Looking at vertical user operations from three dimensions

The simple understanding of vertical users is to operate vertically in a certain type of users. Its underlying logic is not to ask what vertical operations are, but to ask how to group users. So, how to group users? The author of this article answers this question from three dimensions, hoping to be helpful to you.

Vertical user operation can be simply understood as vertical operation for a certain type of user.

But if you think about it carefully, you will find that its underlying logic is not to ask what vertical operations are, but how users should be grouped.

When doing user operations, many teams will find that they have done a lot of useless work and the final conversion efficiency is not high. This is because they did not do a good job of operational segmentation in advance, which led to poor vertical operation results!

So how do we segment users?

I will answer this question from three perspectives:

1. Objective attributes of users: interests/gender/role (creator, reader)/city
2. User life cycle: New user/Old user/Highly active/Risk of churn/Already churned
3. User value stratification: referral experts (KOC) / opinion leaders (KOL) / payment ladder / cumulative payment amount

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Category 1: Grouping by objective attributes of users

Divide and operate users into groups based on their objective attributes. Objective attributes refer to the core of a platform or product that attracts users.

Users can be divided into groups based on their interests and hobbies . For example, if there is a group of users who are interested in operations learning, platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Zhihu can perform vertical operations for this group of users.

It is necessary to understand the characteristics of this type of users. For example, they may focus on reading articles during a certain time period in the evening, so the platform can push operational articles during this time period.

You can also operate by grouping based on gender , for example, grouping users by gender, and push content that interests male and female users respectively to attract users to read.

For community platforms, another feature is the role of the user's objective attributes . The platform needs to know whether the user's role is a creator or a reader.

If there is a group of creator users, the creators can be managed separately, because the creators need to know what the current hot spots on the platform are and what types of articles the platform will encourage them to post. Therefore, operating creators separately will help improve the quality of the community platform, and for the community platform, quality is the most valuable asset.

Secondly, for some brands or categories, their users are distributed in different cities, so it is necessary to consider more in-depth operations for users in different cities . Because different brands have different market advantages in different cities, the corresponding specific strategies will also be different.

Category 2: Grouping by user life cycle

The purpose of operating by user life cycle group is to migrate the user's life cycle to a highly active period.

If it is a novice user , you need to encourage this user to quickly feel the core value of the product, fall in love with the product, and thus become an old user.

If the user is an old user , during the operation process, you need to encourage him to do more operations each time and experience more different functions, so that he can become a highly active user.

If the user is highly active , the platform should provide more incentives and rewards to make the user more willing to stay.

If a user is at risk of losing , messages can be pushed or subsidies can be issued in a timely manner. For example, some games will send a piece of equipment to users if they have not logged in for 48 consecutive hours to avoid losing the user. For those users who have already lost, there are corresponding recall actions, such as sending bonus coupons, to try to recall the user.

The third category: grouping by user value

Grouping users according to their value can help the platform allocate its resources effectively.

Because from the perspective of the platform, there are many large and small customers, including users who are willing to pay more and pay for a longer period of time; there are also users who love to share and can help the platform with referrals.

These users are worthy of the platform's great efforts and more resources to focus on management, and the value of users is also different. Some users are very good at referrals, so the focus of operations should be on promoting user sharing; some users do not like to share but are willing to pay on their own, so the focus of operations for this group of users should be on promoting users to pay.

For each brand, they may have some superstar users who have a lot of say.

For example, Ctrip had made a big mistake with this type of users in the past, and was often criticized by female celebrities on Weibo: "Big Data Killers. " This is actually a typical result of not doing vertical operations for key leader users.

If there are targeted vertical operations, then Ctrip should have a dedicated person within the company to connect with big V customers. Once a big V customer places an order on the platform, whether it is a new or old user, it should be given a high priority and a dedicated person should be assigned to connect with them.

In this way, when faced with such influential customer dissatisfaction, internal employees can digest their dissatisfaction in the first place and avoid it from turning into a public relations and opinion event. This is the value of vertical user management.

In the final analysis, why is the refined operation of users becoming more and more important now? It is because the competition is getting more and more fierce. If you only provide general services to all users, it is actually difficult to attract customers to trust and love the platform and products. Therefore, you must have extremely deep insight into the user operation method to truly influence the customer.

So what is the essence of operation? It is to influence the behavior of customers to change. But what is the most important thing to influence the behavior of customers to change? It is to influence customers in a targeted way, so that changes can occur.

Author: Teacher Yi Rui