How do Pinduoduo, Lian Coffee and Xin Shixiang carry out fission marketing?

Attraction is the "bait for entry", communication power is the "traffic engine", and conversion power is the "traffic monetization machine". These three forces are intertwined and restrained with each other, and are the key points in the design of the fission process.

In the second half of 2018, there were fewer concepts related to "fission" and more actual cases. Social e-commerce with distribution as the main line also became popular. All this shows that the term "fission", which is gradually losing popularity, is not a bubble that has been burst, but has gradually settled into a basic traffic model and has been incorporated into the underlying context of the Internet.

In the fission circle, Lian Coffee is highbrow, creative and humorous, with decent bait. It is an interesting landscape in the circle of friends of first- and second-tier white-collar workers. NetEase Testing, WeChat Reading, etc. belong to this school; Pinduoduo is low-brow, with direct copywriting and rough benefits. The wool parties outside the Fifth Ring Road flock to it and are happy to spread and share it for you. Qutoutiao and Mogujie belong to this category.

There are countless wonderful cases, and the failures are roughly the same. The hundreds of cases extending from Lian Coffee and Pinduoduo have basically mastered the underlying design of fission. In this article, I will combine these cases to talk to you about the principles and techniques of fission.

In the fission process design, three key forces play a key role:

• The power that attracts users to click on the link is called attraction;
• The power that drives users to forward links is called communication power;
• The force that motivates users to pay and place orders is called conversion power.

Comparing the fission closed loop to a simple DC circuit, it looks like this:

Attraction and communication power are two switches in the fission circuit. When these two switches are closed, the fission circuit can start to operate and spread endlessly in the WeChat ecosystem.

Conversion power is the light bulb in the fission circuit and the machine that ultimately realizes the value of traffic. Without conversion power, no matter how large the current is, fission will not light up.

Let’s take a familiar case as an example:

Lian Coffee - Pocket Coffee House

When you see someone reposting their cafe on WeChat Moments, you might think it’s a dress-up game, and your curiosity leads you to click in. This is attraction ;

After you decorate your own cafe carefully, of course you should share it on your Moments to show it off. Maybe you can even earn coffee coupons by selling a few cups of coffee! This is the power of transmission;

Buying coffee from a friend’s cafe is 10 yuan cheaper than the official price, and it can also enhance friendships. If this friend happens to be the girl you’ve admired for a long time...tsk tsk... this is the power of conversion.

Pinduoduo - Bargain and get it for free

A friend sends you a link to bargain and asks you to help him bargain. You think it’s a small favor since we’re friends, and maybe you’re a little curious, so you click on it. This is attraction.

After you help your friend bargain, it will prompt you to start bargaining. After you start bargaining, ask your friends to help you bargain down to 0 yuan, and you can get this oven for free. Then you share it with your friends excitedly for help. This is the power of communication.

You may be busy for most of the day but still not be able to bargain down to 0 yuan. But in this process, you came into contact with many products and received some coupons. You were amazed at how cheap the things here were and placed an order. This is conversion power.

New World——Marketing Course

The three marketing campaigns "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou", "Buddhist Youth" and "Book Throwing Campaign" are classics. When such review lessons are released, all marketers are excited. Coupled with the last-minute encouragement of "increase by 5 yuan for every 10,000 people purchasing", I am afraid that few people can survive it. This is the attraction;

After I bought the course, but before I had a chance to listen to it, I received a message from the APP, teacher and community saying "Share the poster to sell the course and make money". Under the guise of paying for knowledge, this money can be made easily and decently, so I decided to forward it. This is the power of transmission;

What's the point of talking about conversion power? You have already completed the paid conversion at the stage of attraction.

Now that we understand the big picture, let’s look at the effects and design techniques of the three forces one by one.

Attraction - the bait

In WeChat Moments and conversations, we often enter fission activities through a poster, a small program card or an H5 link. These touchpoints are the carriers of attraction and the bait for users to enter the entire fission. The design of these entrances is particularly important and is the starting point of the entire fission.

Whether users click to enter a fission activity depends on two points:

• First, what can I get?
• Second, I needed to do something about it.

What can I get? Most of them are related to subsidies, usually free goods and services, red envelopes and coupons, lottery opportunities, etc. If you want to create good attraction, you have to write about the prizes in an attractive way, create a warm atmosphere, and package the benefits to make them rare.

Another approach is to gamify fission, using testing, dressing up, and socializing to satisfy users' desire to "play." This route has high requirements on planning and product, and it is difficult to set up "conversion power". Lian Coffee’s pocket coffee shop is a rare success story in the industry.

What do I need to do for the reward? Basically, it is an act of forwarding and attracting others, and occasionally there will be a small monetary cost. This is to help users form expectations of behavioral costs. Users will weigh the gains and losses in an instant and choose whether to enter.

There are two reasons why attraction fails:

1. The tasks are too difficult and the rewards are too small. For example, if you want a user to attract 30 people to follow your official account and only give them a tube of toothpaste, probably no one will be willing to play with you. When the supply chain is too demanding to compromise on costs, it is better to think about whether there are other ways to reduce costs, such as virtual resources (material courses), prizes from BD, etc.
2. Your users have a scholar complex, but your copywriter is a cook. This is a common problem encountered in the fission industry.

When meeting a scholar, talk about pens, ink, paper and inkstone; when meeting a cook, talk about firewood, rice, oil and salt.

If you talk to the cook about brushes, ink, paper and inkstone, maybe he will think you are cultured and be willing to listen to you;

But if you talk to a scholar about daily necessities, he will definitely despise you for being vulgar and not want to talk to you.

Many brands, despite facing a group of scholars, choose to imitate Pinduoduo and talk about the daily necessities of life. For example, a brand that sells high-end new hair lotion insisted on organizing a price-bargaining campaign, forcing a group of ladies who use Lamer to forward the message "Help me get it for 0 yuan" on their WeChat Moments. The effect can be imagined.

Isn’t free shampoo attractive enough? I don’t think so. A scholar also needs food, clothing, housing and transportation, but he cannot afford to lose face like this.

Cooks are easy to communicate with, so just speak clearly; scholars are difficult to deal with, because they talk about moral principles and ethics, but their hearts are filled with emotions. They value face and respect propriety, hate money, and are ashamed of human nature. When talking to them, you have to beat around the bush and say things with ulterior motives, and you have to use elegant words when talking about eating, drinking, defecating, and urinating. Therefore, the more high-end and rational the brand is, the more it tests the skill of being pretentious in fission.

The middle class who drink freshly ground coffee are a group of decent scholars. If you say to this group of people, "I'll give you a commission if you help me sell coffee," you will definitely be sneered at. Lian Coffee packaged this as "opening an online coffee shop," and it caused an uproar in the scholar circle.

Scholars clicked in for the decent dress-up game, but it also helped sell coffee: on the day of the launch, more than 10% of the 52 coffee shops achieved real sales. Buyers get discounts and sellers earn coupons. In this decent little game, the scholar also gets a lot of bargains.

Therefore, the essence of fission is to exchange subsidies for social traffic. If your users are cooks, you can copy Pinduoduo; if your users are scholars, you have to add a layer of fig leaf to Pinduoduo's logic.

The responsibility of attraction is not only to attract people, but more importantly to screen them, like a sieve to remove impurities among users, that is, the freeloaders.

In order to ensure that the fission attraction can cover a large enough number of people, we usually choose highly universal products as interest points, such as slippers, toothpaste, etc. However, the more universal it is, the better it is. For example, giving away toothpaste on a women's e-commerce platform may attract a large number of male users who are difficult to convert, but giving away women's clothing will not. When selecting products, we must ensure sufficient versatility while also taking into account the limitations of versatility caused by conversion needs. Cash red envelope rewards are always a taboo for fission.

Another way to screen out is to set appropriate thresholds. Take coffee for example. For a cup of coffee that originally costs 30 yuan, for people who have the purchasing power and demand for it, paying a 6 yuan shipping fee is not much different from getting it for free. And the 6 yuan threshold can keep away many freeloaders, because for people who don't have demand for it, spending 6 yuan on a cup of coffee is not really a bargain.

Communication power - traffic "engine"

As early as the post-PC era, the marketing departments of some companies, by studying social currency, came up with many famous viral marketing campaigns such as "Vancl". Today, viral marketing has transformed into the more vicious and efficient "social fission", but its spreadability is still the engine driving traffic acquisition.

Judging from many successful fission cases, engine casting usually starts from two aspects:

1. Prize setting and bonus

Prize setting. In line with the attraction of “what can I get”, free goods and no-threshold coupons are the mainstream prize settings. Of course, you can also package fission into a game like Pocket Café, and use psychological needs such as comparison, showing off, and personality display as the motivation for forwarding. But as mentioned earlier, fission that does not involve subsidy costs can easily be achieved through brand communication like NetEase’s test, because users do not have any substantial interaction with the product during the entire process, and the “conversion power” may have nowhere to exert its power.

The prizes are increased. Usually, in fission activities, the tasks corresponding to the rewards are already clearly defined when attracting users to join. Therefore, attraction and spreadability are usually bundled together, and all prosper or suffer together.

For example, the following activity:

When users learn that they need to find 9 friends to help them get a pair of slippers for 1 yuan, they are mentally prepared to forward the message when they enter the game. Therefore, from "click" to "share", the width of the funnel will generally not decrease drastically.

However, Pinduoduo tends to conceal the conditions at the entrance of fission and only mention the rewards in order to broaden the first-level funnel.

For example: Daily Youxian’s “Eat Fruits for Free”, you saw that you could buy 1 kilogram of horse milk for 0 yuan and clicked on the activity link, but found that the condition for receiving it was to forward it to 3 different groups. After forwarding, you found that you still had to pay 10 yuan for shipping.

Although it is a borderline case of "cheating", for platforms that are unable to provide subsidies or are not suitable for subsidies, "taking one step at a time" is a smart choice. After all, with your tiny rewards and demanding sharing tasks, if you reveal everything at the entrance of fission, it is likely that no one will come to you. If the "attractiveness" fails, there won't even be a chance for communication.

But the corresponding price is that with this method, the funnel from "click" to "share" will definitely be the hardest hit area for losses, and users who come because of the title will feel humiliated and cheated.

Rewarding bonuses is a great way to relieve pain. If you increase the cost of the reward, then you can also add a code to the reward. When you are told that you need to forward it to 3 different groups, you are also told at the same time that as long as you complete it, in addition to the pound of mare's milk, you will also receive a 30 yuan no-threshold coupon. When you finish forwarding and are ready to receive the mare's milk bag, you are told to pay 10 yuan for shipping. But at the same time, you see that free shipping is available for orders over 30 yuan. The fruits in the mall are fresh and cheap, so be good to yourself and get free shipping.

You see, not only the dissemination problem but also the conversion problem is solved at the same time.

1. Packaging of forwarded content

It is difficult for mid-to-high-end brands to achieve fission, and the difficulty lies in not knowing how to deal with talented people.

This is also a topic that echoes "attraction". As given in the previous article, for a high-end shampoo brand, you cannot encourage ladies who use Lamer to forward the message "Help me and get it for free" on their Moments, but you change the text to "Scan the QR code to become a VIP and get a free trial for your first order" without changing the underlying settings, doesn't it look more respectable?

WeChat's strong relationship social networking is cross-class. Based on this, many people who do not use Pinduoduo have seen Pinduoduo's fission activities in their circle of friends or conversations. From a semiotic perspective, Pinduoduo's "style" will be unconditionally resisted by scholars. For this reason, when we, as scholars, learn Pinduoduo's logic, we must avoid using words such as "bargaining, assistance, and division".

Another trick is to learn to package your forwarding with truth, goodness, beauty and formal justice.

For example, I once communicated with a friend who runs a maternal and infant social e-commerce platform. Their model is distribution. When the platform used "making money" as the slogan for developing micro-business mothers, the effect was not satisfactory. When they changed the slogan to "Let more babies use safe and reliable products", the numbers suddenly went up.

Xin Shixiang’s marketing course is also a good example. After you purchase the course, it will remind you to forward the poster to your circle of friends. The poster for selling the course is extremely seductive, full of a sense of justice for paying for knowledge, but there is no information about distribution at all. I believe that most young people who buy the course would not think that such a poster appearing in their circle of friends would have any negative impact on their social image.

Conversion power - income in pocket

Once fission starts working, it is like a rolling river, sweeping away the boss's subsidy money and never to return.

Therefore, when fission is launched, the bosses will not be too critical about how much traffic has been fissioned, but will stare intently at the order report, constantly calculating how many conversions have been generated, how much money has been earned, and when the subsidy pit can be filled.

Therefore, transformation is the only purpose of fission. Not talking about the fission of conversion is pitting the boss.

What is a conversion? A user completing a forwarding and receiving a prize is not considered a conversion. Placing an order using the coupon in the prize is not considered a conversion. Repeated participation in activities or activities on other platforms is not considered a conversion. But these are the necessary processes of transformation.

The real conversion is that users can consume in an equal trading environment and their real consumption needs are realized.

But how difficult it is! How can you expect the users you invited at a reduced price to be treated as equals? You have added a low-priced anchor point to these users. They may have consumption needs, but they may not have the consumption attitude. They may be able to accept your normal price, but they may not accept it immediately after getting a bargain.

The path to realizing transformation power is to create a transformation buffer zone.

If the user is unwilling to convert immediately, let him do something else first, such as playing with other fission, experiencing the product functions, visiting the venue, or getting some coupons to get some bargains. Users will gain a sense of participation in various interactive behaviors, will place orders and enter the price buffer zone under the incentive of large coupons, and will gradually face up to their own consumption needs with the continuous exposure to good-priced goods.

When the user gradually adapts to the water temperature, he will find how pleasant it is to take a hot bath.

How to create this fission buffer zone?

1. Provide more activity touchpoints and coupon push

When you click on the Pocket Cafe event link, you will find that this is a huge game system. You can sell your own coffee to friends to earn coffee coupons, or go to your friend's store to buy a discounted cup of coffee, and you can also participate in ranking activities and draw lucky bag prizes;

When you complete the MiYa lucky draw group, the system will immediately give you an extra free coupon for the group leader, allowing you to start a new round of activities;

When you initiate a bargaining activity on Pinduoduo, the template message will divide the red envelopes and encourage you to work hard to get coupons.

Whether it is an extension of a single activity or the coordination of multiple activities, through means such as page prompts, Push, template messages, etc., users should be encouraged to keep playing before they are willing to convert, and coupons should be used as prizes in conjunction with activities to pave the way for conversion.

1. Increase exposure of products that are easy to convert

Any brand or platform will accumulate some products that are easy to convert new customers. Most of these products have low unit prices, strong versatility, and high cost-effectiveness. They are the SKU areas with the most concentrated new customer conversions shown in previous data. E-commerce platforms often set up a special area for new users to bring these products together and expose them specifically to newly registered users in order to increase the new activation conversion rate.

Commodities are the only weapons that can hit demand, and the same applies to new users who come from fission. New users generated from WeChat can be exposed to products through various means such as activity processes, venue pages, template messages, etc.

For example, if you use Pinduoduo's bargaining function, the system will frequently push products with free shipping for 9.9 yuan to you; if you open your own coffee shop in Lian Coffee, the first menu item unlocked is the best-selling mocha coffee. As long as these products are exposed to users tirelessly, coupled with the sense of participation in many activities and the finishing touch of large coupons, as long as the user really has demand, conversion will be a natural thing.

Summarize

Attraction is the "bait for entry", communication power is the "traffic engine", and conversion power is the "traffic monetization machine". If you apply this to existing cases, you will find that these three forces are often intertwined and operate in a systematic manner. This kind of thinking should also be adopted when planning fission. However, the ultimate success or failure depends on your understanding of your users.

Show your empathy and think carefully about what kind of links your users like to click on WeChat or other apps; check the users' WeChat to see what content they usually forward in their circle of friends; and test more when pushing messages to find out what kind of products, wording and discount methods are more likely to make them pay and convert.

Fission is ultimately a game based on human nature, and these three forces only provide a starting point for thinking about users.

Source: Operation Dog Oliver (ID: yunyingoliver)