How can event operations improve user conversion?

Someone asked me: I have been working in the community in the education and training industry for several years. I basically know all the ways to attract traffic and increase followers on the market, and I do well in it.

The embarrassing thing is that although a lot of fans were accumulated through each fission activity, the leaders were quite satisfied at the time; but when it came to subsequent conversions, the leaders were no longer satisfied because the conversion effect was too poor.

So, what bothers me now is whether I should continue to carry out fission and fan-increasing activities, and whether it is valuable?

I answered:

I can understand your dilemma. For most of the friends who are working in the community, they not only have to grab traffic on one hand, but also conversion on the other. It really means "grasping both hands, and both hands must be strong."

When traffic is "all over the place", this requirement is basically no problem; because if the conversion effect of this group of users is not good, you can do another activity to introduce a new group of users for conversion. After all, there is a lot of traffic and the cost is low.

But as traffic becomes less and less and costs become higher, people start to feel troubled.

After finally attracting a group of users at a high cost, who wouldn’t want to have a good conversion effect? If the conversion effect is not good, there will be no place to cry.

One time when my children were on summer vacation, a friend who worked in operations at a children's English training institution talked to me.

He said: "Before, when the children were about to go on vacation, we spent a lot of money to do a fission event. Not only were there many rewards and big discounts, but we also placed advertisements on major platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou."

I replied: "That's great, how did it turn out in the end?"

He sighed: "We have accumulated tens of thousands of fans for our official account and created dozens of groups, but..."

I interrupted him: "But what? This data is very good. It's really hard to get some traffic now!"

He gave me a distressed look and said, "Don't mention it. The data looks good, but most of the users who come in are not interested in our courses at all. They are just here to get the free stuff. The conversion rate is very poor."

After hearing this, I finally understood that it’s not that the fission activity is useless, but that the quality of the fans coming in is not good.

1. Ineffective Efforts

Using fission fan-increasing activities to accumulate initial users is a common method used by most educational and training institutions.

Many friends who work in social communities, after starting to taste the sweetness brought by traffic, focus on studying how to improve the traffic data of fission activities and increase the number of fans, while completely ignoring other things.

If most of your fans come here to take advantage of the freebies, no matter how many more you add, it won't have much impact on the subsequent paid conversions.

Whether it is to attract traffic, promote activation, or retain customers, the ultimate goal is conversion. Without this premise, the problem you mentioned will occur: "The number of fans has increased, but sales have not increased."

In fact, this phenomenon of efforts to achieve a certain goal but having the opposite effect is not uncommon in our actual work and life.

For example, a mother enrolled her child in a piano class, and the teacher said: "If you want your child to learn piano well, you must let him spend more time practicing."

After the mother brought the child home, she began to urge the child to practice the piano desperately, and she even wished that the child would save time for meals.

But in the end, it was discovered that not only did the child fail to learn the piano well, but his initial interest in learning the piano was also lost.

Why does this happen?

This can actually be explained by a very famous theorem: "Goodhart's Law" .

2. Goodhart’s Law

"Goodhart's Law" was first proposed by the famous British economist Charles Goodhart.

In 1975, Goodhart published this view in an article on British monetary policy: Once an attempt is made to control an indicator by exerting external pressure, any regularity obtained from statistical observation will tend to collapse.

How do you understand it? Let me give you a simple example.

We all know that GDP is an important indicator reflecting the economic development of a place and has great reference significance.

But if we only focus on GDP and only think about how to increase GDP, various problems will arise, including data falsification, random demolition and construction, etc. At this time, GDP becomes a decoration and loses its meaning.

At first, Goodhart's law was only applied in the economic field. As more and more people discovered its universality, this law was extended to various fields.

Ultimately, the law is simplified to this: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

For example, when it comes to children learning piano, there are actually many factors that affect whether the child can learn piano well: practice time, learning interest, learning methods, etc.

If you only think about increasing the amount of practice time for your child, it is likely to have the opposite effect.

Because you don’t know whether the child’s training method is correct, and you don’t care whether the child will get bored after practicing for a long time...

The most vivid example of Goodhart's Law comes from a classic theory: the "Cobra Effect" .

During the British colonial period in India, there was an infestation of cobras in Delhi. Because these snakes are highly poisonous, they had a great impact on people's lives.

In order to solve this problem, the British government came up with an idea: citizens could receive a reward for every dead cobra they handed in.

At the beginning, in order to get the bonus, people rushed to catch and kill poisonous snakes, which led to a significant decrease in the number of poisonous snakes. The policy was quite effective; but the good times did not last long, as some people smelled business opportunities hidden in the policy loopholes: the government only looked at the dead snakes and did not know where the snakes came from.

So they started breeding cobras themselves and slaughtered them regularly to earn the bounty.

After the government discovered all this, it decisively stopped the issuance of rewards.

Seeing that there was no profit to be made, these people released a large number of cobras that had lost their value into the wild.

In the end, rather than decreasing due to the policy, the number of cobras actually increased significantly.

The story of the "Cobra Effect" is actually a perfect verification of "Goodhart's Law" .

Artificial killing is a good measure to reduce the number of cobras. Even if the government does not intervene, people will spontaneously kill these creatures that pose a threat to their survival.

But the measure became ineffective when the government set a bounty target for hunting the animals.

3. Measures are not goals

Now that we know Goodhart’s Law , how do we solve the problem raised at the beginning: “The number of fans has increased, but the conversion effect is very poor”?

First, we need to figure out the root cause of this problem.

You should know that the quality of conversion effect is not only related to the number of fans, but also includes the quality of fans, subsequent operational actions, one-on-one language and so on.

Increasing the number of followers is only one of the measures that determine the conversion effect. If you regard this measure as the only goal and use all means to increase the number of followers, the result you want will be counterproductive.

So what should we do more appropriately? I think there are at least two aspects to start with:

1. Don’t Obsess Over Invalid Data

When many community operators are doing fan-increasing activities, in order to make the data look as good as possible, they often invest in places with more traffic, such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Toutiao and other large-traffic platforms.

Is the effect of increasing followers good? The data may look good, but it is only superficial.

When it comes to conversion, you find that these users are either zombie fans or freeloaders who are not interested in your courses at all.

Therefore, it is more important than obsessing over these invalid data to find your real potential users.

For example, you want to do a fission activity for your "Children's English Course".

Instead of spending a lot of money on big platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, and harvesting a lot of invalid data.

It would be better to find more small platforms to cooperate with that are often followed by young mothers, such as some women’s emotional public accounts, part-time job communities for mothers, etc.

Although the final increase in the number of fans is not that impressive, the value lies in the good quality of these fans and the high conversion rate.

2. Create a good screening funnel for user traffic

If you can’t find a particularly precise channel for delivery, there is a way to ensure the quality of your fans, and that is to create a good user flow and screening funnel.

In terms of data analysis, there is a famous "AARRR funnel model", which talks about a trend in which the number of users decreases gradually in the five stages of "attracting new users → promoting activation → retention → conversion → referral".

AARRR Funnel

Based on this theory, we can actually create a drainage screening funnel in the first stage, that is, before entering the "activation" stage.

Let’s take the fission activities of “Children’s English Class” as an example.

For example, in order to maximize the final conversion effect of this fission activity, you conducted initial delivery in many external channels.

But you are not sure how many of these incoming users are valuable to you. What should you do?

At this time, you can set up a screening funnel.

First of all, through fission posters, these initial users can be directed to the WeChat public account.

Then, parents with children are added to the WeChat group by increasing rewards and guiding users to fill out information.

Finally, through group operations, some interested parents are imported into the corporate WeChat account for subsequent refined operations.

The advantage of doing this is that not only is the added users more accurate, but the subsequent operational pressure can also be greatly reduced.

Increasing fans is not a goal, it is just a means.

Author: Miss C

Source: Seeding sales