2.How to create “Triggers” that bring users to your product
In the last article, we saw how the best way to get people hooked to a digital product was not by employing costly advertisement campaigns, but by incorporating subtle techniques, that slowly convert user perception of it from a ‘product’ to a ‘habit that can’t be avoided’.
Let’s talk about each quadrant in detail.
Triggers:
Let’s say, you download an app. But before you do that, what is that small (or large?) itch that prompts you take that action? That itch is what we call a trigger. (I am not even going to count the number of broke friends I have who bought a higher-end phone just so they could play the video game, PUBG)
Triggers can be internal or external.
External triggers:
For the product owner, it’s quite easy to place an external trigger in front of the user. They’re mainly of 4 types: paid, earned, relationship, owned.
Paid trigger: Deals with marketing and advertising. Not feasible in the long term. Imagine Facebook doing that.
Earned trigger: Someone finds out you have a very good product, useful for the society and they decide to give it a mention on their blog. Next time someone reads their blog, that recommendation is going to serve as a trigger for them to buy your product, however small it may be.
Relationship trigger: For human beings, it’s established that it’s easier to trust a friend’s recommendation than one from a newspaper. That is what this trigger is about. Just imagine, if your product was so good that out of 20 people that came across your product, each person started recommending it to a friend. Your product would run into millions of users creating a viral loop of rapid adoption. Just like what happened to Facebook. That is why this trigger is very important. If you can get people to recommend your product to at least one person, you can accumulate customers faster than with any paid marketing campaign.
Owned trigger: Owned triggers occur after a user has acquired a product. They are used to keep the user engaged, and sustain a habit-forming relationship with it. Examples include: The app icon on home screen, random push notifications signaling to take an action after opening the app etc. These triggers don’t help acquire new users but help keep existing users engaged with the app. Like Facebook’s birthday notifications or Instagram’s ‘check out what Ms.X posted today’ notifications.
It is very important to create these triggers, because the last thing you want for your beloved app is hundreds of people downloading it and never opening it for a second time.
Internal triggers:
So, we talked about all possible external triggers. In reality their function is to activate the internal triggers inside us which are the real ‘hooks’ that keep us hooked to a product. Like how great philosophers say; real motivation comes within, not from outside.
So, the idea is, given you have a fairly good product and you keep providing your users with external triggers consistently, chances are they’ll start associating your product with certain specific emotions. And once a user ties your app with that emotion, they’ll most likely open your app every time they feel that emotion.
Pardon me for my poor articulation. Let me explain with examples.
People love taking pictures with Instagram. It’s a great product. It has amazing filters that will make anyone a beauty queen. It’s a great cure for people who have FOMO (fear-of-missing-out) syndrome. Instagram is a place where they can record all their memories spontaneously without worrying about looking like their Adhaar photo (here is a Aadhar card photo horror meme for those unfamiliar to this joke). It’s also a great social networking tool. People can flaunt their pics and get appreciated. And being human beings, social validation is very important to us. We crave for it. Who doesn’t love likes and comments on their social media posts? Over time, we associate products features on Instagram and Facebook to fixing our need for social validation. That keeps us churning content on them non-stop.
Even if you don’t create content actively, many people still view it as a way to kill boredom. Subconsciously every time we open Facebook when we’re bored, we begin to associate boredom killing to Facebook scrolling. Their umpteen random cat videos and blooper videos ensure that. It’s amazing how people don’t even realize how they just start scrolling these things, every time they sit idle at a bus-stop for more than 2 minutes.
By building in features into a product that over long term can connect to people’s deep feelings such as happiness, excitement, loneliness, fear of missing out, the creator is inconspicuously rewiring the user’s brain to pick up the product every time he/she experiences that feeling.
I do not want to make these people sound evil. My personal opinion is that as humans we have the ability to self-regulate. Facebook can be addictive. But it’s not heroine. We can always use it in moderation. What do you think?
Next part : How do you get users to take ‘actions’ on your product?
Stay tuned !
Hello reader! I’m Meera Vinod, an aspiring product manager. I write blogs about Product Management and product stories that I find interesting. You can find more about me here :)
Happy reading!