How did I achieve 300,000 sales using a social network?

After I used text messages to activate lost customers last time, my boss sent me another task, asking me to set up a community and complete a certain amount of sales through it. After working overtime day and night for a period of time, we achieved sales of 300,000 yuan by organizing communities through core users. I would like to share the experiences and pitfalls encountered in this process. Everyone is welcome to give me advice.

Here is the summary first, please go directly to the end for practical examples.

1. WHY: What is the purpose of forming a community?

Before forming a community, operators need to clarify the purpose or "tone" of establishing the community, or in other words, what is the value of your community to users? This is crucial to whether members in the community can continue to be active. A community is not just a collection of people, it also carries the common needs, interests, values, etc. of this group of people. Only by hitting the user's "G-spot" can the user favor your group and make continuous contributions to your group.

Taking myself as an example, I operate a VIP user group for B2B users. My starting point is mainly focused on two points:

1. Provide users with price discounts that are different from those offered by the website itself;
2. Provide a channel for communication between users and operators.

2. WHO: Who is your target audience?

Who your target users are determines how you recruit members of your community and how you plan your daily operations. At the same time, the selection of users also needs to be consistent with the purpose of establishing the community.

The higher the degree of match between the community's "tone" and the user's characteristics, the stronger the user's sense of belonging within the group, and the easier it is for them to interact effectively with group operators. Therefore, when selecting users, operators may need to pay attention to the following points:

• Whether the target users agree with their products;
• Do users have commonalities and can they resonate with each other in certain dimensions?

3. WHERE: What is your social media platform?

This is the last step of preparation before creating a group. What do you plan to use to host your group, QQ group, WeChat group , YY group, or DingTalk?

Here are some brief descriptions of the advantages and disadvantages of some commonly used group forms, which you can refer to when building a group:

1. QQ Group

(1) Advantages

As the most popular and mature IM tool on the market, QQ has a series of inherent advantages such as high installation volume, easy use, and complete functions. At the same time, the QQ group itself also has a series of functions suitable for group operation such as mute, group password red envelopes, bulletin boards, sign-in, voting, etc.

(2) Disadvantages

The QQ usage rate is low among some user groups, and QQ groups are prone to the problem of mass group additions. If they are not managed, they may soon become dominated by small advertisements.

2. WeChat Group

(1) Advantages

As a national-level application, almost everyone has a mobile phone that does not have WeChat installed. And the openness is extremely high, the message can be delivered to the user first-hand and at the first time, and the user can interact with it anytime and anywhere.

(2) Disadvantages

WeChat is heavily used in daily life and work, and messages are easily blocked. Moreover, WeChat itself does not have many group management functions. For example, non-group owners cannot use the group announcement function, cannot mute group members, and cannot chat with group members privately. In addition, the overwhelming amount of inspirational messages, takeaway coupons, voting information, etc. can easily make the group go quiet quickly.

3. YY Group

(1) Advantages

The communication method is mainly voice-based, with strong interactivity and certain speech management functions. At the same time, mobile YY also supports live broadcast function, which greatly enhances the fun of group interaction.

(2) Disadvantages

The method of voice communication is affected by factors such as the customer's current network conditions and equipment, and its effectiveness is easily compromised.

4. DingTalk Group

(1) Advantages

The read and unread status of messages are clear at a glance. In addition, DingTalk messages support multiple notification modes such as phone calls, station messages, and text messages.

(2) Disadvantages

As a SaaS-level communication tool, its popularity among ordinary users is not high.

4. HOW: How to recruit your community members

There are currently many ways to recruit community members. A typical example is the QR code poster for the “Jianying” paid operation course in which I participated. This method of adding friends through a WeChat secondary account and then inviting them to join a WeChat group can manage group members more conveniently. Since joining the group is paid, users can also be screened through secondary accounts to ensure the quality of group members.

Other commonly used online methods include WeChat public accounts , sharing group QR codes on Weibo, QQ group numbers, etc., but in essence they are no different from the QR code posters above. Of course, there are also some offline recruitment methods, such as promoting to users through phone calls or field sales staff. Since my user groups are mainly distributed in pharmacies and clinics in various regions, the method I adopt is the more traditional method of telephone invitation and then adding WeChat friends to create a group.

In this era when the fan economy is infinitely magnified, every operator may receive the task of " community operation " from the boss. Whether it is a to B or to C product, it seems that they want to catch this "express train" to make their product users' contribution to the product take another leap forward. In this process, as an operator, in addition to thinking about whether your product is suitable for community operation, you need to think more about how your users can form a community and how we can provide a link to connect everyone for the community users.

Taking the medical e-commerce platform I work for as an example, the user age structure is relatively old and the degree of internetization is low. Many users even need remote assistance from customer service staff to change browsers . When I first took over, I felt that such a user group could not be formed into a community. However, after investigating and visiting the target users, we found that these users really want the platform to recognize their contributions to the platform, and at the same time hope that user groups similar to themselves can be served separately by the platform. In simple terms, they hope to receive VIP treatment. With such an entry point, we successfully grasped the customer's "G" point by promoting the concept of "special offer for VIP members" to this group of target users, emphasizing the platform's importance and green customer service channels, and the customer happily accepted our invitation. After joining the group, I found that there were many people like me, and I was more satisfied with the membership structure and atmosphere.

——————————————–I am using this dividing line as an example————————————

After the last SMS push, my boss resisted the urge to fire me and gave me another task: to establish a community for users in Sichuan and achieve monthly sales of 300,000 yuan through the community. Below I will summarize the content of my operations this time for everyone to use as a negative example.

Operational purpose: To establish groups through core users, conduct targeted sales, and achieve sales targets.

Operation plan :

1. User selection

Since the purpose of this group operation is mainly to achieve sales targets, I considered the following dimensions in selecting target users:

1. Cumulative purchase amount on the user platform: used to determine the user's purchasing power
2. User recent activity: Since in-group sales will be pushed through WeChat, it is necessary to ensure that the user's recent behavior on the platform is active to improve the push effect
3. User's region: In some areas, offline salesmen of pharmaceutical factories and commercial companies have a tighter control over users and have more room for profit sharing. The discounts provided by platform activities may not necessarily attract customers, so these areas need to be excluded.
   Finally, from the background data, users who meet the above requirements are selected as the next invitation targets.

2. Create a group

After discussion, WeChat group was adopted as the group carrier. Therefore, before the invitation, a customer service account was created and distributed to the customer service department, and after the invitation, users were added and groups were created for use. Afterwards, the list of names of corresponding regions will be distributed to the customer service department, who will make outbound phone invitations. The language or invitation gimmick used is [Exclusive benefits for VIP users], informing customers that they can enjoy discounts different from those offered by the website to the outside world by joining this group, and that there will be exclusive customer service to serve them. Since most of my target users are owners of pharmacies and clinics, their age is generally 35 years old and above, and the urban-rural distribution is extremely uneven. This type of users is not very receptive to some of the current C-end communication methods, so the most effective way is still through the phone.

TIPs:

1. A reminder to some students who don’t know this yet: if you use WeChat group QR code sharing to create a group, the QR code will automatically become invalid when the group has more than 100 members. Therefore, it is recommended that you share the QR code of the customer service account, and then the corresponding operator will add the user to the group.
2. The time of creating a group should not be too far away from your first event, otherwise users will lose interest and no longer pay attention to your group messages. I fell into this pit during this operation, and I hope everyone can avoid it.

3. Group Operation

1. Formulate group rules

When a user joins a group, the role and rules of the group can be clarified through group announcements. The saying "Without rules, there will be no order" is something we need to pay special attention to in group operations. Of course, the group rules should not be too complicated. It is most important that they are simple and easy to understand. At the same time, the group owner needs to ensure their implementation. For example, my group rules only have these few:

1. Notes are changed to region + pharmacy name
2. No videos, takeaway coupons, voting or other irrelevant information may be posted in the group. Those who violate the rules twice will be removed from the group.
3. You are not allowed to insult others or make political remarks. Violators will be immediately expelled from the group.

During the operation process, it has been strictly enforced. After seeing the strength of the enforcement, users in the group will consciously maintain it. After all, a good environment depends on everyone.

2. Activity plan formulation

Since it is clear that users can get [discounts different from the unified discounts on the website], we only made a separate link and uploaded the varieties with high demand in the season or high customer demand on the page, providing discounts lower than the lowest price on the website. The core ideas of the activities here are mainly the following:

1. Discounted products need to be carefully selected. In addition to considering the market factors of the season, it is necessary to combine high-priced products with low-priced and high-volume products to ensure that the customer unit price and the average order price are not too low.
2. Due to the low prices, it is necessary to estimate the shipment volume with the supplier to ensure that there will be no losses or the losses are controllable;
3. In order to ensure the output volume, some varieties that need to be cleared can be discounted.

3. Activity warm-up

After the activity plan is set, you need to start warming up the activity. The methods I use are as follows:

• Stimulate through small red envelopes. The name of the red envelope is the activity time, and the customer's impression is continuously deepened by sending small amounts frequently.
• Regular WeChat group announcements. Continue to reinforce your memory that the event will take place at a fixed time.
• By exposing part of the activity page, users' interest can be aroused.

4. Activity Execution

On the day the event started, I focused on the following points:

• Real-time UV and PV of the page: Understand the user participation to evaluate whether the customer service department needs to assist in secondary outbound promotion and whether it is necessary to continue promotion via SMS
• Inventory of promotional products: Some hot-selling products are prone to being sold out, so you need to notify the merchant to replenish the inventory in time
• Feedback from users in the group: Are there any temporary problems that need to be solved in a timely manner? At the same time, we will announce the countdown to the event through group announcements at regular intervals.

5. Activity cycle

In order to cultivate users' habits, we held activities every Thursday and announced the activities on Wednesday. After three weeks, users would inquire about the activities every Thursday and propose the names of product categories they wanted to participate in for our reference. This in turn promoted the accuracy of the activities and ensured the effectiveness of the activities.

3. Activity review

Activity Effect

By holding four events in one month, we achieved sales of 330,000 and achieved our operational goals. At the same time, the group has become a fixed place for this group of core users to communicate with us.

insufficient:

1. Due to the tight schedule in the early stage, the activity page was not adapted for mobile phones, resulting in the website display effect still being displayed when it was opened, which resulted in a poor customer experience;
2. Since our business logic states that all prices are not visible without logging in, we did not consider that the default page state is always logged in when we initially planned the event. After logging in, the page was not redirected back to the event page, but back to the homepage of the website, which increased the number of steps for customers to operate.
3. Some other original technical issues were not resolved in advance during the first event, which caused customer inquiries and dissatisfaction during the event.