To operate the user in a refined manner, it is enough to do these two things well.

What is user-based refined operation? How can we achieve user-based refined operation? This article analyzes how to conduct user-based refined operation with the lowest cost and the greatest effect from the perspectives of user acquisition and user management. Through this article, you can thoroughly understand user-based refined operation and apply it to actual scenarios. It is recommended for operation novices to read.

What exactly are we talking about when we talk about refined user operations?

The essence of refined operation is the operator . It is to optimize the operation strategy and experience link for different user groups based on the deep digging of user needs. It uses the right time, right channel and right method to give the right user what they want , so as to exchange value with the user and facilitate transactions.

Today I would like to share with you some of my thoughts from the two perspectives of user acquisition and user management .

1. How can brands attract new users at low cost?

Mr. Hua Shan of H&H once said: In normal business operations, traffic costs should be lower and lower, otherwise you are going in the wrong direction.

However, more than 95% of companies cannot do this. So is there a low-cost way to attract new users? Today, I will share 3 cases with you, hoping to provide you with some ideas for reference.

1. Store customer acquisition

More than 90% of MINISO stores are located in first-class locations in first-class business districts. They have a good image, a large flow of people, and a high exposure rate, which is a good advertising position. We have done data statistics. At that time, the number of people entering MINISO stores in China was close to 1 million per day, and there were countless passers-by. In the Chinese market in 2019, the number of customers entering MINISO stores exceeded 416 million, and the in-store purchase rate reached more than 30%.

How can we make use of this huge offline traffic? We turned our attention to the WeChat public account, which was just emerging at that time.

The start is very simple. It is to use thousands of offline stores and place a material poster that offers a shopping bag for free by scanning the code on the LCD screen of each checkout counter. Consumers can get a shopping bag for free by following MINISO’s WeChat official account when paying for their shopping. Otherwise, they have to pay an extra 50 cents to buy it.

This shopping bag is a decoy design. Why a shopping bag and not other small gifts?

First of all, the promotion cost of free shopping bags is controllable, and the cost price of one can be controlled within a few cents. Compared with the current customer acquisition cost of hundreds or thousands of yuan per person, this customer acquisition cost was extremely low at the time when various brands were competing for traffic in the market, and walking on the street with shopping bags can greatly increase the exposure of the brand.

Secondly, we have fully considered the consumer traffic scenarios. On the one hand, most consumers need shopping bags when checking out, and at this time, there is a benefit of free shopping bags as long as you scan the code and follow it. And as long as you keep following a specific public account, you can enjoy this benefit for a long time, just show the public account you follow when checking out; on the other hand, when consumers are waiting in line to check out, this step only requires them to move their fingers, and low time cost in exchange for free benefits, generally no one will refuse.

In this way, relying on offline stores to accumulate traffic, the number of fans of MINISO's official account increased by an average of about 30,000 on weekdays and about 60,000 on weekends. Soon, in less than a year, we quickly accumulated 10 million fans.

That is, offline users who follow MINISO’s official account can get free shopping bags, which has attracted tens of millions of new fans. Subsequently, users are activated through product marketing, entertainment marketing, IP marketing, and content marketing, and finally the sales cycle is completed by integrating product and effect. Users are retained in the private domain traffic pool, and fans recommend more friends around them to buy MINISO’s popular products.

Seeing this, many readers may say that MINISO has such a large offline traffic, so it is relatively easy to quickly attract fans, but for small and medium-sized brands that do not have offline stores to rely on, this is not possible.

Not really. Let’s look at another customer acquisition model.

2. Ground promotion mode

Let me share another case I worked with, Panda Don’t Walk Cake.

Panda Buzou Cake was founded in 2017. At that time, whether it was a traditional cake brand or an emerging Internet brand, the service generally ended at the delivery stage. Most brands focused on product research and development and paid little attention to user consumption scenarios, especially birthday parties. Almost no brand thought about how to bring happiness to consumers.

Panda Buzou saw this blank market opportunity and provided users with a differentiated birthday service experience with the "online ordering, door-to-door delivery" model and "dancing pandas". In less than three years, it entered 15 cities across the country.

At present, Panda Never Walks Cake has a monthly revenue of nearly 100 million yuan and has nearly 20 million fans across the entire network, including more than 8 million users on its WeChat public account. In an era when ROI (return on investment) is negative, it has achieved 100% of its users doing secondary promotion for the brand without spending any money.

So how did Panda Buzou Cake achieve such a large user base in such a short period of time?

The powerful offline fan-attracting ability, coupled with the equally powerful online fan retention and conversion capabilities , ultimately enabled Panda to achieve a closed loop of rapid growth.

First, Panda Buzou Cake combines the user's portrait and accurately matches the scene often visited by female white-collar workers aged 25 to 35 and families with children - supermarkets. As we all know, supermarkets have a huge flow of people.

Based on this scenario analysis, Panda Buzou Cake began to focus on supermarkets, residential areas, office buildings and other places, focusing on promoting and sharing with users, and the promotion methods include cake tasting and distribution of small gifts. Through this simple and replicable model, a market supervisor can even manage 10 venues at the same time.

Secondly, Panda Buzou Cake also uses cake products to exchange for venue resources . For example, it provides a 10-meter anniversary celebration cake in exchange for a large amount of publicity resources and venue resources, reducing the cost of publicity and fan attraction for the official account.

Through this headquarters standardization, the fan-attracting strategy supervised by regional branches was quickly replicated across the country, achieving 2 million new fans per month for the official account, a net retention of more than 1 million, and a fan price of 0.7 yuan per fan.

Finally, after new customers follow the official account, we use buy one get one free, 1 yuan cake, top up and get a gift package and other benefits to maintain and attract new customers. In this way, the Panda Buzou team has made offline promotion, sharing and fission into a complete closed loop.

3. Private Domain Customer Acquisition Model

Similarly, there is also private domain traffic attraction, which is also a question that many friends often ask me. Let's take a look at the new chocolate brand Daily Dark Chocolate's private domain traffic operation and traffic path, and see what points can be used for reference.

Daily Black Chocolate’s private domain traffic generation methods are mainly these four methods: DM orders, circle of friends advertising, sharing fission, and community mutual promotion.

(1) DM: A card (later adjusted to a postcard + bookmark) is placed in all express packages of Daily Black Chocolate, using the scratch card format to attract users to claim discounts. The copy emphasizes that Black Chocolate can be claimed for free, and invites users to add their personal corporate WeChat to redeem, thus accumulating the first batch of private domain users.

(2) WeChat Moments: Daily Black Chocolate officially announced Liu Yuxin as its spokesperson and began advertising on WeChat Moments. The number of followers of the official account increased by more than 30,000, and the number of followers of the corporate WeChat account increased by more than 8,000.

(3) Fission transformation: Invite friends to get chocolate fission. For example, the fission activity of Daily Dark Chocolate and Be & Cheery, "Invite 4 friends and each of them can get a 25 yuan coupon", is a good attempt.

(4) Mutual promotion among communities: For example, by cooperating with Zhong Xue Gao to distribute coupons in the communities of these brands, or by pushing posters containing each other’s products and benefits in each other’s communities, thus absorbing the other party’s traffic into one’s own traffic pool.

In a word, brands should develop a strategy for attracting new users based on their actual situation. There is no need to make it too complicated or invest too much at the beginning. Start with small steps and iterate repeatedly. Then, like a snowball, it will grow bigger and bigger until it becomes a towering tree.

Second, how to stratify your users and manage high-value users?

In the book "Kotler Marketing Thinking", it is mentioned that once a company understands the customer lifetime value, it can use the information to conduct precision marketing, thereby establishing close, profitable, and long-term customer relationships.

Among them, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers proposed marketing methods for customer relationship management:

(1) Identify your potential customers and clients, and don’t blindly chase after everyone.

(2) Differentiate customers based on their needs and the value they place on the brand, and give more attention to valuable customers as appropriate.

(3) Customize products, services, and information for each customer, and tailor personalized service plans. Customers’ power has been greatly enhanced, and they can decide the direction of brand development and even the brand’s marketing methods.

Therefore, the core logic of a brand lies in operating users rather than operating channels .

Let’s look at two cases.

1. Inside and outside

I summarize internal and external user strategies as: a trust relationship, a relationship that makes consumers feel "I choose to believe in your product and story."

"Trust" is a very important word. The key to trust is that the consumer knows that she can get what she wants from you, or even more, and she will feel that these things exceed her expectations.

In this section, Neiwai adopted the pyramid model, divided users into three levels according to brand recognition, and deployed different strategies in terms of products, brands, and channels for different users.

Source: Chaos University app

For loyal users:

This group of people are the fans of all categories of products both at home and abroad, and are the core users of high-value products in offline stores. They are very willing to try new categories and are high-value users.

Neiwai’s strategy is to give priority to inviting users who highly recognize the brand to participate in core activities, and to provide them with a better service experience through offline stores, focusing on the user’s sense of participation and honor.

For example, in the beginning, Neiwai attracted a group of elite women aged 28 to 35 by founding the women's forum "She Said". Among them were many educated women from the financial, art and advertising circles. This group of people were the first batch of seed users of Neiwai.

For core users:

This group of people are the disseminators of brand word-of-mouth. They mainly promote core product categories both internally and externally. Some are willing to try new product categories and introduce private domain traffic operations, connecting with them more frequently through stores or communities.

For general users:

They may never participate, trade or share. They are very cool, but they just keep shopping. For this group of users, Neiwai mainly activates these dormant users through live broadcasts and KOL outfit recommendations.

We all know the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of a company’s sales are contributed by 20% of its important users.

When it comes to managing high-value consumers, the focus is not on how many people you reach, but on whether you reach the important people.

In the user operation strategy, we can see that Neiwai is not trying to capture all users at once, but to attract those who are willing to actively approach the brand and recognize Neiwai’s products and brand values.

Here, Neiwai does more to communicate with loyal users first, and then use the influence of loyal users to influence core users and mass users.

2. Lechun yogurt

Since 2015, the Le Chun team has been devoted to practicing user operation methods dominated by growth hacking and the pirate model (referring to the five stages of the user life cycle: user acquisition, user activation, user retention, revenue generation and recommendation and dissemination). After continuous experimentation and iteration, they have gradually polished out their own operating model - " user-driven" products and operations.

Externally: use users to form the 1990 user operation model to efficiently complete product iteration and dissemination; internally: form an innovative user-centered organizational structure to respond to and meet customer needs extremely quickly.

Specifically, Le Chun divides consumers into pyramid-shaped levels:

1% are content creators , or opinion leaders (KOLs). These users are die-hard fans. They can be Weibo food bloggers, Zhihu food columnists, public account celebrities, KOLs, housewives or students. They have strong user-generated content (UGC) capabilities, and Lechun invites them to participate in the entire process of product development, content creation and new product dissemination. For example, yogurt production, copywriting planning, etc.

9% are sharing users , who actively share Le Chun's products and are the backbone of social marketing, spreading Le Chun's products to ordinary consumers. Le Chun mainly uses a membership system to maintain its business, and shares stories, product packaging, ingredients, food knowledge, and activities (including promotions, membership, group purchases, etc.) with them.

Another 90% are ordinary mass consumer users , and this group is the core consumer population.

The user-driven organizational structure is flatter and includes five main departments:

1. Product operation : user-centric, continuous iteration and development of new products;

2. Content operation : building brands through content output, storytelling, etc.

Third, user growth , let user consumption drive brand communication. Lechun basically does not invest in advertising, and its brand communication relies entirely on users;

4. User operation , namely customer relationship management;

5. User Experience : Responsible for Le Chun’s continuous product iteration and user experience optimization and upgrade every two weeks.

The operating logic of a company based on user operations is: before the product is launched, the product operation and content operation departments have already started to interact with users; when the product is about to be launched, the user growth department starts to promote it, making full use of the seed users accumulated in the early stage, and cooperating with some promotion tools, such as coupons and vouchers, to achieve the promotion effect. The user operation and user experience departments interact with users for a long time, laying a solid user foundation for the entire product process.

From the operating model of Le Chun Yogurt, it can be seen that the brand and consumers have become an organic whole, integrating upstream resources together. The essence of the brand is not to position a product with leading sales, but an ecosystem connected by content and values ​​and can change with the changes of users.

The main work of a brand is user operation and improving user participation. Le Chun's type of company is called a user operation management company, which means that product development, channel selection, etc. are all determined by users.

In summary, the ability to operate users in a refined manner = the ability to build a brand and face consumers directly , which is an essential internal skill for an enterprise.

It is never achieved overnight, and it is even more impossible to have a universal methodology. Trial and error, improvement, iteration, optimization, and achieving growth through refined operations are the eternal tasks for brands.

Author: Mulan Talks About Brands

Source: WeChat public account: "Sister Mulan"