the product problem, but also increase user loyalty and word-of-mouth reputation. Why not do this kind of user operation?

We can think of the user operation system as a big tree with spreading branches and leaves. Each part provides the necessary "photosynthesis" for the tree, that is, the input of nutrients, to maintain the normal life operation of the tree.

Author: President Banxia

Source: Qiaomu Operations Agency ( vx18438037659 )

Related reading:

4 ways to improve the user operation system!

User operation: How to improve user stickiness and retention?