Reviewing the operation of NetEase Yanxuan’s 411 anniversary event!

NetEase Yanxuan is different from platform-based e-commerce. As a new retail brand, Yanxuan has richer sales scenarios. Yanxuan, whose business core is goods, has official self-built online scenarios such as official sites, apps, and mini-programs, as well as online product sales channels such as Yanxuan JD store, Yanxuan Koala store, and Yanxuan Dangdang store.

In order to integrate omni-channel sales scenarios, we use the four nodes of "411 Anniversary Celebration", "618", "Double 11" and "Double 12" as the explosion points of brand voice throughout the year to open up the market.

As the first marketing node in 2019, the 411 third anniversary celebration carries the first implementation project of the 2019 "fan-circling" strategy, so its sales scenario construction work is particularly important.

I will start by analyzing the online sales scenario of Yanxuan’s 3rd anniversary celebration from four perspectives.

1. Create a sense of ritual and push emotions to a climax online

We hope to establish an emotional connection between the product and core users through our third anniversary marketing efforts.

So, we found the marketing positioning of "Fan Festival": to celebrate a festival for Yanxuan fans. We believe that everyone who lives life with heart should be taken seriously, so we refined the communication slogan of "Pay tribute to everyone who lives life with heart" and created a sense of birthday ceremony online through 4 online communication links.

1. Communication creativity: 30 letters from employees to fans

We communicate with users through pop-up windows on the homepage and by attaching internal handwritten letters to offline logistics boxes. Ask employees to write a letter personally from the perspective of a server and a friend. Through the team's experience in serving fans in Yanxuan and their own experience of living with care, they can convey Yanxuan's sincere communication and attentive service attitude to Yanxuan's fans.

Yanxuan's CEO, quality inspection team, supply chain team, and heads of various product categories wrote down their insights on Yanxuan's three years of growth and expressed their gratitude to fans for each other's companionship. When fans log in to Yanxuan’s official website or APP, or receive a Yanxuan package, they will receive this thanks from Yanxuan.

To our surprise, we received a reply from one of our fans, and Yanxuan’s CEO replied to him again (the letter is too long so I won’t post it here).

1. Communication Creativity: TVC "Seeing Your Careful Life"

We created a heartwarming short film from the perspective of product anthropomorphism. By telling the relationship between Yanxuan products and fans, we show that Yanxuan has always seen the moments when fans live their lives with care.

Have you ever encountered such a situation?

I stayed up late countless times to revise a plan and worried countless times; I wanted to make a nutritious dinner for my family, but ruined 5 pots of porridge; I traveled back and forth between 3 cities in one day for a project, and even the first meal I had was spent connecting with clients.

We find the most typical life scenarios to stimulate users' emotional resonance, convey the brand value of NetEase Yanxuan's companionship, and deepen users' favorability and recognition of it.

1. Communication creativity: Co-branding & celebrity joint voice

Through celebrity live broadcasts and joint posters, the "Life with Heart" story is shared online, and offline events are created to attract outside attention.

• On March 18, "Zhang Yishan visits the offline store of Jiebai Yanxuan in Hangzhou" live broadcast;
• On April 1, "20 celebrities jointly talked about their attentive lives";
• On April 11, Yanxuan joined hands with major brands to speak out for attentive living.

1. Communication creativity: Write 3 years of fans' consumption into one song

The lyrics of "NetEase Yanxuan is 3 years old" are written based on everyone's historical consumption, thanking every Yanxuan fan and paying tribute to everyone who lives with heart.

A complete marketing campaign cannot be separated from online resource integration as well as offline marketing. On-site marketing allows users to truly participate in activities, enhance their experience, and thus increase users' recognition of the brand.

For this anniversary celebration, a unique 3rd anniversary birthday party was held in Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Beijing and Changsha. An activity was also launched in the offline flagship store and corporate park store where a birthday cake was given away for every purchase of RMB 411 or more.

Create a promotional atmosphere and establish a "buy, buy, buy" promotion mentality

It may be easy for domestic e-commerce platforms to create a carnival atmosphere in sales scenes during promotions. For example, Tmall Double 11 can even create a festive atmosphere beyond the sales scene that affects all retail scenes in the whole society.

All of this is actually unfamiliar to NetEase Yanxuan. Although there are many samples for reference in the industry, for Yanxuan, which has always maintained a cold tone, many adjustments have to start from its own official sales channels.

We created a promotional atmosphere during this anniversary celebration by integrating design language, transforming the entire shopping chain, improving the promotion venue matrix, and providing a good introduction to the gameplay.

1. Integrated design language

As the core marketing project of the year, the scenarios for the implementation of anniversary promotional materials vary from online to offline.

In addition to integrating the "communication language", the "design language" also needs to be integrated. Let users have a unified perception of the event no matter where they come into contact with "anniversary promotional materials or venues."

We chose a "from factory to home" C4D design plan as the main picture plan for this promotion. Under the main picture plan, the plan is extended to various scenarios, including the Yanxuan official APP and web/wap sites. We carefully select official sales channels such as JD.com flagship store/Tmall flagship store, and also include various online and offline promotional materials.

1. Transforming the entire shopping chain

As the core sales channel, the official APP is the main battlefield for creating a promotional atmosphere. In order to create a promotional atmosphere for this anniversary celebration, we transformed the atmosphere of the entire transaction chain of the APP.

In the process of users using the Yanxuan APP, the promotion’s mindset is reached, the marketing rhythm is reached, and the preferential measures are reached.

1. Improve the promotion venue matrix

In addition to transforming the original interactive interface of the APP, Yanxuan’s third anniversary celebration used as many forms as possible and set up a large number of venues in order to achieve three goals: distributing traffic/discounts, quickly completing transactions, satisfying the needs of “shopping”, and attracting users to browse and pay attention.

Based on these three goals, we built different types of venues as shown above.

The main venue plays the role of distributing traffic to various transaction venues, and also distributes the core gameplay of this promotion, such as core coupons, subsidies, etc. What this type of venue needs to consider is how to efficiently divert traffic and distribute preferential measures.

Some venues play the role of stimulating quick transactions, such as flash sale venues, which use ultra-low prices and limited-time and limited-quantity discounts to create a sense of urgency and stimulate users to place orders quickly. What needs to be considered for this type of venue is the exposure of discount information and the creation of a sense of urgency.

Some venues "meet users' shopping needs." For users, in an era with such an abundance of e-commerce platforms and products, the pain point of shopping is no longer not being able to buy what you need, but wanting to buy something but not knowing what to buy. For example, recommendations and content lists are not centered on promotion, but on exploring user needs and leading users to browse.

If we step out and look at the promotional venues of the entire e-commerce industry, we can basically see that they cannot escape these three business purposes, but there is one venue that is very special. It not only distributes preferential measures, but also plays a role in complex business purposes such as attracting new customers, promoting activation, and repeat purchases. This is the interactive game venue. The creation of this type of venue is more like designing a product.

1. Provide a brief introduction to the activity

If a big sale is compared to a performance, then the gameplay introduction is like the program and trailer of the performance. We hope that users can have a simple understanding of the performance through the trailer, and then use the program to help users find their favorite activities in this 11-day performance.

Therefore, for this 3rd anniversary celebration, we created an APP opening screen short film "From Factory to Home, Careful Everywhere" as a trailer for the performance, and created an "Anniversary Celebration Strategy Page" as a program for the performance to help users have a preliminary understanding of the event.

• Trailer: The APP opening short film "From Factory to Home, Everywhere with Care" uses CG animation to convey the atmosphere of the big sale through visual language, conveying important activities at important nodes between April 1st and April 11th, and also conveying the strictly selected ODM model to users.
• Program list: The strategy page "Strictly Selected Fan Festival·Full Guide to Saving Money" shows users the important time points during the entire anniversary celebration, telling users "when to buy", "what products are worth buying", "how to buy to save the most money" and "how to get discounts", helping users to simplify complex activities.

Venue modularization practice - designing "plug and play" venue modules

Before the 411 anniversary celebration, Yanxuan's main promotion venue had always adopted a waterfall development process, involving many links, including business, products, interaction, vision, front-end, development, testing, etc. When the business side needs to make real-time adjustments to the venue based on data performance, they need to go through the waterfall flow again. If every activity does this, it will be inefficient.

Based on this and combined with observations within the industry, we began to promote the "modularization of event venues" on Yanxuan's "page building system". The module supports the business side to directly intervene in the front-end performance without going through the development and testing process, and performs long-term maintenance and iteration on the module after the big promotion is over, so that the output during the big promotion period can be replicated, iterated, and expanded.

Based on the ideas of planning and designing venues in previous years, each floor in the main venue can be divided into "diversion module", "preferential measures distribution module", "transaction module", "interactive game module", "rules module", "new customer acceptance module", "re-visit diversion module" and other types of modules according to their needs. During this 3rd anniversary celebration, we focused on the product design of the diversion module and the preferential measures distribution module.

1. Productization of the diversion module - practice in the 411 anniversary celebration

The purpose of the diversion module is to effectively distribute traffic. Generally, various forms of diversion modules will be used extensively on the homepage of an APP or the main venue of an event.

In this 411 promotion, we hope that the traffic diversion module can meet three requirements:

1. Can meet the business side's needs for targeted product recommendations;
2. Ensure that the algorithm matches the recommended product content with user needs as closely as possible;
3. Multiple styles to match different scenes.

We designed three diversion modules with different interactive styles: "head bubble", "direct train to the venue" and "scene shopping guide" to adapt to the diversion scenarios of the first screen space and waist space of the main venue.

Provide middle-end capabilities for the module, configure the module to specify recommended content, and let operations and algorithms jointly intervene in the recommendation results.

PS: In this promotion, we added a lot of details to promote conversion in the diversion module. For example: the transparent transmission capability of the upper and lower pages of the diversion module, that is, the first product picture recommended in the module will be consistent with the product picture of the previous level recommendation entrance. After clicking to enter the next level from the diversion module, the first product recommended on the next level page will be consistent with the product picture recommended at the diversion module entrance.

1. Preferential Measures Distribution Module - Practice in 411 Anniversary Celebration

Unlike platform-based e-commerce, Yanxuan, as a brand, needs to integrate a set of common core interest points in a major promotion event. Let users feel the gameplay of Yanxuan during the promotion period. For example: "20% off coupon for the entire store", "Return cash back after placing an order".

In the context of this site-wide integrated gameplay design, it is necessary to create a preferential treatment distribution module and display it in various scenarios so that users can easily receive preferential gameplay.

During this anniversary celebration, we created preferential distribution modules for "full-site tickets", "order return bonuses" and "allowances", and designed a "foldable" interactive solution around the goal of "quick collection and less space occupation".

Design interactive games to achieve "attract new customers", "bring goods" and "promote activity" in one step

In celebration of Yanxuan’s 3rd anniversary, we launched the game “Stack Cakes, Receive Subsidies” with the goal of boosting activity, attracting new customers and distributing subsidies. In fact, looking at the industry, more and more activities are becoming more and more playable. For example: Ant Forest, Tmall Farm, Tmall 618 Stacking Cats, Pinduoduo Orchard, etc.

So, why do major e-commerce companies use games as a vehicle for their activities? How to combine games and e-commerce?

1. Designing game context – Why use games?

Reason 1: Games are a form of high cost-effectiveness

The game's visual performance, sound atmosphere, real-time feedback and other elements create a fun experience that gives it a unique ability and gives users who participate in the event the motivation to continue participating. For e-commerce websites, the traffic brought by this form is much more cost-effective than the clicks purchased through CPA channels.

Take Tmall as an example. From Double 11 in 2015 to the present, this type of interactive games serving e-commerce businesses have become more and more sophisticated and have appeared more and more frequently. Since the production cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the promotion costs, large companies with abundant R&D resources are best suited to do this.

Reason 2: Ability to effectively achieve business objectives

In addition, the game’s task system can serve as the best vehicle for “achieving business goals.” Anyone who has played the game knows that there are various forms of tasks in the game. Behind each task is a reward. The rewards with instant feedback will give users a good gaming experience, so completing tasks is part of the game experience.

In the e-commerce scenario, the two elements of "task" + "reward" can be combined with many business purposes. For example, completing the "task of sharing with friends" will get you a "5 yuan red envelope reward". It can not only attract new customers, but also promote transactions.

1. What are the forms of combining games with e-commerce?

The three basic elements of e-commerce games:

As mentioned earlier, the "task" + "reward" elements in the game are easy to implement in the e-commerce scenario. Add the element of "interactive game" and it forms the basic framework of an interactive game. When the game becomes more complex, other elements may be introduced under this framework, such as virtual currency.

The manifestation of e-commerce games:

The essence of the game is to allow users to participate in the game, which can be a game between people (PVP) or a game between people and a preset system (PVE).

After observing cases in the industry, I divided game types into two categories: PVP and PVE. Some games have rich business purposes, and PVP and PVE often coexist.

Different business purposes will use different types of gameplay: PVE gameplay is suitable for the business purposes of distributing preferential measures and promoting user activity; PVP gameplay is suitable for the purpose of guiding fission.

1. 411 Anniversary Celebration of "Cake Stacking" Game Design Journey

The entire project planning process can be divided into four steps: setting goals, determining the framework, conceiving the gameplay, and finalizing the values.

Set goals:

First of all, we need to think clearly about what we need the interactive game project to do? You can’t make games just for the sake of making games. Determine clearly what role interactive games should play in the current marketing project, and then make a specific plan.

Taking the 411 anniversary celebration as an example, we judged that the current venue matrix needed an interactive game that could stimulate user activity, distribute traffic to transaction-related venues, and stimulate user sharing.

Determine the framework:

After the goal is confirmed, you can plan specific plans around business needs.

We planned the interactive game for the 411 anniversary celebration based on the three elements of "task system", "game play" and "preferential measures".

Gameplay ideas:

• Task system: Based on business needs, conceive specific tasks that users need to complete;
• Gameplay: Choose the most suitable direction from PVP and PVE, and then find a more suitable gameplay based on this direction;
• Preferential measures: Different prizes are designed based on the business purpose of the transaction and the purpose of stimulating users' continued participation. General prizes are used to stimulate users to place orders, and high-value prizes are used to stimulate users' continued participation.

Take the 411 anniversary cake stacking game as an example:

Finalize the value:

Numerical planning work determines the game's operating difficulty, reward value and other aspects.

In the gaming industry, numbers often determine the life or death of a game. The debugging of game values ​​is often done through "closed beta", "internal beta" and "public beta" by players and the R&D team.

In the Yanxuan 411 anniversary cake stacking project, the numerical values ​​were determined based on data insights into user behavior, and the numerical plans for each detail were finalized one by one.

Take the 411 anniversary cake stacking game as an example (incomplete version):

Author: Wang Aoda

WeChat ID: wangaodasss