The event planning effect is poor. How to improve it efficiently and achieve growth?

Event planning and operation are commonplace for operators. However, at a time when traffic dividends are drying up and growth is sluggish, the effectiveness of using events to ensure user growth and retention is getting worse and worse. So how can we operate events scientifically and achieve results efficiently? This article will reveal the answer for you.

When it comes to event planning, operations colleagues, especially those responsible for the C-end, must be very familiar with it.

For an experienced event planner, marketing nodes such as Valentine's Day, anniversary celebrations, and Double Eleven are familiar to him or her. Event operation tools such as cash, coupons, and discount coupons are also at his or her fingertips. Even the currently popular user fission has already been memorized.

However, have you noticed carefully that users’ interest in activities seems to be weakening at this stage? In the past, an ordinary red envelope activity could attract many users to participate, but now users seem to be less and less interested in the same benefits? The effectiveness of activities and user participation in activities are weakening, as if everything is confirming the "reality" that user traffic has peaked and user growth is weak.

But reality is reality, and problems still need to be solved. Usually, when faced with the weakening effects of the above activities, the operations team will still have some empirical solutions such as the following:

For example, when faced with poor activity results, the first thing we would think of is to increase the activity reward amount (from 20 off for purchases over 100 to 50 off for purchases over 100), increase the frequency of activities (from once every three months to once a month, increase the frequency of sales staff’s WeChat/telemarketing, etc.), or increase the channel promotion budget (increase channel promotion rebates by 20 or 30%).

Usually, with the combination of these three methods, product sales are improved to a certain extent, achieving the established activity KPI.

But this is not the end of the story. While these three solutions can achieve effective sales, they also have strong side effects that some operations managers need to pay close attention to.

The increase in the reward amount has narrowed the product profit. Although a lot of products were sold, the profit did not increase significantly.

What's more, some products are based on heavy subsidies for users. The better the effect, the greater the amount of subsidy. If the platform cannot effectively convert this group of new users and tap into their subsequent sustained purchasing power, once the conversion of new users falls short of expectations or they are lost, it will be a disaster for the platform.

Increasing channel rebates and promotion budgets will lead to a simultaneous increase in product marketing costs. If the platform's marketing channels are limited, the platform's reliance on some paid channels will deepen, and promotion fees will only increase. If the channel output ratio does not meet the standards, it will undoubtedly be a huge waste of costs for the platform.

Whether it is online or offline activities, they require a lot of resources and manpower. Simply increasing the frequency of activities without changing the marketing strategy is a huge challenge to human resources. If the activity is not effective, the people involved in the activity will definitely complain. At the same time, in order to increase sales, sales or employees are asked to push activity information on WeChat Moments many times, which causes many employees to feel repulsive. Frequent advertising push will also cause user disgust, which is not worth the cost.

From this review, we can see that the above three conventional empirical operational solutions have indeed played a good role in past marketing, but their side effects are also becoming increasingly prominent. Especially today when user growth has peaked (the number of new users has decreased and the industry has entered a competition for existing users), products are becoming increasingly homogenized, and user marketing is overloaded, this operational solution seems too simple and crude. Therefore, as operators, we need to think about how to operate activities scientifically and efficiently when user growth is weak today?

1. Be good at using "leverage thinking" to maximize the effectiveness of activities

The reason why event operation is so popular among marketers is its explosiveness. It can instantly gather thousands of user traffic through events, and then conduct centralized marketing and customer acquisition. It emphasizes the effect of achieving a great result with a small effort, which is something that other operations such as content operation and user operation cannot achieve. However, at this stage, more and more operators have turned event operations into a conversion rate game, which has greatly lost the "leverage" characteristics of event operations.

Take a common e-commerce platform activity as an example - old users can enjoy discount coupons when shopping (10 yuan off for every 100 yuan spent).

For this activity, its conversion effect is a simple conversion rate funnel: number of existing old users × user conversion rate. On the basis that the number of existing old users is fixed, the key factor of this activity lies in the user conversion rate.

Simple and crude, but this is not our ideal form of activity because it lacks the core activity leverage gene.

If we make a simple modification to this activity format, old users can enjoy a lucky draw when shopping (a lucky draw is held every 100 yuan, with a minimum prize of 10 yuan), now let's compare the effects of these two activity formats:

From the comparison in the above figure, it can be seen that when comparing lottery activities with coupon activities, under the premise of the same cost, lottery activities significantly increase users' expected benefits (minimum 10 yuan) and also greatly increase users' sense of participation in the activities, which is beyond the reach of coupon activities.

This kind of adjustment is the leveraged transformation of the activity, which means maximizing the effect of the activity with the lowest cost.

In this case, the human psychological lever in the operation activities—the gambling nature of the lottery—is used to leverage the activity conversion rate, rather than simply playing the conversion rate game.

Of course, lucky draws are just one form of leverage thinking. Other activities that we often see with leverage genes in event operations include inviting/recommending friends, ranking activities, and guessing activities. Inviting/recommending friends is especially typical of leverage thinking. Whether it is the previously popular user growth model or the current popular fission H5, the core is the invitation/recommendation thinking, that is, using people's social sharing and recommendations to carry out leveraged marketing of activities.

If you observe carefully, you will find that many listed companies that mainly target C-end users usually disclose their user composition in their annual financial reports. The user growth brought about by user invitations/recommendations is becoming an increasingly important customer acquisition channel for major platforms, and its share is increasing. This shows the importance of leveraged thinking in user operations, especially event operations.

2. Avoid pure profit inducement and increase user interest in the platform

Wetness, also known as user stickiness, is the strength of the relationship between users and the platform/product. If the association is strong, users will have high stickiness and will not easily churn; otherwise, users will easily churn.

User stickiness includes two dimensions: emotion and benefit. However, in daily activity operation practices, some operators are too focused on benefit induction, and simply use red envelopes, coupons, cash and other benefit dimensions to convert the entire chain of activity users. This is too simple and crude, and ultimately not worth the cost.

This phenomenon is most evident in the crazy mutual finance marketing in recent years:

In the past few years, many Internet finance platforms have been frantically acquiring customers through marketing tools such as cash, red envelopes, and interest rate increases.

As competition in the industry intensifies, benefits have been continuously increased, from the initial tens of yuan to hundreds or thousands of yuan in red envelopes.

To big customers, they are even more generous, and red envelopes of tens of thousands of yuan are no problem at all. This has fattened up a group of profit-seeking wool-gathering parties, but can these customers eventually stay?

The answer is obviously no. If there are similar platforms that can offer greater discounts, these users attracted by money will still withdraw their money without hesitation and run away to invest in places with higher returns.

In the end, the industry fell into a vicious cycle of increasing welfare benefits, and the situation became a mess. But how can we change this situation? It would be better for us to learn from the experienced banking operation and management practices.

When it comes to big customers, bank marketing staff rarely use high rebates and high interest rates to retain customers. Instead, they usually hold offline activities such as "book sharing sessions, financial literacy exchange sessions" to market and maintain big customers. While users improve their financial literacy through activities organized by the bank (at least they feel that way), they also get to know a large number of friends of equal worth and with common interests.

The benefit of doing so is that, in addition to maintaining the most basic monetary benefits with major customers (customers will enjoy continued benefits), the bank also builds multiple value relationship networks (emotional user stickiness) between major customers and banks, and between users through this series of offline activities.

In the long run, once large customers have formed close emotional connections and time investment with these users and organizations, they will remain stable in this high-end circle. When users leave a bank platform, it is equivalent to leaving a community, greatly increasing their exit costs. Subsequent bank marketers only need simple marketing guidance, and large customers can continue to reinvest and convert.

Therefore, this inspires us to avoid simply maintaining customers through interest inducement, and also to enhance the emotional bond between users and platforms or products through some face-to-face offline activities (customer meetings, new product launches, etc.) and online activities (user story collection, brand story creation, etc.), which will bring unexpected effects on user retention and conversion.

3. Refine user groups and develop refined activity operation strategies

User segmentation and refined user operations, as a clichéd operational concept, seem to be sounding outdated. However, in daily observations, we have found that although everyone has understood this concept for a long time and is aware of its importance, when it comes to practice, many operations students often have no idea where to start and still make some common thinking errors.

For example, applying a fixed new customer acquisition activity method (download and get red envelopes, etc.) to omni-channel product promotion and customer acquisition, and distributing coupons in batches to all old customers for activation and promotion. These are currently common and extensive activity operation examples with limited conversion rates and will result in a waste of activity resources. If we want to develop a refined activity operation strategy, in addition to the common funnel analysis, we need to focus on the user's channel attributes and user grouping ;

Channel attributes, that is, the channel type from which the user comes (as shown below). Users with different channel source attributes have distinct channel characteristics. You will gradually discover that customers coming from user recommendation channels have a high conversion rate, customers coming from SEM channels have good quality, and customers coming from content channels have high stickiness.

Therefore, in the refined operation of events, we need to carry out classified event marketing for users with different channel attributes, especially in terms of event formats and event prizes, we must adapt to local conditions and must not be the same for all. We must carry out targeted event marketing based on the preferences, regions and other characteristics of users from different channels to maximize the effect of the event.

User grouping, that is, the life cycle management of all users. After users come to the platform, they will generate a series of interactive behaviors and data on the platform (mainly focusing on business-related data, such as access data, browsing data, purchase data, etc.). After analyzing these data of users, we need to establish a user life cycle model and divide all users into five categories of life cycle users: introduction period, growth period, maturity period, decline period and churn period. Then, based on the characteristics of different groups, we carry out refined activity operations, which will have unexpected effects.

For example, for mature customers, we only need simple guidance or low-cost event benefits to promote their repurchase, but customers in the introduction stage require multiple event stimulations and high-value event rewards to promote their conversion. These two completely different operational thinking are the thinking behind refined event operations.

To sum up, in today's world where user growth is sluggish and competition for existing users is becoming increasingly fierce, event operation is no longer a simple and crude profit marketing, but a systematic marketing strategy. To do a good job in event operation, it requires a lot of in-depth thinking about the market and users. Only by continuous adjustment and summary can the expected results be achieved.

Author: Monk

Source: Monk