Operational skills of Alipay products!

It turns out that Alipay is not only a payment product and financial management tool, but also a master in market operations.

This article starts from the characteristic methodology of Alipay operation and shares the skills of product operation from four perspectives; friends who are engaged in operations work, come and take a look!

This article aims to spark four discussions:

1. Market operation, how to use high frequency to bring low frequency?
2. How to find a handle and do cross marketing
3. Productization of Marketing
4. Building an emotional bank account

First, let me bring up a topic. Can you guess where I check epidemic information every day? ?

Announce the answer:

I don’t check the latest epidemic data every day on WeChat, news clients, or short video platforms, but on Alipay .

Why?

WeChat does not have such an entrance. Although there are many public accounts and mini-programs that provide such information, there is no fixed entrance. Information can only be obtained through search, which makes the acquisition cost high and the link long.

Although there is a fixed entrance on the news client, the information around the entrance is messy and distracting. Moreover, I have never developed the habit of "intentionally" opening any news client product to browse the news (I don’t know if there are other readers who have the same habit. If so, please leave a message so that I can find resonance). Because there are enough pop-ups on the news APP every day, the way I open it is to see the pop-ups that interest me, click in and take an overview.

There is sound when you open the short video. I was already very anxious during the epidemic, so I didn’t have the mood to enter the more noisy information platform.

Therefore, the clean and refreshing page is in a fixed position every day. Before and after collecting the energy from Ant Forest (during the epidemic, people stayed at home and the amount of energy collected was greatly reduced), you can click in to see how many new ones have been added and where they appear.

Some people say, why does Alipay, a payment product, have such an information section?

Yes, this is the first question we are going to explore.

Market operation, how to use high frequency to bring low frequency?

What is the essence of this question?

Talking about user needs.

They are all user needs, but these different needs are naturally divided into rigid needs, non-rigid needs, high frequency and low frequency . If we put these demand levels into the four quadrants in the figure below, we can clearly see that those that can be utilized for our marketing operations appear on the right side of the quadrant. Of course, the most ideal is rigid demand and high frequency, followed by high frequency non-rigid demand.

Within a product (traffic pool), how to effectively activate the traffic pool, reasonably allocate the traffic entering the product, and guide user usage in a targeted manner is a job full of technology and art.

As a long-term observer of Alipay's market operations, I have observed and learned many effective methods among the various operational activities and marketing products within Alipay.

For example, for Alipay, what is urgent need and high frequency?

Of course it is the payment scenario, especially the offline payment scenario.

The vast majority of Alipay's daily traffic comes from online and offline payments, so within the product, the payment completion page will have many operational locations to display various eye-catching operational activities or red envelope benefits, etc., to take over this part of its own traffic and guide it to some projects or products being promoted.

So what has changed during the pandemic?

Everyone is striving to be someone who can contribute to the country by lying at home. Few people go out, and even fewer people consume offline. What is the biggest demand of users during this period?

Pay attention to epidemic information.

So where is the connection between epidemic information and Alipay business?

The answer lies in the text in the banner above – “ Giving you a guide to staying at home without going out ”.

In my new book "Content Drives Growth", I have mentioned many times that in social communication, we must find the connection points between topics, events, products and brands .

Open this page and read on, and you will understand the purpose of providing users with epidemic information. It not only meets users' concerns about the epidemic, but also provides satisfaction and care for various needs derived from staying at home.

In this way, during the epidemic, a high-frequency but non-urgent information demand was transformed into a diversion of Alibaba's food, clothing, housing, entertainment, fitness, financial management, working from home, and other scenario businesses that are urgent needs during the epidemic but are low-frequency for Alipay.

Therefore , how we find marketing scenarios must be based on insights into user needs. We must find those high-frequency and rigid needs, or high-frequency and non-rigid needs, and penetrate them. We must guide user experience from high-frequency applications to habit formation, and further divert them to other rigid-need, non-high-frequency businesses .

How to find the starting point for cross-marketing?

Based on the understanding of user needs and psychological insights, various cross-marketing strategies can be used within the product. According to my observation, I think that for a product with such a large amount of traffic as Alipay, being able to distribute this traffic well and carry out operational conversion is no easier than for the marketing department to acquire customers outside. From this perspective, I believe that operations are marketing within the product , and Alipay's operations can be said to be better than those done by the marketing departments of most products.

So how to find the market (operation) foothold is very important.

I divide marketing hooks into several categories: product hooks, interest hooks, and marketing theme hooks.

The product hook is easy to understand. It means that the characteristics of the product itself have strong user appeal, and the product comes with its own topics and traffic, such as many game products, some entertainment products that make users addicted, and product highlights that can be packaged and perceived, etc. For Alipay, this product hook is "Ant Forest".

The interest-based approach is also easy to understand. From the discounts used by traditional offline merchants, to the online Double Eleven, to Didi’s red envelope fission, Pinduoduo’s price cuts, etc., all of them use subsidies and profit sharing to capture consumers.

Marketing themes are a hook outside of products and operations. They are reserved for those who are good at capturing topics and themes that influence the emotions and minds of users and consumers in the external environment, and can attract users' attention and behavior.

In "Content Drives Growth", I introduced the Internet Personality Triangle, a user insight model.

As a payment and financial product that deals more with money, Alipay makes full use of the users' "greed" mentality, "luring" users through various means such as red envelopes, cash back, and direct money sharing, turning these interest incentives into core tools to achieve operational goals.

But if a method is used too much, it will inevitably become boring, and its effectiveness will become lower and lower.

At this time, timely content becomes the softest additive, amplifying the effectiveness of the hook .

For example, the introduction of epidemic information mentioned in the previous section has become an information grabber. After careful content packaging and operation design, and through participatory experience design such as pictures and tasks, it has achieved user reach and guided users to experience and use various services. It achieves a good cross-marketing purpose.

When accessing epidemic information from the Alipay homepage, based on people's attention to epidemic information, various Alibaba products were naturally cross-marketed in the scenario of staying at home to fight the epidemic.

The orange line represents the picture below. Based on consumer insights, a new scenario is proposed, which also allows us to expand into the new user area - elderly users. During the epidemic, many young people complained that no matter how their parents persuaded them, they were unwilling to wear masks and insisted on going out. By grasping this marketing theme, we have the following cross-marketing recommendations.

Productization of Marketing

Before talking about marketing productization, we must first talk about why we should carry out marketing productization?

When we find that a certain marketing method or lever has become a regular tool, then it has the opportunity to be productized and become a standard, iterative product, and the function and purpose of this product is to serve the marketing and operational goals - this is marketing productization.

This is to improve the efficiency of marketing tools.

What does marketing productization include?

Marketing productization = content (creativity) + product (technology)

Typical examples here are Ant Forest and Alipay Wufu.

Ant Forest was not a product at the beginning, but just a To G public welfare marketing activity. One or two years after the project was launched, there was actually some embarrassment internally. After all, as a purely public welfare brand activity, it was a pure money-burning project.

But Alipay is very lucky that someone has seen its product value and its potential as an operational tool.

Through the design of gamification scenes and the combination of virtual and reality, this product becomes both loving and magical. Because you need to have energy and steal energy from other friends in order to exchange energy for various tree species that can be planted, and these trees you "exchange" will actually be planted by the Alipay team in the desertified areas in the western part of the motherland. This gives users an excellent legitimate reason to "play" with this feature.

This has led to users using Alipay services more frequently, turning Ant Forest into a productized form, and bringing huge value to Alipay, including an increase in its own traffic and the promotion of cross-marketing of various businesses. As shown in the picture above, you can see how many business modules and products are linked by the linkage of Ant Forest's "energy"!

The same is true for the Alipay annual bill and the Spring Festival Five Blessings. They became a productized marketing activity at the end of the year and during the Spring Festival. Eventually, with the help of Alipay's influence, scanning the Five Blessings gradually became a new year custom among Chinese netizens.

Building an emotional bank account

The highest level of product and brand marketing is emotional marketing. Branding means not only communicating with the user's rational brain, but also communicating with the user's emotional brain, and establishing an emotional connection with the user. It is like your brand has an emotional account in the user's mind . Every communication and interactive experience between you and the user can make a deposit in the user's emotional account.

Alipay has done an equally good job in this regard. Alipay not only establishes financial accounts for users, but also continuously builds emotional accounts with users through emotional communication.

How to do it?

That is, through subtle and personalized operational activities, we make users feel that the product is related to them personally. For example, on the user's birthday, we invite the user to celebrate the product's birthday together, summarize the annual bill based on the user's usage data, and so on, which will strengthen the emotional connection with the user.

For example, on the user’s birthday, a splash screen is displayed to the user:

Huabei is 5 years old. Huabei’s product manager left a small note for users and affectionately called users “Baobei youth”. At the same time, a gift was also given.

Open the gift, oh, you can experience Huabei’s future new features, which are not only interestingly designed but also provide various real benefits for users.

For example, there is a small highlight that really impressed me. As a user who often forgets the repayment date of Huabei, a new feature of Huabei, the repayment calendar, has launched a Huabei call service. "The Gathering at Southern Station" was a hit at the time, and I liked Gui Lunmei, so I spent 0.01 yuan without hesitation to customize a voice call from Gui Lunmei to remind me of the Huabei repayment date.

Just before the repayment date in February, I suddenly received a call from Shanghai with a number starting with 021. The other party said I was Gui Lunmei. Although it was a pre-recorded call, for fans, this is definitely a good trick to increase their favorability.

As a result, users' perception of Alipay is no longer simply a payment product and financial management tool, but has become a daily little happiness.

After years of observation and some summaries, don’t you think that the operation of Alipay is worth learning? When it comes to organizing events, it is better than the marketing departments of many companies!

Author: Dong Qiao Xi Kan

Source: Dong Qiao Xi Kan (ID: princeqiao)