In-depth analysis of Pinduoduo's fission activities

Everyone knows that Pinduoduo is very good at fission activities. "Cut the price" has become everyone's impression of Pinduoduo's group bargaining activities. However, when we use similar routines to do activities, the gains are not equal. Why is this? The author of this article shares the disassembly of Pinduoduo's fission activities. Let's learn about it together.

I have seen many cases analyzing Pinduoduo's fission activities, and every case talks about how powerful Pinduoduo's fission is.

Why can’t we achieve the same results as Pinduoduo by completely copying the activity process of Pinduoduo? Why is the same fission activity effective on Pinduoduo, but not as effective or even ineffective when used on our own products?

This article attempts to analyze the reasons why Pinduoduo's fission activities are successful based on Pinduoduo's entire traffic system, as well as how we need to consider and plan activities when doing fission activities .

Users and products form a mutually beneficial system, in which users and products are interdependent and mutually beneficial.

The same is true for Pinduoduo's fission activities. Behind the seemingly simple fission activity, it actually forms an ecosystem for traffic retention and monetization together with Pinduoduo's crowd positioning and other activities.

Only by starting from the entire system can we better see the power behind it and use it better for ourselves.

1. Pinduoduo’s North Star Indicator

Other activities form an ecosystem for traffic retention and monetization. Starting from the entire system, we can better see the power behind it and use it for our own benefit.

What is the so-called North Star Indicator? It must be the unity of the product's commercial value and user value .

This indicator must be the core indicator that guides the product to operate in a healthy and normal manner. It must be an indicator that can reflect the product status in a timely manner and can have a positive impact on the product.

Around this North Star indicator, we will definitely have some core process indicators, and fission must be based on these process indicators to provide services and guidance. If fission is done simply for the sake of traffic, then the final traffic will be difficult to be converted into real users. They will come and go, and it will be difficult to bring long-term value to the product.

For e-commerce platforms like Pinduoduo, to a certain extent, the North Star indicator is the number of orders . This indicator can well reflect the development of the platform and realize the positive cycle of product value and user value; while the GMV indicator has a certain vanity and lag, and it is difficult to truly reflect the actual situation of the product.

Judging from the current activities launched on Pinduoduo, all of Pinduoduo's fission activities are carried out around this North Star indicator; and in the process of fission, in addition to obtaining registered user traffic, various activities such as browsing products, free orders, and returning red envelopes for orders will be set up to promote user order conversion .

Pinduoduo’s strategy is that as long as you spend enough time on my product, I will find a way to convert your first order, and then gradually cultivate user habits and increase user ARPU value .

2. What is fission?

Fission is a concept in physics. When an atom undergoes a nuclear fission reaction, it can continue to split and grow exponentially. 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 6..., this is called fission.

The trend of WeChat fission is bulk dissemination, with multiple dissemination nodes disseminating information at the same time, gradually expanding the crowd and forming a network. This fission model is more conducive to the dissemination of fun, interesting and useful activities/content.

In fission, the core underlying logic is the logic of sharing conversion: What is the motivation of A users to share and spread . Next, we will talk about them one by one.

1. The underlying logic of fission

The key to fission activities is the invitation action and the establishment of invitation relationships. The difficulty and reward of the invitation action determine how many users will participate and how many users will successfully participate, while the establishment of invitation relationships is the key to whether the prizes can be successfully distributed.

What kind of user A (user characteristics) completes the invitation sharing action in what scenario and for what motivation, and why does user B (here refers to the invited user) participate in the activity or complete the corresponding action .

User characteristics, scenarios, actions/rewards must be a whole, which is the key to the success of a fission activity. In other words, we need to design our scenarios and actions based on the user characteristics of user A to better reach our target users.

Here, we focus on the action/reward factor, which is, to a certain extent, a very critical factor that affects whether fission is successful.

Why do users share/invite?

There are two aspects for users to complete this action. One is motivation, and the other is the ability to complete the action. These two elements make it possible for users to complete the sharing/invitation behavior .

From the user's motivation, why do users want to complete sharing/invitation?

Generally speaking, users may share for five reasons:

1) Recognition needs: Seeking recognition, understanding and a sense of belonging. For example, the “Like” button on social platforms satisfies users’ psychological motivation to seek recognition and enhances user content sharing and user stickiness on the platform.

2) The need to vent emotions: the need to relieve stress and escape reality. Humans are emotional animals, and things like anger, happiness, and fun are easy for users to share.

3) The need for personal integration: refers to the need for individuals to improve their credibility, stability and status through some behaviors or sharing. For example, the following types of content in WeChat Moments: New Year's fortune, monthly fortune, etc.; a certain test; a certain research report, etc. These types of content meet the need for personal integration, and forwarding to Moments is to improve one's credibility and status.

4) Social integration needs: that is, social needs, strengthening connections with family, friends, etc. For example, zodiac signs, food, emotions, etc. can easily bring people closer and ease the communication atmosphere.

5) The need to show off: Seeking a sense of superiority and positive feedback. For example, some fancy ways of showing off on Zhihu: "What is it like to have a very beautiful girlfriend?" "What is it like to be admitted to Tsinghua University or Peking University?" "What is it like to earn 100,000 yuan a month?" etc. These contents have a high number of views on Zhihu.

Simply put, being interesting, useful, beneficial, and having something to talk about are the keys to users sharing.

• Interesting: NetEase Drama Contest and NetEase Personality Test, on the one hand, can become social currency in your circle of friends, increasing everyone's understanding and topics of conversation.
• Useful: Sharing of useful content, but research shows that useful content has a higher collection rate.
• Advantages: Profitable, distribution, group buying, task treasure, invitation gifts, bargaining and other activities all take advantage of the public's desire to get a bargain. After all, who doesn't like to get a bargain?
• Have something to talk about: increase your social currency and shape your own personality in your circle of friends.

Based on the user's ability, is the user's motivation to share greater than the resistance? Can the user's resistance be fully reduced in the process to increase the user's motivation to share?

The motivation includes prizes, medals and rewards that users can get by sharing. If users can get 100 yuan by downloading an App, who would not want to download it? However, whether users can stay after downloading it is a great test of the operation skills and the ability to carry on the subsequent traffic.

User resistance includes the smoothness of the operation path, the complexity of completing the action, etc. Give users clear and explicit guidance, do not let users think and choose, and only let users see the prize and the action path. In this way, the resistance in the intermediate process will be reduced a lot.

Spiritual rewards vs. material rewards, which one is more contagious?

We can see that many of Pinduoduo's fission activities are designed based on rewards such as cash/coupons/food, and there are many universal rewards such as cash rewards. But why do many people who copy Pinduoduo's activities ultimately fail?

Pinduoduo designed this kind of reward activity because of the universality of Pinduoduo's user population . Who doesn't shop online? Who doesn't buy something online? But for its own platform, it is not necessarily the case. Are the people who come here the potential target population? Will there be a chance to convert these target users in the future?

When taking over user traffic, Pinduoduo has designed various means of user retention and activities for browsing product activity pages. Browsing pages can earn gold coins, which can be exchanged for cash and free order rewards. After placing an order, completing certain actions can earn cash rewards. The series of reward actions are formed into a coherent action, making users addicted and falling in love with shopping on Pinduoduo .

As long as users can go shopping on Pinduoduo, it is easy to convert them. After all, buying things on Pinduoduo is like free. Small items worth a few dollars are also free shipping. The cost of placing an order for users is very low. Buying a bunch of things will cost less than 100 yuan. There are even first-order cashback activities to promote conversion.

However, most products are not universal, and their target users are not as wide as Pinduoduo's. Moreover, the products that can take over the traffic may be very limited, making it difficult to retain and convert users. This is also a problem that many people encounter when doing fission: fission activities take time, energy and money, and also bring about user growth during the activities, but users cannot be retained and it is difficult to form direct conversions. This is what we call false traffic.

The key is to design prizes based on the attributes of your products and the characteristics of your target users, so as to ensure that the traffic we receive is accurate and effective.

2. Basic gameplay of fission

From the fission activities currently launched by Pinduoduo, we can summarize them into the following basic gameplay:

Bargaining to get products for free was the core method of Pinduoduo's early fission.

"Get Cash Every Day", "Cash Wheel", and "Guard Cash" are all activities that allow users to get cash by completing actions within a limited time . The actions here are mainly to invite friends. Each activity page corresponds to a final withdrawal amount. The final withdrawal amount for "Get Red Packets Every Day" is 100 yuan, the final withdrawal amount for "Cash Wheel" is 500 yuan, and the final withdrawal amount for "Guard Cash" is 1,000 yuan. It seems that the ability of users on Pinduoduo to invite friends should not be underestimated, and it can steadily bring more traffic and users to Pinduoduo every month.

Sign-in, Duoduo Orchard and Duoduo Earn Big Money are the keys to receiving the traffic from fission . Sign-in can earn sign-in beans, which can be directly withdrawn, 1 yuan = 100 sign-in beans; Duoduo Orchard can earn water drops and fertilizers by completing designated actions, and after planting trees, a box of fruits can be mailed to your home, realizing fruit freedom; Duoduo Earn Big Money can earn gold coins by completing designated actions, and gold coins can be exchanged for goods. At the same time, there are many free-order incentives on this page to stimulate users to buy.

Signing in, Duoduo Orchard and making a lot of money are not only the key to retaining existing traffic, but also the key to recalling users. The activity here also includes inviting friends. Inviting friends can get more sign-in beans; inviting friends to Duoduo Orchard to come back and water the plants can also get water drop rewards.

Pinduoduo has made full use of the opening of social relationships. In the early stage, it relied on fission to obtain user friend information, and then continued to recall users through various activities and the social relationships between friends.

As long as the social relationship between friends continues to exist, there will always be a chance to recall them again in the future.

3. What kind of users will be attracted by the gimmick of the fission activity?

Everyone likes to take advantage, but some people prefer to take advantage without losing face, which also determines which users can be attracted by fission activities?

Anyone can invite friends to get cash, which is suitable for multi-SKU pan-products. Any user group is a potential user of the platform. After attracting users, they can be converted through a variety of products.

When choosing prizes, you must match them with potential target users. You should use prizes based on what the potential target users like as a gimmick for the fission activity.

In addition, according to the principle that birds of a feather flock together, if you want to further control the quality of incoming traffic, restricting the invitees is also a key point.

4. Risk control and freeloaders

The "wool-grabbing party" does not mean using technical means to cheat. Most of the "wool-grabbing party" refers to those who take advantage of the benefits and leave immediately.

I think people who do operations have a love-hate relationship with the freeloaders. After all, many freeloaders are highly contagious, and the activities can spread quickly through their social circles. However, the users brought by the freeloaders are mostly freeloaders, who leave immediately after receiving the freeloaders without any stay. (This proves that retention is not really done well, and the freeloaders cannot be retained.)

The most amazing thing about Pinduoduo is that even if I know that you are a freeloader, I will not restrict you, but I will try every possible way to convert you and the users you bring.

Another type of super-wool party is to use technology to cheat. One IP can split into many users, and use these fake users to get the wool of the platform. The last KFC wool-sucking incident was actually due to the platform's inadequate risk control. If the risk control was in place, how could it be possible to be cheated by tens of thousands without realizing it.

Restricting users by IP and device is also a common method of risk control.

I have talked a lot about the analysis of some basic elements of fission before, and I also want to share with you more thoughts related to the underlying layer of fission. Next, let’s take a look at the detailed analysis of Pinduoduo’s fission activity.

3. Analysis of Pinduoduo’s fission activities

When analyzing Pinduoduo's fission activities, we will mainly start from the user paths of the inviter and the invitee, and analyze the flow path of fission traffic and the acceptance path of user traffic. What is more difficult than bringing in users is to keep users and keep them to generate value.

1. Bargaining for free

Analyzing the essence of fission, user A, who loves to take advantage of a bargain, invites user B to click to bargain because he wants to get a physical product for free.

According to the principle that people are divided into groups, the invited users must be those who like to take advantage of others. Therefore, when designing the interaction, when user B helps, the emphasis is on showing that user B gets a product for free. This kind of activity design can allow user A to bring user B, user B to bring user C, user C to bring user D, and so on. A node continues to spread outward, forming fission.

At the same time, each activity page of Pinduoduo forms a complete closed loop of all activities, forming the flow and utilization of traffic through retention pop-ups, pop-ups, and King Kong area icons.

Judging from the user paths I have experienced so far, Pinduoduo is no longer pursuing rapid user growth. Instead, it is looking for ways to allow users to complete their first order conversion by offering free check-in and cashback, thereby breaking the ice and turning traffic into users. The key is to ensure that users can continue to retain the platform.

2. Invite friends to get cash activities

The fission game, which was very popular last year, adopts the same strategy as bargaining, which makes users decide that they are just a little bit away from getting cash/prizes, and encourages users to take action. After taking action, there are sunk costs. Seeing that they are very close to the goal, they can't bear to give up.

When the user is about to give up and quit, a window pops up to retain the user: Get a 5x cash card, and the amount of support for inviting a friend will be multiplied by 5. It seems that the dawn of victory has been seen again; the words of giving up the reward and the cross-out window on the pop-up window are very hidden, so that users follow Pinduoduo's instructions without thinking.

At the same time, it also points out the target for users. If you don't know who to invite, Pinduoduo will tell you that you can speed up cash withdrawals by inviting xx friends. Use your own social relationships to further recall users for Pinduoduo.

The same applies to activities where you can invite friends to get cash. For B users who have helped, the key is not to seek to get more B users to help, but to find ways to make B users who have not converted convert.

3. Cornucopia

Completing the task will earn you cornucopia cash and WeChat change. The withdrawal cycle is one week. If you fail to complete the task and withdraw the cash within one week, the cash will be invalid and you will have to start over.

The tasks here are basically browsing, drawing free rewards, completing orders to get free orders, etc. Most of them are tasks of user retention and conversion. The traffic from fission is converted through browsing, ordering free orders, etc.

There is a particularly interesting one here, which is the cash withdrawal cheats made by Pinduoduo. There is no official formal text description, but a guide posted in the user's tone on WeChat Moments. What it tells you here is that it is very simple to withdraw cash, just click it.

Most of the fission activities currently retained by Pinduoduo still use WeChat cash payments as the means of fission. Compared with the previous bargaining for free items, the user group is more universal, and users do not have to worry that the free items from Pinduoduo may have quality problems and be unwilling to participate in bargaining activities.

In addition, in terms of retention, compared with the previous Duoduo Orchard, the current sign-in activities and Duoduo Big Money activities are more suitable for the current product development stage and bring more support to the product. In the original Duoduo Orchard, the fruits may not be liked by everyone, and not everyone may be willing to participate in Duoduo Orchard's activities. However, the free order award and cash rewards are suitable for everyone and can well stimulate users to complete the order conversion action.

After the conversion of the first order, we will be able to understand what users like to buy on Pinduoduo in the future, and recommend more products of interest to users, thereby promoting user conversion again.

4. Thoughts on Pinduoduo Activities

Based on Pinduoduo’s activities, I have a few thoughts that I would like to share with you.

1. Starting from the end determines the quality of fission flow

Fission must be the beginning, the starting point of traffic, not the focus; we need to look at the final utilization efficiency of traffic, and our fission activities also need to have a target point. In other words, we need to focus on the North Star indicator to see whether each of our fission activities has achieved our core indicators and auxiliary indicators.

If it is not achieved, what is the reason and how can it be optimized later?

For example, we set the goal of fission activities to attract 30,000 new users and convert 300 users to place orders. The 30,000 traffic target here is not the core key, the core key is how to convert users, which is the positive value that fission activities can really bring to the product.

2. Taking over traffic is the key

Today, Pinduoduo is no longer simply pursuing rapid user growth, but is trying to find ways to take over each incoming traffic and convert each incoming traffic.

If users have not yet converted under the stimulation of free orders, Pinduoduo will also promote user conversion by offering a limited-time 1-yuan purchase for new users. In Pinduoduo's current strategy, conversion is the key to converting incoming traffic into users.

3. Social recall of users

The traffic generated by fission comes from certain social relationship chains between users, and these social relationship chains are the key to attracting new users and recalling them.

The efficiency of recalling through social links is higher than that of PUSH and SMS, and it is easier to convert.

There are obvious social relationship reminders in Pinduoduo's fission activities. Inviting xx friends can double the withdrawal, which stimulates you to recall long-term inactive users.

The above is a simple analysis of Pinduoduo’s fission activity.

In summary, the essence of fission is what kind of user invites user B in what kind of scenario and with what kind of motivation, and for what reason user B clicks and participates in the activity ; if you figure out the paths of the inviter and the invitee, and understand the users and the products, fission won't be that bad.

Author: Wang Operation Diary, WeChat Official Account: Wang Operation Growth Diary. Pay attention to all the gameplay of user operation!