The price of BTC hit $27,000 and ETH hit $1,700. Two popular projects — Arbitrum and Space ID held exciting airdrop events. The bull market is here?!
Let’s take a look at the airdrops emerging in March:
SafeDAO: “Redistribute unclaimed SAFE airdrops”.
Iron Fish: The deadline for new airdrop KYC is April 14, and the airdrop receiving date is April 21.
Tensor: Distribute the airdrop rewards of the first quarter for Solana NFT traders.
HALO: The airdrop application page has been released, and users can start claiming it from 18:00 on April 5.
PancakeSwap: PancakeSwap V3 will be launched in the first week of April, and airdrops and NFT will be launched.
The list of airdrop events goes on and on.
Why is airdrop so popular? The reasons are as follows:
Airdrops help attract users
The Arbitrum airdrop became a hot topic on Twitter. Thousands of discussions in the past hour also bring high exposure for the project. In particular, related tweets by other projects and KOLs can bring huge exposure.
2. Airdrops help increase user engagement and conversion
After the airdrop on March 15th, Arbitrum announced the start of eligibility inquiries on the 16th. As a result, its on-chain transactions reached the second high of 1,079,668 on record.
According to DefiLlama, the TVL on the Arbitrum chain has surged since March 15th, especially from the 16th to the 18th. Of course, the overall recovery of the market is part of the reason.
However, although airdrops can indeed bring about growth, engagement, and conversion quickly in the short run, how to initiate an effective airdrop is also key. Most projects will encounter the following problems:
Lack of effective planning without professional talents in user growth involved
Errors easily happen in the complicated process of planning and execution, including issues like token amount, airdrop rules, and distribution strategy.
The participation ratio is low. For example, the airdrops by popular projects like Blur weren’t fully claimed, let alone small projects.
It is difficult to screen users, for example, it will attract a large number of fake robots, and participants sometimes use inappropriate means to qualify themselves. Or the participants don’t match the user persona of the product, leading to low user retention.
Participants may sell out the token once they receive it, leading to the value decrease of the token.
To solve these pain points, Web3 projects need to answer the following questions:
When: When is the right time?
In Web2, when the product is completed by 40%, the product can be launched for use and attract customers. Based on this, further development and iteration can be carried out through early user feedback, that is, internal testing and public testing. The same can happen for the Web3 product. Moreover, early adopters are easy to become loyal users and can assist the project in managing the community and advertising.
However, the Web3 project team needs to consider how to balance the accuracy and increment of users, including precise screening, a small number of users; a large number of users, and insufficient user engagement and retention.
What: What to do to attract users?
Generally, large-scale airdrops use tokens as the main incentive, but the rewards in small-scale airdrops and giveaways are more diverse, including tokens, NFTs, registration forms, community roles, etc.
A poll on the Twitter of TaskOn, a task platform for user growth, shows that about 77.1% of users are more willing to participate in activities that reward tokens.
At the same time, the type of events, the form of reward distribution, etc., are also elements that attract users. For example, new users are more likely to do social media tasks, while experienced users are willing to complete transaction tasks.
Who: Who do you want to attract?
The most important reason for low user engagement and high churn rate is that the persona of users attracted through events does not match the product. To find the right target users, you need to have a close look at the product attributes, such as TO B-end or TO C-end; DeFi, NFT, or Game; high-net-worth users or Web3 newcomers, etc.
Where: Where to reach out to users?
Generally speaking, wallets, exchanges, and NFTs will require more new users of Web2, so both media channels and event tools need to connect with Web2. Among that, there will be problems such as insufficient user education and low user retention.
Other business fields, especially DeFi, an industry with extremely high professional requirements, need to reach existing users from within the Web3 market. Vertical media and tools will be more accurate in attracting target users. And again, they may face an insufficiency of reached users. Additionally, there are various approaches that Web3 projects reach out to users.
Advertising is costly, and the effect of reaching is related to the popularity of the project itself and the market environment. The effect of branding is even less obvious, and it often takes time and accumulation of users to see the final result in growth. Therefore, events with incentives are the first choice for Web3 projects.
Based on the above analysis, we can draft a decent plan for an effective airdrop.
First, we need to be clear about the types of airdrops in Web3:
Large-scale airdrops: Planned and formulated by the project, mainly targeted at contributors and participants in the early stage of development.
Small-scale airdrops: The first choice for Web3 projects thanks to the effectiveness, efficiency and low cost. The airdrops can be initiated by the project, or the project cooperates with KOLs and task-based platforms to publish events.
Second, learn about the general rules:
In small-scale airdrops, tasks are mostly following social media accounts and joining communities to get new potential users quickly.
Application-oriented dApps will add requirements on usage, such as registration or transactions. For example, Arbitrum’s airdrop qualifies participants based on the volume, frequency, and amount of their transactions.
Usually, before or when the event starts, the organizer or platform will post on Twitter to remind the audience to reach more potential users.
With all this knowledge in mind, how to create and execute an airdrop or giveaway? In this article, the author uses giveaway as the keyword to search tweets in the last 24 hours. The result of different types of events is as follows:
The result of events published by different task-based platforms:
*Above data is real-time.
The main reasons why task tools represented by Gleam, Galxe, QuestN and TaskOn will replace other approaches to help Web3 projects grow are as follows:
Low cost to acquire users
The project needs to pay for cooperation with KOLs or tools like Gleam.
Gleam’s full-featured version requires $97/month, and the minimum price for KOL advertising is 100U (50U for rewards, 50U for labor costs). In Web3, all task-based platforms are free at present. Projects only need to provide rewards, including tokens, NFT, and WL at a lower cost.
Automated templates to create events
Task creation will use automation templates including regular Twitter follow&retweet&like, joining the community, and even API tasks and verification, allowing projects to focus on planning efficient activities.
In particular, automated API verification and on-chain tasks perfectly match the needs of Web3 projects to increase the number of users as well as product usage, which is one of the reasons why the field of Web3 task tools has steadily grown in the past two years. At the same time, through various combinations of templates, it can meet the needs of projects at different growth stages, as listed in the following table:
Increasing source of user growth
In essence, the task platform aggregates projects and incentive activities by providing task tools, making it easier to gather Web3 users. Take monthly active users as an example:
At the same time, each platform connects to multiple chains to reach more users:
Therefore, projects can choose to publish multiple events on multiple platforms, and attract more users to achieve growth through multiple chains. However, the authenticity of users and the repetition of users attracted from each platform will be problems. The author posted the same event on the following platforms, and found the following outcomes:
Holding joint events
The joint event has the same logic as the multi-chain event, that is, to achieve the integration of ecology between multiple projects through the event. By cooperating with each other, projects can grow users faster. Important joint events on major Web3 platforms have been carried out one after another.
With so many tools in the market, how to select?
As mentioned above, if the budget is sufficient, the project can broaden its user growth source by using multiple task platforms and participating in joint events.
But if the budget is limited, you can make a comprehensive judgment from multiple dimensions. We have the following findings to help decide from the data point of view:
At the same time, it is also important to match the differentiated functions of the product, such as using automated API verification to improve DeFi’s TVL and DEX/CEX transaction volume.
In addition, the data tracking function is also a very important criterion for selection, because data tracking is a prerequisite for recognizing user persona and increasing retention and conversion.
In addition to seeking user growth, you also need to consider retention and conversion, such as:
User Retention
First, the screening during the early stage of growth can touch more ideal target users, such as those from different regions and have different preferences;
Second, combinations of task templates can help with user education, cultivating loyalty, and providing various incentives to improve user retention.
User conversion
Supporting templates for transaction and asset tasks is the most basic requirement for conversion. Of course, anti-bot measures are also very important, because only real users can bring subsequent conversions.
Besides, some manual support, including API docking, such as customized task modules, also need to be taken into consideration, because the task platform only has the basic task and API docking. Manual support will help tasks designed for user conversion run more effectively.
All in all, ordinary projects can choose to create annual/quarterly and celebration-specified events through the task-based platform, and set that users who only complete tasks can unlock greater rewards to get more real users. At the same time, combining different types and quantities of rewards and planning games with different levels can cultivate users’ interest and guide users to continue using the product step by step.
In this way, the continuous user growth and user conversion in the entire product life cycle can be achieved.
