Building a marketing activity system (Part 2): 18 marketing activity methods

What are the ways to conduct marketing activities? The author has summarized 18 ways for building a marketing activity system. I hope it will be helpful to you.

There are many ways to conduct marketing activities on the market, and most of them can be used in different industries. For example, lucky draw activities can be used in e-commerce products (such as Jingdong Vipshop), travel products (such as Didi Chuxing and AutoNavi Maps), information products (such as Toutiao and NetEase News), game products (such as Genshin Impact Egg Party, etc.), and financial products (such as Anyihua 360 IOU).

However, the applicable marketing activities will be quite different depending on the product form (such as e-commerce and reading information) and the industry (financial industry and catering industry). For example, for information products such as WeChat Reading (or Toutiao) and e-commerce products such as Vipshop, the marketing activities available to the former are limited by the product form, and are obviously much fewer. The full discount and flash sale activities commonly used in e-commerce are not very suitable for information products.

E-commerce products should be an industry with relatively more marketing activities in the entire industry. Different marketing activities can be carried out according to different scenarios or life cycles of users or products.

The following is the marketing campaign gameplay that I sorted out when I was working on marketing campaign products at Mashang Consumer Finance in the early years. I designed corresponding marketing campaign gameplay according to the user's life cycle stage.

Marketing activities for financial products:

Below we will briefly introduce how to play 18 of the more common types of activities. The gameplay of various mobile games/web games/PC games is not within the scope of this article.

1. Coupon redemption activity

Chapter 1.1 briefly introduces the prize system - coupons. Assuming that my coupon prizes have been configured, how can I distribute them to users?

In fact, there are many ways and methods. Automatic coupon delivery After a new user completes registration in the product, the system automatically issues coupons. Of course, this registration event can also be adjusted according to the behavior or event that the platform or product wants the user to complete. For example, real-name or card binding or credit or account activation or browsing the product list page for XX seconds or completing the first order payment or confirming the receipt of the first order. Of course, the system can also automatically deliver coupons every time an action is completed or an event is triggered. A partial screenshot of the background activity configuration page is as follows.

Manual coupon collection users need to manually collect coupons on the app homepage, coupon collection center, product list, product details page, or activity page. This is mainly to promote user login and activity. After all, users cannot see and collect coupons if they do not log in to the product or enter the corresponding page.

2. Activities of bringing new employees together

The activity of bringing in new customers by bringing in old customers can also be called MGM, or Member Get Member activity, which is a typical fission and new customer acquisition activity. Pinduoduo's "Get Cash Every Day" activity, WeChat Reading's "One Answer Every Day", and Hua Xiaozhu's "Get Millions of Cash Every Day" are all typical MGM activities. It can help products quickly obtain traffic and user growth at a limited cost.

The old-to-new activity is actually an evolution of the early promoter system, which was almost a standard feature of major PC game manufacturers during the heyday of PC games in 2005. Its method is relatively simple. Each promoter (the inviter) has a unique ID or invitation code. When a new user registers in the game, as long as he fills in the invitation code, the system will establish a binding relationship between him and the promoter.

For every new player that a promoter invites to register, reaches level XX, and tops up XX yuan, he or she can get the corresponding reward. The reward is mainly promotion commission, and the promoter can withdraw cash when the commission reaches a certain threshold. Of course, new players who fill in the invitation code will also receive additional gift packs, which mainly include in-game currency and props gift packs.

Later, this gameplay continued from the PC Internet era to the mobile Internet era, and it was given a more high-sounding name called distribution fission.

Of course, some companies call it "old customers bring new customers" and some call it the MGM system, but the essential principle is the same: old customers invite new customers. Rewards are given according to different nodes of the new users in the product. Of course, this gameplay is also constantly keeping pace with the times, and is constantly being iterated and improved.

After listening to these introductions, many people may think that distribution fission should not be difficult, but in fact it is not. Building a simple distribution fission system is relatively easy. The following figure is the simplified version of the background configuration page of the distribution fission system made by our company recently. It does not look complicated. But if you want to make this gameplay perfect, you still need to spend a lot of thought and energy.

A few years ago, when I was working on the MGM system at Mashang Consumer Finance, there was a 6-person project team (development + product + operation + testing) who treated it as a long-term project. Facts have also proved that the customer acquisition cost of this gameplay is extremely low and the cost performance is extremely high. For the sake of confidentiality, I will not talk about the specific data here, I will only talk about the general gameplay. The following is a partial screenshot of the MGM activity background configuration page. Among them:

Role: This system includes two roles, the inviter and the invitee. The inviter is further divided according to whether there is a loan contract. For e-commerce products, it can be whether there is a completed order, the user level of the inviter, role identity, etc.
Events: The user chain of financial products is relatively long, with key nodes such as participation, sharing, binding, application, contract signing, successful loan, etc. Each node can set a corresponding reward event. Analogously to e-commerce products, it can be multiple scenarios or nodes such as invitee registration, order placement, and store pickup. Different rewards are provided to the inviter and invitee according to different nodes.
Pages: At the beginning, the inviter and the invitee saw the same set of front-end UI activity pages. Later, we found through data tracking that the data of several nodes of the funnel conversion were particularly bad. After analyzing the reasons, we designed the inviter page and the invitee page in a targeted manner. That is, we will present the content that the two roles are interested in or that we expect them to see. We call them M1 page and M2 page internally, for the inviter and the invitee respectively. After dozens of iterations, the conversion rate of the entire page and the activity is constantly improving towards our expectations.
Rules: basically in accordance with "Inviter (role) - no contract (user type) - participation in activities (events) - event attributes (multiple levels correspond to different rewards) - reward strategy (maximum 1 time or statistical interval) - reward items (corresponding to 6 major prize types) - collection method (automatic distribution, manual collection) - activities are mutually exclusive.

After more than a year of iteration, the MGM system has become modularly and visually configured. That is, after the UI displays the activity page image, the operator can edit and generate an activity URL link. There is almost no need for front-end and back-end developers to write code to implement the MGM function, and the overall data of MGM activities has been steadily increasing.

In fact, fission coupons can also be regarded as a replica of the activity of bringing in new customers. For example, user A obtains a 20 yuan coupon. A shares the coupon with BCD and all three of them receive the 20 yuan coupon. At this time, the face value of A's coupon will fission into 80 yuan.

The design of the MGM event could take up an article of more than 6,000 words if I were to describe it in detail, so I will just stop here. The following is a list of features from an iterative version I made, for your reference only.

3. Lucky Draw Activities

As the name implies, users can obtain lottery chips after completing certain events or behaviors, and then obtain lottery qualifications by consuming chips. Early lottery pages were basically large turntables, and later they evolved into various fancy forms such as nine-square grids, slot machines, scratch cards, etc., but their essence is lottery.

The following is a partial screenshot of the backend configuration page for a lucky draw event when I was working on a B2B e-commerce business for alcoholic beverages. The lucky draw qualification here is based on the order amount and number of orders, and the prizes are various coupons and cash red envelopes that are configured in advance.

The prizes for the lucky draw will be associated with the prize system mentioned above, that is, the prize distribution interface will be called during the lucky draw.
For example, in a lottery in the form of a roulette wheel, the sum of the probabilities of winning the first, second, third prizes and the encouragement prize (not won) should be 100%.
You can set the scope of participants for the lottery, for example, only users whose user levels meet certain conditions or users in XX area are eligible for the lottery.

4. Collection Activities

The most common collection activity is Alipay's annual "Collect Five Blessings" activity. At the same time, some novel ways of playing have also emerged, such as collecting dragon-shaped fragments in the Year of the Dragon and then piecing together a picture of a Chinese dragon. Users who complete the collection will share the prize pool or be eligible to participate in the lottery.

Laymen watch the excitement, experts watch the door. Product managers will first analyze the business flow of this lucky event, analyze the overall business process and then break down the functional modules and function points of the front and back ends, and how many corresponding pages there are. Putting aside other branch processes, we can think about how the core business process of the entire activity should or can be implemented in the back-end system.

Collection process:

The process of users collecting patriotic blessings, prosperous blessings and strong fortunes is essentially a lottery activity, that is, one card is drawn from the Five Blessings Cards, Zhanzhan Cards, Universal Cards, and brand cards (such as cards provided by brands such as Li Ning and Ping An) according to probability.
Paths to participate in activities, such as AR scanning, Ant Forest, etc., are all carriers or entrances for front-end lottery activities, which may correspond to two lottery activities, or the same lottery activity.

Synthesis process:

The synthesis process as I understand it may be similar to the coupon redemption of Meituan's catering group purchases. Specifically, I have one each of Patriotic Blessing, Prosperous Blessing, Harmonious Blessing, Friendly Blessing and Dedicated Blessing. When redeeming, all 5 of these Blessings will be cancelled from my card wallet.
At the same time as the verification or synthesis, the system issued me a "Five Blessings" blessing, which can actually be understood as a voucher or qualification for a lottery.

Prize drawing process:

For example, Alipay has set up a total bonus pool of five small goals. This bonus pool may be divided into first prize, second prize... ninth prize. Each prize corresponds to a fixed denomination, such as 5,000 red envelopes of 188.88 yuan, 20,000 red envelopes of 168.88 yuan... 1 million red envelopes of 188 yuan, for a total of 2 million places.
For example, before the Spring Festival Gala draw, 1.8 million users collected the five lucky numbers and successfully obtained the lottery qualification. At the time of the draw, the 2 million prizes were actually distributed to the 1.8 million users, and the system automatically recycled the remaining prizes after they expired. As for whether the prizes you will win are calculated in advance when you obtain the lottery qualification, or whether the lottery is drawn according to probability at the moment of the draw, this cannot be verified.

Overall, Alipay’s “Five Blessings” campaign should be much more grand and huge than what I described, such as the brand’s card management and UI elements, such as the lottery and synthesis-related animations, such as the red envelope settings and fund sharing, as well as the corresponding data statistics, risk control management and underlying architecture, etc.

Small companies are really not recommended to carry out such activities with high input and low output. If small companies must carry out such collection activities, I think the collection and synthesis process is indispensable, but the synthesis process and the lottery process seem to be integrated together, eliminating the step of issuing lottery qualifications, that is, collecting 5 cards and immediately giving away other unified and fixed prizes, such as a cash red envelope of 8.88 yuan.

5. Question-answering activities

The earliest quiz activities were a common way of playing in online games. For example, a quiz activity would be started at a scheduled time every day. Players could enter the activity and participate in answering questions. They could get rewards after answering XX questions correctly or passing the level.

The purpose of this activity is mainly to attract players to go online and promote activity. Secondly, many players will offer rewards or search for XX game quiz activity question bank on the Internet in order to get high scores, thereby increasing the search popularity and exposure of the game. This may also be something that the game activity designers did not expect.

Later, this activity was transplanted into many products, such as WeChat Reading. At the same time, the gameplay was upgraded to allow users to compete in answering questions. Combined with the question rankings, it can greatly arouse users' competitive spirit, satisfy their vanity and promote activity.

Guessing with prizes can actually be considered an advanced way of playing quiz activities, where users can "test" the relevant results. Then, through personalized content, users are attracted to forward it to their friends circle or even swipe the screen, thereby promoting the exposure and dissemination of the product.

Question bank design: You need to prepare various question banks in advance and import them into the system, or allow various types of questions to be entered in the management background.
Activity Rewards: If you answer XX questions correctly in a row within the specified time, you can get a fixed reward, or get N lucky draw qualifications, and then participate in another lucky draw. Of course, the prizes and winning probabilities of the activity are configured in advance.
Advanced gameplay: During the question-answering process, you can design several more props, such as question-changing cards, resurrection cards, etc., to increase the fun and participation of the gameplay.

6. Check-in

You can get rewards by checking in every day. You can get more rewards by checking in continuously. The rewards can be medals, points or other prizes. This gameplay is more suitable for improving user activity and increasing user stickiness. It is usually more common in fitness, reading, shopping and other applications.

The event will also be linked to the prizes set in the prize system.
Punching in and signing in is an important activity to promote product activity, but some have low thresholds and only require clicking to punch in, while others require meeting certain conditions. For example, WeChat Reading requires reading the content of a book for more than 10 seconds to successfully check in; some games, such as WeLe Landlord, require sharing.
Some clock-in activities allow users to make up for the day when they forget to clock in, while others do not. Both have their pros and cons, and product managers can use A/B testing to evaluate which one works better when designing.

7. Full discounts, full discounts, full gifts

These three activities are the most common forms of activities within e-commerce products, without a doubt.

Full reduction activities:

A common example is that if you purchase more than XX items or more than XX yuan, the total order price will be reduced by XX yuan, or the total order price will be reduced to XX yuan. Reduction is more common, while reduction is less common (somewhat similar to Taobao's shopping cart price change, but the system automatically reduces to eliminate the need for manual price changes).

It is a bit like selling a combination of products at a reduced price, but without the trouble of configuring multiple combination products. Of course, there are two subdivisions of full discount: repeated full discount and step full discount.

Full discount activities:

A common practice is that if you purchase more than XX items or more than XX yuan, you will get XX discount on the total order price. To avoid too high a marketing discount, an upper limit on the discount amount is usually set when setting up an event.

For example, if the discount is 20% off for orders over 10,000 yuan, the upper limit is 1,200 yuan, so the actual amount paid by the customer should be 8,800 yuan instead of 8,000 yuan. To use an inappropriate but easy-to-understand metaphor, it means that the customer is a novice but loves to play, and wants to organize activities but is reluctant to give the discount to customers.

Full gift activities:

A common way is to buy XX items or XX yuan of goods and get XX items of a certain product for free, or XX items of product A and B for free. Later, a more flexible way of playing was derived. The gift pool of free goods has M kinds of gifts, and users can choose N kinds (N<=M). The gift M here can also be a coupon or a third-party benefit.

For example: When the organizer was sorting out the warehouse or taking inventory, he found 4 kinds of slow-moving goods that were about to expire, including 400 packs of ham, 800 packs of instant noodles, 600 packs of snail noodles and 1,200 boiled eggs. If one of each product was taken, only 400 gift packs could be configured, which would not be able to maximize the use of these slow-moving goods.

At this time, if you choose 3 out of 4 gifts, you can configure 1,000 gifts. While expanding the beneficiary group of the activity, you can also deal with obsolete products to a greater extent.

Of course, there are still loopholes in the above example, because the actual selling price of each of the four gifts cannot be guaranteed to be exactly the same. When customers have difficulty making choices, they will choose the product with the highest price, such as choosing all sausages. This is unfair to subsequent customers who participate in the event and will not be attractive enough.

At this time, you can add another restriction condition that is, you can select a maximum of X items for each of the four products. That is, you can only select a maximum of 3 items from the four gifts ABCD to control the total quantity, and set a limit on the quantity of gifts ABCD separately, such as a maximum of 2 items for AC and a maximum of 1 item for BD. Of course, the corresponding cost is that the background configuration and development implementation will be more complicated.

The first two types of activities will involve the difference between the amount payable and the amount actually paid, and the discount amount needs to be allocated proportionally to the participating products. For the full gift activity, the value of the gift needs to be allocated to the corresponding products.

8. Purchase restriction activities

Purchase restrictions refer to limiting the number or quantity of purchases of a certain SKU within a certain period of time. But some readers may ask, as a seller or platform, shouldn’t the more the better? Why do we need to set purchase restrictions?

In fact, if you think about it carefully, it is not difficult to find that purchase restrictions exist in real scenarios. For example, if the iPhone 16 is released on JD.com, if there is no purchase restriction, the limited products may be snatched up by a very small number of buyers or scalpers, and users who really need it may not be able to buy the new products, affecting the user experience.

Simply put, the platform or seller hopes that this relatively scarce or extremely attractive product can be purchased by 100 customers, each of whom buys one, so that the product or platform will have more traffic, rather than having 100 units purchased by a rich person or scalper.

In addition to the traditional restrictions on the number of purchases and the quantity of purchases, purchase restrictions should also have risk control dimensions, which basically involve risk control models, big data and algorithms, such as the dimensions of delivery address, mobile device IEME, and delivery mobile phone number.

Many of the iPhones included in Pinduoduo's 10 billion yuan subsidy are worth buying, so many users will try to take advantage of them. However, Pinduoduo's risk control mechanism will identify "speculative" users and automatically cancel their orders.

9. Flash Sales

Some readers may ask, both purchase limits and flash sales limit the number and quantity of purchases customers can make during the event period. It feels like the two are the same event, so why do some platforms offer two different types of events?

In fact, there are some differences between the two, as follows:

Compared with limited purchase activities, the duration of flash sales is shorter and the intensity of the activities may be greater. For example, the iPhone 15 mobile phone, which is priced at 4998 yuan on the official website, is limited to 4688 yuan for a one-month activity with a stock of 5,000 units. The flash sales activity may start at 12:00 every Friday and limit 300 units to 4588 yuan. Flash sales are more scarce and more attractive to customers. They can give customers a sense of urgency and prompt some customers with needs to place orders as soon as possible.
Flash sales will have a notice before the event starts, a countdown to the end of the event, and a real-time display of the remaining inventory of the event products. In contrast, limited purchase events will not have this information. It will only display the purchase limit of XX pieces on the product details page or in the shopping cart.
Some platforms allow flash sale items to be purchased together with full-priced items, but limited-purchase items cannot be added to the shopping cart together with full-priced items for settlement (after participating in a limited-purchase event, you can only buy full-priced items when purchasing again).
Restricted purchase activities are generally carried out as long-term fixed activities, while the biggest feature of flash sale activities is that the activity time is short.

Merchants launch limited-time, low-price flash sales to attract customers to the store, quickly clear out the promotional products, and increase exposure for other products. When planning and designing activities, the platform can determine whether both flash sales and limited purchase activities are necessary based on the characteristics of the platform and the industry.

10. Group buying activities

To put it simply, group buying activities mean that different prices can be enjoyed when the number of purchases reaches 1, 3, or 5 people.

Pinduoduo is a typical example of taking group buying activities to the extreme. Group buying activities are very suitable for social groups, communities, and social e-commerce. In addition to activities that can be directly participated in, group buying itself also has new member groups and bargaining groups, which are very suitable for communication.

Any user can initiate and participate in ordinary group buying, but only old customers can initiate and allow new customers to participate in group buying.
In order to encourage or motivate group buying, the price for the group leader can be set lower than the price for the group members. Of course, for simplicity, it can also be set to be the same.
If you want to focus on attracting new users, you can try to have old users bring in new users to form a group, let old users share and spread the word, and attract new users to form a group.
In order to increase the chance of forming a group, you can set group prices for old customers and new customers in the model of old customers bringing new customers. The criteria and logic for judging old and new customers can be determined according to the nature of the platform and industry. Some customers are considered new customers if they have no purchase records, while others are considered new customers if they have not made any purchases within N days.
The number of people joining the group is inversely proportional to the success rate of the group, but positively correlated to the scale of diffusion. In order to give users a stronger motivation to actively spread the word and attract more people to join the group, multiple levels can be set up, and the more people join the group, the lower the price.
In order to increase the chances of forming a group, you can set up a virtual group to simulate buyers to make up the maximum number of people.

11. Packaged at a fixed price

That is, the activity of buying M items for XX yuan. NetEase Kaola is an example of taking the activity of buying N items for the most. Snacks have low average order value and scattered SKUs. If you don’t offer discounts, buying N items for N yuan is a good way to promote sales. JD.com’s book channel also often holds similar activities of buying N books for XX yuan.

The advantages of a one-price package or a XX yuan N-item campaign are obvious and can be summarized as follows:

Promote additional purchases: Package purchases are more favorable, and customers can't help but buy more to complete the order. Give customers more choices, customers can freely choose promotional products, and buy according to their preferences to meet personalized needs.
Solve the problem of overstocked inventory: clearance sales, and selling old goods with new ones can relieve inventory pressure in a short period of time.
Create a promotional atmosphere: When opening a new store or celebrating a festival, use “one-price” discounts to attract customers and create a promotional atmosphere.

12. Pre-sale Activities

Pre-sale activities usually require customers to pay a deposit in advance and then pay the balance after reaching the activity node. The most common pre-sale activities are the pre-sale activities of Tmall and JD.com on Double 11. So the question is, why do pre-sale activities exist?

New product launch: For example, coriander hotpot was very popular some time ago, and Baixiang Instant Noodles seized the opportunity and developed Baixiang Coriander Instant Noodles. But the question is, can customers accept this product? Are the data from market research and user research consistent with actual user feedback? Can it achieve the expected sales effect? Baixiang manufacturers may not know for sure. So Baixiang manufacturers took the opportunity of 618 to launch a pre-sale event to see how many customers who voted in favor online would pay with real money. In this way, merchants can understand consumer demand in advance, allocate supply or adjust sales strategies offline in a timely manner, and even adjust production plans to avoid product inventory backlogs and insufficient stock in the market.
Promotional activities: Regular marketing activities for existing products, the most typical of which is the Double 11 event. Baixiang manufacturers are not sure how many customers will place orders and stock up during Double 11, so it is difficult to evaluate production plans. In order to minimize inventory stagnation and increase turnover, Baixiang launched a Double 11 pre-sale event. Pre-sales can help find out which products are in high demand. If there is insufficient inventory, the workshop can increase production and inventory to ensure that the promotional activities achieve greater results.
Improve turnover: The biggest ideal of White Elephant manufacturers may be to load and transport instant noodles immediately after they come off the production line, reduce the cost of product transportation, storage and custody within the factory, and reduce inventory turnover days (the ideal state is 0 days, that is, loading them immediately after they come off the production line). After all, internal storage has management costs and capital occupation costs.

But pre-sale activities are a typical double-edged sword.

From the perspective of consumers, pre-sales will wear out consumers' patience and make customers abandon the product and choose other products, resulting in customer churn. On the other hand, if the seller's product is unique and irreplaceable, pre-sales can play a good role in cultivating customer loyalty.
From the perspective of merchants, pre-sales can effectively predict sales and determine production based on sales, without worrying about inventory backlogs, greatly improving inventory turnover. Although it will cause order loss to a certain extent, it also saves costs and inventory risks.

There may be the following pitfalls in planning and designing pre-sale activities:

A certain production capacity may have normal sales and pre-sales at the same time, and orders, ERP and WMS need to be differentiated and adaptively modified accordingly.
If the platform has designs such as IOUs or credit limits, there will be a large time difference between the repayment date of the deposit and the repayment date of the balance, which will be a little more troublesome to handle.
For pre-sale products, you may need to pay the deposit and the balance in two installments, or you may need to pay the full amount in one lump sum.
Customers are likely to use coupons when paying a deposit, but they should be restricted from using coupons again when paying the balance (otherwise the platform will easily lose money).

13. Periodic Purchase Activities

For industries or products with local attributes such as low-temperature fresh milk, drinking water, and flowers, customers will frequently place orders to purchase the products, but frequent ordering is a bad experience for users. If customers forget to place an order, they will be unable to use the products. "Buyers pay once, and merchants ship multiple times" is an extremely important consumption scenario for these products.

Huaxi Fresh Go milk ordering app has launched a periodic purchase model, and Youzan New Retail also has a similar "order as you like" function. Customers buy 1-12 months of milk at a time, such as 30-360 boxes of milk, and the delivery staff delivers milk to the door according to the delivery mode specified by the customer, which greatly optimizes the user experience.

Compared with other "periodic purchasing" tools on the market, Suixinding not only helps merchants manage periodic delivery of goods more conveniently, but also optimizes the consumer experience when placing an order, which can more effectively reduce user churn and improve user LTV.

The cycle purchase model is suitable for all industries that sell periodic products, such as fresh milk, flowers and plants, fresh fruits, drinking water, grains, oils, rice and noodles, and health supplements. It has the following advantages:

Greatly improve the user's consumption experience. Compared with the traditional regular purchase model, the periodic purchase model meets the actual use scenario of customers ordering once and delivering multiple times. When placing an order, customers can customize the delivery cycle, quantity and time period, and generate a dedicated delivery plan. At the same time, they can also modify the delivery plan according to the customer's schedule changes (such as traveling on May Day or returning home during the summer vacation), and stop delivery.
Cycle purchase can help merchants improve digital operation efficiency. It helps merchants quickly lock in users, reduce promotion costs, quickly recover funds, increase single customer value, and improve user stickiness. While improving customer experience and stickiness, it also reduces the number of after-sales consultations for merchants.
In terms of order management, the orders from the cycle purchase have been split into orders and delivery orders, and the delivery plan supports return, change, replacement and stop operations. Return means refunding the milk that has not been delivered, change means modifying the delivery plan, such as changing from daily delivery to every other day delivery (the quantity can also be changed), change means modifying the delivered products (to facilitate the promotion of new products), and stop means suspending delivery.
In terms of user management, merchants can view the order expiration date of each user through periodic purchases, and support users to repurchase with one click, helping merchants to lock in high-net-worth users in advance.

14. Purchase at a Premium Price

Add-on shopping is a business sales strategy, also known as "add-on shopping" or "add-on shopping". It is a marketing method that increases the total price of the items that consumers originally intended to purchase by offering them additional products or services. This strategy is widely used in the retail and service industries as well as e-commerce.

For example, the basic version of an iPhone 15 is priced at 6,199 yuan, but consumers can choose to purchase a one-year extended warranty service at an additional cost of 649 yuan. In addition, they can also choose to purchase the included one-year replacement service for 119 yuan. This premium purchase strategy can increase consumers' perception of the value of the product and bring additional profits to merchants.

Consumer psychology: Paying a premium may give consumers the feeling that they have more choices, but it may also cause confusion or anxiety in purchasing decisions.
Price transparency: Merchants need to ensure that their price structures are clear so that consumers do not feel misled or defrauded.
Brand trust: The success of a premium purchase strategy often depends on consumers’ trust and loyalty to the brand.

In the above example, the value-added service product that can be purchased at an additional price is strongly associated with the iPhone product itself. Some products, such as tripe and fish throat, which are in the food category, may not have strongly related value-added products for additional purchase. In this case, you can set up some weakly related products, such as the same type of food, such as shrimp balls, fish balls, and plates and tableware for holding the food.

Premium purchase is also a double-edged sword. Since it is mostly displayed on the order submission page, while increasing sales, it may also interrupt the customer's purchasing path, causing some customers who are willing to buy to click on the premium purchase items randomly and then jump out of the page, resulting in loss.

15. Secondary Marketing

Secondary marketing, also known as customer management, is a strategy to manage the different needs of the same customer at different times and locations. The core of this marketing method is to use existing customer resources to promote customer repeat consumption or cross-selling through different strategies and means.

Let's take an example to help you quickly understand this concept.

After the platform has completed the 618 promotion, sellers can seize this opportunity to do a wave of secondary marketing. Some customers who added items to the shopping cart but did not pay, and some customers who placed orders but did not pay, actually have a strong desire to buy. They can all be converted and a wave of return promotions can be done for them. Of course, customers who have already purchased can be guided to participate in repeat purchases.

There are two relatively important nodes in secondary marketing, namely list screening and activity configuration.

List screening: Through customer feature information, behavior records, internal and external credit performance feature variables, screening rules and screening scoring models are formulated. Screening is done from existing users, secondary marketing is conducted, and after going through different states, the list screening pool is finally returned to the existing pool.

Activity configuration: The activity system configures dynamic and static activity parameters according to the invitation plan; the whitelist is filtered in real time and the invitation is executed at a certain time. There are several types of invitation methods.

16. Cross-selling

Cross-selling is the process of selling other types of products or services to customers who have already purchased products or services to meet the diverse needs of customers. For example, when a customer buys apples, the salesperson recommends bananas to the customer.

Some readers may wonder, this cross-selling is very similar to the premium purchase, is it necessary to have two activities? Actually, it is not.

Add-on shopping is to recommend other related goods or services during customer decision-making and purchasing, and cross-selling is to recommend other products and services to customers who have already completed the transaction.
Cross-selling is more about selecting products and customers with higher conversion feasibility based on existing order data and customer data, and then configuring corresponding activities. For example, there are 200 customers who bought iPhone 15, some of whom are potential customers of iPad products, and some are potential customers of Macbook. How to accurately identify them is the essence of cross-selling.

If you try to introduce new services to existing customers, we call this type of expansion cross-selling. A common example is Apple launching AirPods, and recommending AirPods to customers who already have iPhones is expansion cross-selling.
If you introduce an existing service or product to another member of the customer organization (different regions or departments of the existing customer, for example, Division A of Group A is an existing customer of Intelligent Customer Service, and we recommend the product to Division BCD of the group that is independent of Division A), we call this type of cross-selling.

The concept of diversified cross-selling is rather obscure and will not be elaborated here.

17. Precision Marketing

Precision marketing is about targeting existing customers to inspire brand loyalty and purchasing behavior. Precision marketing relies less on creating persuasive ads and more on creating deals, offers, and gimmicks to attract existing customers.

The core idea of precision marketing is accuracy, precision and measurability. Precision marketing ensures long-term personalized communication between enterprises and customers through quantifiable and accurate market positioning technology, advanced database technology, network communication technology and modern logistics, so that marketing can achieve precise requirements such as measurability and controllability.

To do this, precision marketing relies heavily on market segmentation: a technique that divides the market into smaller, more specific groups of customers with unique needs.

As shown in the figure below, for example, if the total number of existing users is 200,000, we can identify maternal and child users by segmented industry, and then push maternal and child products and activities to them. More precise push and activity strategies can improve the overall conversion rate.

E-commerce products can divide users into 8 user value groups based on user value RFM, namely, consumption (Recency), consumption frequency (Frequency), and consumption amount (Monetary). It can also be divided into 5 stages or groups according to the dimension of user life cycle. The specific methods and strategies need to be formulated according to the industry and product characteristics.

Customers at different stages of their life cycle have different blocking points. The operation strategy is to sort out the blocking points at each stage and then formulate corresponding precise marketing activity strategies. This can make the most of limited resources, rather than just scattering resources aimlessly.

The ultimate precision marketing has given rise to a new concept: real-time (intelligent) marketing. For example, on April 23, you searched for air tickets from Chengdu to Beijing in a travel app, browsed family rooms in hotels near the Beijing Bird's Nest, and then closed the app and put down your phone.

Guess what will happen at this time? The system combines your historical orders and travel data, as well as your behavior data just now, and comprehensively determines that you may have the intention of taking your family to Beijing for a trip during the May Day holiday. So the system has pushed for you a coupon of air tickets with a denomination of XX yuan, a parent-child room in the hotel where you are doing activities, and a destination suitable for children within XX kilometers of the hotel. This push may be an APP push or a short message.

Within just a few minutes, the system analyzed your historical consumption data and operational behavior, and gave an event marketing strategy that was more in line with your needs, stimulating or attracting you to make purchase conversions. It is possible that when you open the homepage of the app again, the information flow has matched the relevant strategies, itineraries and notes of your destination Beijing.

Traditional precision marketing has a certain lag. Most of the marketing strategies related to you are involved in the operation after manual operation intervention or the system only reaches you after N hours, and the timeliness can be improved. The real-time intelligent marketing in the above examples is obviously much more advanced than traditional precision marketing.

But the fact is that many companies or products have not even been able to do the most basic precise marketing. The biggest difficulty and opportunity for precise marketing lies in the CDP of the customer data management platform. Those who are interested can understand it themselves. This article will not be expanded.

18. Bargaining helps

The essence of the bargaining support event is to invite friends to participate in the event and quickly acquire new customers to improve customer activity. Old customers can also participate in help, but the effect of bargaining support is obviously not as good as new customers. The common one is Pinduoduo's cash red envelope support event. Withdrawal of 200 yuan may only require about 5 new customers, but old customers need 15 or even more (the data is roughly estimated, not real estimates).

Bargaining activity: Consumers actively send the event or product link to friends and invite them to help bargain. The more people participate, the lower the price will be. This activity method can help merchants quickly spread product information and allow more consumers to participate, and quickly fission online customers. Simply put, the lower the price is.

Support activities: In essence, similar to bargaining activities. Consumers actively send the activity link to friends and invite them to help. The more people participate, the smaller the gap between consumers and the target. For example, the initial red envelope amount is 198 yuan, and the red envelope is over 200 yuan before withdrawing cash. The more people invited, the smaller the difference in withdrawal.

Let’s take bargaining as an example to talk about the management backend or specific implementation method of the event. It is known that the original price of a certain product is 100 yuan, and the minimum price that can be cut is 60 yuan (financial accounting will not lose money). I have been searching online for a long time but haven’t found anyone related to Pinduoduo to come up with an explanation. Many e-commerce products are also reversed based on the effects presented by the front-end.

The common features of these methods are:

Number of bargaining people: that is, how many people can participate in bargaining at most, and whether consumers can cut themselves.
The lowest price of the product: that is, how much the minimum price of the product can be cut, which determines whether the product will lose.
Validity period of bargaining: that is, the time from the time from the initiation of bargaining to the end of bargaining, which is different from the activity time. For example, the activity time is 5/1-5/7, but the validity period of bargaining may only be 3 hours. Through the urgency of time, consumers will invite more friends to share.

Is each bargaining fixed or random amount? The former is simple to implement but will make customers feel that the activity is lacking, while the latter will generally set a random amount range. Assuming that 10 people can participate in the bargaining, the total amount that can be cut is 40 yuan, and the average person can be cut 4 yuan at random, so how can this amount be randomly cut?

Here are several common implementation logics:

The amount of random money for each time is purely random in the range of 4 yuan ± 20%, but the biggest disadvantage is that it is possible that it is +X% each time, and the final random amount may exceed 40 yuan, which is a certain risk.
Set the maximum and minimum value of the random amount of the first knife. For example, the range of the remaining 9 knife should be 27-36 yuan, corresponding to the average random amount of each knife, which is 3-4 yuan. Set the maximum value of each knife to bargain for each knife, and the minimum value is >0.01 yuan. If you want to be attractive, the minimum value can be set higher, such as 3 yuan or 3.5 or even higher.
Plan 2 has been subsequently improved, that is, the first knife is not set, but the first knife is 2-6 yuan per 1-5, and the last 6-10 yuan per 1-2 yuan per 1. In this way, the first 5 friends can cut 10-30 yuan, and the last 5 customers can cut 5-10 yuan. The amount cut in the first half will be relatively large, and the customers' willingness to share will be stronger, which will reduce the customers' fear of difficulties. We adopted this plan at that time.

In fact, there is room for optimization in Plan 3. For example, the total bargaining amount is 100 yuan, and the total number of people can be distributed first and the back is less, such as 80 yuan and 20 yuan, and the number of people is less and the number of people is less and the number of people is more divided into 40 and 60 people. That is, the first 40 people cut off 80 yuan, and the next 60 people cut off 20 yuan. Through the Pinduoduo cash red envelope withdrawal activity that I have not been successful in previous times, I once suspected that they might have similar design ideas. Off topic: If there are many users who have bargaining or helping the event participate, it may not be appropriate to calculate the random amount in real time. Perhaps the calculation is carried out in advance based on the bargaining amount and number of people, and then the calculated amount is stored, and when a user comes to bargain, the corresponding amount can be read.

Of course, there are other logics in the middle, such as setting the difficulty coefficient based on the historical success times or the new and old levels of the bargaining customer. The difficulty coefficient of the pure new customer is 1, the coefficient that the old customer has not participated is 2, the difficulty coefficient that the successful participation is 3, and so on. Of course, the difficulty coefficient here should not grow linearly, but may grow logarithmic or exponentially.

Pinduoduo's bargaining and supporting activities should be much more complex and complete than the above, and also consider strategies and model algorithms such as risk control. However, most platforms or products with small sizes should adopt Solution 2 or 3 to basically meet business needs.

summary:

This article just briefly introduces the above 18 ways to play the marketing activity system. Each of them can be published in detail for in-depth analysis. These activities are not the best. Each company or product can choose the most suitable activity form based on actual conditions.