How to attract new customers through activities?

Today, let’s mainly talk about how we can effectively attract new users through activities during the user life cycle.

I recently watched some videos on Bilibili. There was a video that talked about the issue of business wars. In the video, it was said that "the world's resources are limited, but desires are unlimited." This made me think of a problem: there are only a limited number of Internet users in this world, but there are multiple competing platforms.

For platforms, how to highlight their own platform advantages among many platforms and have effective ways to attract new users, promote activation and retain users are the core demands of platforms in the competition for users . Today, let’s mainly talk about how we can effectively attract new users through activities during the user life cycle.

It sounds like attracting new users is the core of promotion, but in fact, promotion is just to let users know about our platform and convert some of the users covered by the promotion, while the remaining users need to be converted through some product capabilities, content, and marketing methods.

Therefore, when a platform or product uses activities to increase user downloads, activations, registrations, shopping, browsing, and attention, we call it activity-based new user acquisition. Attracting new users is a key step for all platforms or products to enter the market, and the key to success or failure.

First, let’s take stock of the various ways of attracting new customers.

From the perspective of time, they can be divided into long-term activities and short-term activities. From the perspective of activity scenarios, they can be divided into online activities and offline activities. The activities have different durations, scenarios, and target different user groups. Next, let’s talk about the various forms of activities based on the four forms mentioned above.

1. Time dimension: long-term online activities

Since platform products are promoted on a daily basis, it means that a certain number of new users will enter the products every day. Therefore, we need some regular methods that combine the positioning of the platform with low operating costs and efficient conversion methods to convert the new users brought by these daily promotions. For example, e-commerce platforms are more based on commodities, while content platforms are based on personalized content, and they carry out the planning, design, and promotion of activities, as well as the planning of activity gameplay. Today we will take stock of some effective and long-term new customer acquisition activities that are being used by various platforms.

1. Exclusive rewards for new user registration

Many e-commerce and content platforms often use the method of providing new users with products at exclusive prices, exclusive coupons, and some exclusive rights experiences, lucky draws, etc. after they register.

The general practice is that when a user enters the APP, before the user registers, the user's identity is identified and the user is judged to be a user who has not yet registered. Information prompts are given, such as: "Register to get a 188 yuan voucher", "Exclusive price of XX yuan for products", etc. to induce the user to complete the registration, and the user is quickly guided to complete the first purchase through limited-time coupons and product benefits (the definition of the first conversion of users is different on different platforms).

2. Old employees mentor new employees

The new users brought by old users are all brought by "general word-of-mouth" communication. The core logic of old users bringing in new users is that based on the old users' personal recognition of the platform and the users' social acquaintance relationship chain, after the old users complete the order, in order to get red envelopes, they actively share the link with friends. Both themselves and their friends can receive the red envelopes, and the users actively help you to attract new users, killing two birds with one stone.

C-end invitation has rewards: old users can guide new users to place orders by sharing their own H5 links, QR codes, CD-keys, etc. After the new users complete the transaction, the old users can get rewards such as points, experience, coupons, physical objects, cash, etc.

The core of bringing in new users is old users. Not all users who have downloaded the APP are old users, so we need to define what kind of users are considered old users. Generally, it is based on the user's activity, such as daily/monthly visits, shopping frequency, average order value, length of stay, platform content sharing, etc.

3. Group buying, group purchase, bargaining, and help from friends

When talking about group buying, the first thing that comes to mind is Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo is an e-commerce platform in the industry that is based on group buying and relies on the social attributes of users.

Common gameplay such as group buying, group purchasing, and bargaining are all regular means for the platform to attract new users, and are also tried and tested methods. The core logic is that users take the initiative to initiate and use social relationships to complete orders during interactions, promote sales conversion, and produce new customer acquisition effects.

4. Content Guidance

Human nature is "selfish" and they all like to pay attention to information related to themselves, so the content can be more user-related and useful to users. For example, mobile phone brand platforms can introduce cheats, strategies, tips, special services, problem feedback, etc. The content guidance method is more based on the platform's product capabilities and content richness, as well as basic product capabilities.

5. Group Operation

The groups here generally refer to QQ groups and WeChat groups. This method of attracting new users is more inclined to operation rather than simply attracting new users. For many Internet platforms, users in the group do not represent your users, so you need to convert users from group members to users. There are two important rules for group operation:

1) Content rules: Users may be of the same type or consistent in some dimension. If you want this group of people to operate in an orderly manner within the group, then the group must have rules, such as what cannot be posted and what cannot be said.

2) Group value: Even if a group of people are idle, they will not chat all day long, so if a person stays in a group all the time, it means that he can get something from the group.

2. Time dimension: short-term online activities

It is not recommended to have short-term activities to attract new users for too long. Instead, it is more about combining current hot topics, holiday nodes, topics, events, and the characteristics and positioning of the platform to carry out special planning of activities to attract new users. Short-term activities to attract new users focus on activity goals, target users, user psychological needs, user scenarios, etc. The previous article mentioned " Activity Operations , a Magical Tool Throughout the User Life Cycle", which explained how to plan activities and how to tap into the user's psychology, so I will not go into details here.

Here we will focus on a few things that need to be paid attention to when planning an event (excluding store and content aggregation events), and focus on how to interact with users.

Interactive gameplay planning includes two core logics: core gameplay and end-point rewards. The core gameplay determines the fun, and the end-point rewards determine the motivation of the game. Attention should be paid to the reasonable combination of core gameplay and end-point rewards. If the core gameplay is simple and the user participation threshold is low, the end-point rewards can be weaker; if the core gameplay is more difficult and the user participation threshold is higher, the end-point rewards can be stronger.

3. Scenario Dimension: Offline New Customer Attraction

According to the classification of new customer acquisition scenarios, it can be divided into online activity acquisition and offline activity acquisition. Since the short-term activity acquisition and long-term activity acquisition mentioned above are both online methods, they will not be discussed in the scenario dimension. In the new customer acquisition in the scenario dimension, the focus will be on offline acquisition.

Offline new customer acquisition refers more to ground-based promotion methods, while online activities rely on and complete user registration, activation and other links online. Online new customer acquisition activities are the main type of activities we usually come into contact with. Offline activities are often just a supplement to online activities.

Offline marketing methods are more traditional than TV advertising, but as long as they are well-placed, the effects are often better than TV advertising. The main scenarios for ground promotion are: subway (station), bus (station), elevator, flyers, business districts, residential areas, etc.

The core is to say a few things to pay attention to when pushing:

1) Promotion location: Analyze the target users of your product and find out where they like to gather.

2) Target users: The process of attracting new users is different for different user groups. Young people can use QR codes to directly guide downloads, but older people may need more guidance from field sales staff.

3) Promotion time: Confirm the target users and the promotion location. You need to consider when the target users are free and give you time to promote the product through the promotion point.

The above basically summarizes the methods of attracting new customers. There are a few more points that need to be emphasized.

• Clear activity goals: There are many different activity goals, but when we do new customer acquisition, we only have one goal, which is to acquire new customers. This is the only goal. Do not set multiple goals to avoid losing focus.
• The inner needs of users are the core: The inner needs of users determine whether the activity can attract users. You should try to understand the psychological needs of users and never do things that users don’t want, otherwise you will get half the result with twice the effort.
• Activity participation threshold: The activity participation threshold should be reasonable. An overly complex participation threshold may not necessarily make users understand it, and may instead lead to users giving up.

Author: Vinson Ze

Source: Vinson Ze

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