Review of the activities and operations of financial platforms

Activity operation is an operational strategy that quickly improves product indicators within a certain period of time by planning and executing short-term activities based on established goals.

Simply put, event operation is a means of carrying out purposeful user growth or conversion during a certain event, forming a closed loop from the three links of attracting new users, retention, and monetization.

The essence behind event operations is actually all about people operations.

For example, understanding user psychology, stimulating user behavior, exploring user pain points, finding user itch points, and creating user satisfaction points.

For operational product managers, event operations are unavoidable.

When operating an event, you must clarify the basic work flow: event goals, event analysis, event plans, event promotion, event execution, and event review.

Internet finance is generally operations-oriented.

The key to operating activities on a financial platform well is to conceive every link in the activity and make the activity form a closed loop.

1. Financial Activity Objectives

During the event preparation period, before launching the event, a clear and quantifiable goal should be set, and this goal can serve as a standard for event operations.

The goal of the event must be to enable the company planning the event and the users participating in the event to obtain their respective benefits and meet their respective expectations.

The objectives of the activities are varied and depend on the company's operating strategy and activity plan.

Product managers assist in event operations. The key is to figure out what the purpose of the event is?

The purpose of an event can be to achieve company brand exposure, to find core user groups, to attract new users, to promote activation and conversion, to encourage users to contribute value, to increase the stickiness between the platform and users, etc.

The fastest way to clarify the purpose of an activity is to identify target users, describe target users’ characteristics, build user role cards, analyze user usage scenarios, etc.

Only after clarifying the purpose can you effectively think about and plan what to do next.

The middle of the year is the peak period for offline asset lending, and financial platforms are under great pressure on the funding side.

In order to achieve the offline goal of 1 billion yuan in June, we have launched the "Millions of Gifts and Big Feedback" event.

2. Analysis of Financial Activities

In this event, setting the monthly transaction volume to exceed 1 billion yuan as the operational goal was not something that was thought up on the spur of the moment.

In the figure, you can see the platform operation data for June: there will be an additional 750 million yuan in loan amounts to be disbursed that month, and 250 million yuan in repayment amounts will mature.

In order to achieve a balance between lending and borrowing cash flows, the average daily transaction volume must reach 34 million yuan. We need to stimulate investors to lend through activities to meet the borrowers' funding needs.

Any activity design is set up for effect. In order to achieve the original goals, we must conduct market research, competitive product analysis, user research and operational analysis in the early stages of the event.

For example, set up data points to analyze who participated in this event? Who forwarded the event page? Who completed the activity tasks?

This will help us fully understand the user base, tap into high-net-worth users, and achieve precision marketing.

3. Financial Activities Plan

When planning activities, you must focus on operational goals.

Developing a feasible activity requires the support of a plan, but the most important thing is that the plan is consistent with the characteristics of the product and meets the needs of the target users.

The planning of an activity program is nothing more than a combination of multi-dimensional elements such as activity rewards, marketing tools, and activity gameplay to form an activity format.

• Activity rewards: cash, virtual goods, physical goods, etc.;
• Marketing tools: interest rate increase, cash back, vouchers, interest rate increase coupons, experience money, points, gold coins, growth value, etc.;
• How to play the activity: sign-in, lucky draw, redemption, inviting friends, community interaction, first-time investment rewards, gifts for being on the list, etc.

Common activities on financial platforms include: newbie benefits, invitation rewards, red envelope sharing, first investment rewards, investment cash back, full amount cash back, short-term interest rate hikes, full interest rate hikes, grabbing interest rate increase coupons, investment lotteries, etc.

Activity plans are generally planned based on purpose, time, theme, content, process, rules, budget and division of labor.

However, in order to ensure the effectiveness of the event, it is necessary to subdivide the event plan according to the goals and form a set of company-specific creative plan paths in order to produce high-quality plans.

For this "Million-dollar Gift Giveback" event, the planned activity plan mainly includes: from June 1st to June 31st, activities such as first investment points, full-amount cash back, red envelope sharing, investment lottery, and full-site interest rate increase will be carried out to provide added value for the content of the event operation.

Through activities, we stimulate high, medium and low net worth users to invest, and at the same time leverage the power of old users to promote it to the whole nation and increase new user registrations and investment volumes. In addition, set rules for user participation in activities, and budget activity operating costs and overall benefits.

For example, in an activity where investment gives away chances to win a lottery, users will get one chance to win a lottery for every investment amount greater than 1,000.

In order to prevent users from maliciously brushing data, we will limit the number of lottery opportunities to a maximum of 5 per day. Users who participate in the lottery can receive physical goods, virtual currency, cash back red envelopes, etc.

For example, in the first investment points giving activity, during the activity period, users can get points at a ratio of 10:1 for their first investment on the day, and the points can be exchanged for corresponding products.

Whether it is a commercial activity or a corporate activity, it is inseparable from the planning of the activity program.

A good activity plan must be a chain of business links, like a booster to increase the interactivity between products and users.

4. Promotion of Financial Activities

After the activity plan comes out, the activity will be promoted.

Completing an activity within the specified time and with guaranteed quality and quantity is inseparable from pre-promotion. Event promotion includes three dimensions: promotion channels, promotion timing and promotion content.

For this event, the event planner prepared promotional articles for us during the warm-up period.

The event theme, content, participants, participation methods, related rewards and event rules are introduced in detail. Then, based on the operational goals of attracting new customers, processes and conversions, each node of the activity is promoted.

During the detonation period, we use banner carousels, top advertising space, APP startup page, platform announcements, text messages, in-site messages, PUSH push, investor QQ groups, event special pages, WeChat forwarding and sharing, and channel delivery to carry out large-scale, all-round promotion.

In addition, try every possible way of promotion, combining online and offline promotion to attract users' attention and get them involved.

V. Execution of Financial Activities

Activity execution is an important link, and the most critical thing is to promote the implementation of the planned program.

In order to better promote the execution of activities, on the one hand, we need to understand the activity plan, activity status and industry trends; on the other hand, we need to establish an activity execution table and refined operations.

During the entire activity execution process, we mainly focus on three aspects: execution efficiency, execution details and execution attitude.

In addition, the execution of activities cannot be separated from effective management, which ensures the smooth progress of activities and guarantees the overall effectiveness of the activities.

VI. Review of Financial Activities

In Internet companies, review has become an important and normalized management method.

Reviewing is a re-interpretation of what has been done in the past, a reflection and summary of the project just completed, and an activity process of working backwards from the final result data.

In daily activity review, the GRAI review method is generally used, which mainly includes four steps: review goals, evaluate results, analyze causes, and summarize rules.

That is, first start by reviewing the original goals, then dig deep into the problems in each link, then analyze the activity operation data and overall completion status, and finally form a summary of experiences and lessons and output meeting minutes.

For example, for this online "Million-dollar Gift Rewards" event for investors, after the event starts, I will observe the data performance, collect problem feedback and optimize the event process.

After the event, I will organize relevant personnel to review every aspect of the entire event:

• Review the goals: What were the original goals of the activity and were they set reasonably?
• Evaluation results: Compared with the original goals or competing products, what are the highlights and shortcomings?
• Analyze the reasons: What are the main issues and reasons for users’ willingness to participate and conversion rate?
• Learn from experience: What actions or activities should be started, continued, and stopped?

Activity review can reveal the shortcomings of the product itself, the preferences of platform users, the situation of competitors, etc., providing higher-level data support and operational strategies for the next activity.

During the operation of this event, the activity goals, analysis, plans, promotion, execution and review also formed a closed-loop operation process.