I gained 180,000 followers in 3 days. How did I plan the free giveaway?

Editor's note: When running an event , giving away XXX for free is a very common method. But in recent years, this method is no longer popular. What's going on? Based on his own work experience, the author of this article disassembles a classic case for analysis, hoping it will be helpful to you.

We often see XXX being given away for free. The corresponding cost may be scanning a QR code to follow a public account, or posting on a circle of friends. There are many ways to do this.

As an operator, when we organize our own activities, do we often think about giving away free gifts to attract our users? However, the effect of the activities is often not as good as expected.

So, is it because more and more "free" things are happening that users are fatigued? Or is it just that this "free" thing is not attractive?

This article mainly analyzes the prospects of "free giveaway" activities and how to successfully plan a free giveaway activity from the perspectives of "9 elements of event planning " and "how to play the activity".

1. Current status of free gift activities

There are requirements for users in the "free giveaway" activities. They must either scan the QR code and follow the official account, or post on their Moments or communities to invite friends to help. Therefore, free giveaway activities generally have a threshold and are an activity that has requirements and constraints on users. Since 2015, free giveaway activities have gradually emerged in WeChat Moments, and have developed from free PPT materials to free lectures, free books, free cash and other forms of activities.

Free gift event poster display

As of 2020, free giveaway activities have been developing for 5-6 years. During the WeChat bonus period, companies that acquired customers at low cost by giving away free things have gradually grown and developed, such as GSX in K12 online education, Youshu in the adult education market, and Baobao Wanyingyi in the English enlightenment market.

With the emergence of star companies in various segments, free giveaways remain an indispensable form of activity in the online education market. As more and more competitors appear in the market, more and more free giveaways also appear.

After 5-6 years of development, free giveaways can be said to have had a profound impact on the target users of online education, but they have also encountered unprecedented difficulties.

On the one hand, users’ tastes are becoming more and more picky, and they are well versed in the free gift routines. On the other hand, as the bonus period of the WeChat ecosystem gradually fades, low-cost fission customer acquisition models such as free gifts are subject to more and more restrictions and impacts, customer acquisition is becoming more and more difficult, and conversion after customer acquisition is even more difficult.

Who to learn from, Baby Play English, and free book giveaways

2. 9 elements for planning free giveaways

There is no essential difference between planning a free giveaway event and any other event we normally plan. Both require following the 9 elements of event planning.

Element 1: Activity Background

Four things you must mention in your event background:

1. Is it an activity in a specific context?
2. Does the event have special meaning or value to the business/company?
3. Who is the user group that the activity is aimed at?
4. What value does the activity provide to users?

Element 2: Activity Objectives

What needs to be noted about the activity target is whether the activity target is unique or multiple?

Activity Goal Examples

Element 3: Activity Theme

Use one sentence to clearly highlight the highlights of the event to attract users to participate in the event.

Element 4: Activity time

Event start time:

• Important holidays: May Day, National Day, Mid-Autumn Festival, etc.
• When important events occur: World Cup, Double Eleven, etc.
• Within 48 hours of recent hot topics: Xiao Zhan incident, etc.
• The time when users in the vertical field of your product are more focused

Event End Time:

• Limited time limit: 1 hour, 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 30 days, etc.
• Consider whether the goal can be achieved before the end based on historical data

Element 5: Activity Creativity/Gameplay

Creativity/gameplay will be presented through certain forms of activities, such as: H5, web pages, posters, articles, etc. Priority will be given to "lighter" forms of activities. It is not necessary to do H5. If you do H5.

Element 6: Activity Process

The requirements for designing activity processes should start from the user's perspective to describe the key activity links in which users participate.

Element 7: Event Promotion Channel

Which channels of users do you plan to attract to participate in the event?

Element 8: Activity Resource Requirements

Organize resource requirements:

1. Special channel promotion needs
2. Budget requirements for event prizes
3. Special resources needed to support creative realization, such as product, development, etc.

Element 9: Activity Budget

The activity budget is evaluated based on resource requirements. A qualified operation needs to be able to prepare an activity budget table.

Activity Budget

3. Case analysis: How did I plan a free giveaway event to increase my followers by 180,000 in 3 days?

On Christmas Day in 2019, I held a "Christmas Blind Box Opening" event. The event was limited to 7 days and was only online for 3 days. More than 1,400 people participated, and the cumulative number of fans attracted was 179,357. The cumulative number of visits to the event page was 132,293. Next, I will give you a detailed analysis of this free giveaway event from the perspectives of demand analysis, strategy formulation, program design, event gameplay, and event promotion;

1. Demand Analysis

Before talking about demand analysis, let me briefly introduce the background of the event. At the beginning of December, there is still a long way to go before the half-year KPI can be completed, and we need to prepare a large-scale event to achieve the performance goals. My personal performance goal is to increase the number of fans of the official account.

After understanding the background of the activity, the first step of demand analysis is actually the user portrait of the target users. Our target users are elementary and junior high school students and their parents. Because they are a group of students and parents, parents are concerned about their children's academic performance and family, while students are more concerned about grades and fun.

After reaching these conclusions, we need to further consider from what angles our activities can meet user needs.

2. Strategy Development

We have determined that increasing fans is the goal of our activity, so our strategy needs to be formulated around how to achieve this goal. We need to break down the goal in detail to form an overall advancement trend.

1. Find the starting traffic we can reach (users who have participated in the event before, historical users who follow the service account, community users, and Moments, etc.), and inform them of the event information in advance to achieve the purpose of event preheating;
2. Preparation of event resources, including event prizes, event posters, event gameplay, etc. It is also necessary to prepare event plans and think of corresponding solutions to possible problems that may arise during the event in advance;
3. After the event officially starts, timely push the event status, increase the sense of urgency, and carry out necessary publicity for the event status to maximize the scope of participation and the effect.

3. Process of program design activities

Event Prizes:

After having the basic activity process, we need to think about several key points in completing this activity. The first is the activity prizes. Our target users are mainly students from elementary school to junior high school and their families. The age span is a bit large, so in the prize setting, we need to cover all target users, and the prizes need to be rich. At the same time, the prize design should be in a stepped shape, with the top prizes being scarce and very attractive, and the tail prizes being useful and easier to obtain.

Therefore, for the top prizes, we chose [vacuum cleaner], [Polaroid camera], [children's astronomical telescope], [trolley case and school bag], [children's aerial photography drone], [children's indoor slide], and for the bottom prizes, we chose [Frozen Disney picture book], [3x3 Rubik's Cube], [children's thermos cup], [3D printing pen], etc. In terms of richness, there are as many as 25 types of all prizes.

User Path:

The second key point is the user path.

When designing the user path, what we need to pay attention to is how to make the path for users to participate in the event as short as possible, with the least funnel, and reduce the loss in each link. Therefore, in the [Christmas Blind Box Opening] event, users only need to take one step to reach the event page. At the same time, we also need to take into account the efficiency of re-dissemination during the user participation process. One more dissemination means one more exposure, which will be a good improvement in the overall participation rate of the event.

Although we are conducting a fan growth activity, growth without conversion is meaningless, so in the user path, the point that we must consider is our subsequent point of user conversion.

The conversion points of the [Christmas Blind Box Opening] event are: first, for users who finally complete the task, we will guide them to add our assistant WeChat and make the conversion on their personal account; second, we will have a conversion button on the event page, which can directly convert the traffic on the event page.

4. How to play the activity

Through the previous needs analysis, we know that our target users are students from grade 1 to junior high school and their parents. The characteristic of this part of learning users is the pursuit of interesting things, so in terms of gameplay selection, we continued this fun and chose the activity of opening blind boxes.

Blind boxes are very familiar to today's primary and secondary school students, and everyone is familiar with how to play blind boxes. At least we have moved the offline blind boxes online and upgraded the gameplay.

Upgrade point 1: We divide blind boxes into 5 types: diamond blind box, platinum blind box, gold blind box, silver blind box, and bronze blind box. We use the ranking level mechanism of the currently popular Honor of Kings to make distinctions, so that users can see at a glance the importance of the event prizes.

Upgrade point 2: We have 4 types of blind box prizes for each level, covering different types of prizes, giving users more choices.

Upgrade point 3: We chose to let friends help like to help users unlock blind boxes. In the user's psychological cognition, the action of liking is an action with low operating cost and is easy to complete.

Based on the above three points, we finally formed the gameplay of our Christmas event: like and open the blind box.

Activity rules and prizes

5. Event promotion

After having a complete event design plan, we need to think about how to promote the event to ensure that it achieves the desired results. There are several key points in event promotion. The first is the initial launch volume of the event, the second is the secondary dissemination of the event, and the third is the overall promotion rhythm of the event.

Initial launch volume of the activity:

The initial startup volume must be fully prepared. In this activity, the initial startup volume we chose is the traffic of the service account. The service account has 500,000 fans. Usually, the reading volume of a headline article is about 20,000. Referring to the participation rate of our historical activities of 4%-5%, our initial traffic is 100.

Obviously, the initial traffic from this channel alone was not enough, so we prepared 50 personal accounts + Moments and 80 communities for the initial event promotion. In the end, our initial launch reached about 600,000 users, and the number of people who finally participated in our event was around 1,500.

2 spreads of the activity:

The secondary spread of an activity refers to the participation of the 2nd to Nth waves of users attracted after the initial participants participate in the activity. Because our activities are of a fission nature, the participation and fission of subsequent users after the activity promotion is still very important for the overall activity.

Generally, a good free giveaway activity with fission properties will have more levels of fission, and may reach a peak of fission at the 4th to 5th level.

The overall promotion rhythm of the event:

Event promotion schedule

4. Common ways to play free giveaway activities

Free giveaway activities can be divided into referral-based fission and invitation-based fission according to the gameplay of the activities.

Recommendation-based fission means letting users share something, and they can get material or spiritual incentives after completing it. It does not use "whether sharing can bring new users" as an evaluation criterion.

For example, XX Reading allows you to share a link to your circle of friends, and then take a screenshot to send to customer service, and then you can read the book for free without attracting new users to this reading software. Invitational fission means that when users share something, they must also attract new users, otherwise they will not get any incentives.

For example, XX Reading not only asks you to share the link to your circle of friends, but also requires 5 new users to register the software with your invitation code. Only after all the steps are completed can you read for free.

Recommendation fission and sharing fission

Recommended fission can be divided into forced forwarding and active sharing.

Force forwarding:

Using demands or benefits as bait, users are forced to passively share, and they can get rewards after successful sharing. The more mature specific ways of playing include community fission, check-in sharing, single-share fission and resurrection. The main gameplay includes community fission, check-in sharing, single-share fission, resurrection and level-up.

Active sharing:

The fission gameplay driven by user emotions is often called social fission. For example, by sharing the results of an H5 test, users can get spiritual rewards such as "satisfying the desire to show off." Main gameplay: test, personality, charity, inventory, challenge, etc.

Recommended fission - forced forwarding

Recommended fission - proactive sharing

The main invitation-based fission gameplay methods include compound interest, crowdfunding, and sharing.

Compounding methods include:

• Give one, get one: Invite friends to buy or give directly to friends, and you will get the same benefits as your friends (VIPKID: referral gifts);
• Mutual fission: become a binding relationship with the invited friend, and both parties gain benefits when the friend consumes (Spark Thinking: Spark Mom);
• Individual benefits: users can get it for free after sharing, and friends can also get it for free through sharing channels (Himalaya: share and listen for free);
• Group welfare: an upgraded version of individual welfare gameplay; crowdfunding gameplay includes:
• Group buying: A certain number of friends must pay or participate in the group to get prizes (ahaschool, Little Lighthouse);
• Distribution: Users can earn income by inviting friends to buy products, up to level 2 (New World View, Zebra English 9.9);
• Unlock: Users can get rewards by inviting a certain number of friends to complete a certain behavior (following a public account, adding a personal account, paying, etc.);
• Bargaining: Mostly available on e-commerce platforms such as Pinduoduo and Taojiji.

Crowdfunding methods include:

• Active recommendation: After Chaos users purchase products, they will receive some rights and benefits that can be shared with friends. Friends will receive the benefits and Chaos users will be motivated.
• Rights and interests sharing: users' rights and interests can be directly shared with relatives and friends;
• Buy for friends: Users take the initiative to buy products and give them to friends (Fan Deng Reading Club: send gift cards).

5. My thoughts on event operations

Free giveaways are only a small part of event operations. What I am thinking about today is the position of event operations and what event operations do. As an event operator, we need to have several abilities, which can also be said to be our core skills.

Activity target disassembly capability:

When we receive a goal, what we need to do is to break down this big goal into small goals that can be accomplished. How to break it down and how to break it down reasonably is the first step to test us.

Event planning skills:

Event planning capabilities specifically refer to the ability to independently produce event planning plans and event gameplay, to conduct cross-departmental coordination based on event needs, and to promote the implementation of the overall plan.

Data analysis capabilities:

Data analysis capabilities specifically refer to finding accurate user portraits through data analysis, monitoring activity data, reviewing activity results based on data, writing activity summaries, and finding problems with the activity based on data anomalies.

User analysis capabilities:

User analysis capabilities specifically refer to investigating user needs, carrying out targeted activities for different users, collecting user feedback after the activity, and optimizing activity content and processes.

Copywriting skills:

Copywriting skills specifically refer to exploring user needs, completing event planning proposals, event posters, user engagement scripts, and event review reports.