Analysis of Tmall Double 11 event operations in 2019!

This article attempts to analyze the overall gameplay of Double Eleven from the perspective of an operations worker, while trying to understand Alibaba’s strategic goals hidden behind the layers of means.

On October 21, the annual Double 11 promotion kicked off again. In comparison, this year's gameplay is more complicated and cumbersome: pre-sale deposits, store coupons, merchandise coupons, Double 11 red envelopes, shopping allowances, discounts, free orders, and all kinds of preferential rules are dazzling. Everyone can open their shop, take the building challenge, invite people to win red envelopes, and win wish prizes. The various marketing methods are also dazzling.

The author attempts to analyze the overall gameplay from the perspective of an operations worker, while trying to understand Alibaba’s strategic goals hidden behind the layers of means.

Analysis of the overall marketing rhythm of Tmall Double 11 in 2019

From the overall rhythm, this Double 11 lasts for 22 days, of which 11 days in October are the warm-up period. Starting from November 1st, targeted venues such as the National Trend is Coming, Brand Club, Import Expo and other special venues will be launched, focusing on highlighting the sense of quality. Starting from November 10, activities such as red envelope redemption, prize drawing and Double 11 Gala officially began.

All people open shop

1. Time

October 21 to November 11, 13:00

2. Form

Users upgrade their Meow Shops by collecting Meow Coins. After completing the novice guide, they will obtain their first Meow Shop and upgrade it by clicking the upgrade button, which consumes a certain amount of Meow Coins. There are 50 levels in Miaopu. Users can upgrade through the Miao Coin Center and Miaopu to earn Miao coins. There is a certain limit on the number of Miao coins that can be obtained by each method every day. After upgrading, there is a chance to get red envelopes, shopping allowances, avatar medals and other rewards.

The front-end presentation formats of Taobao Mobile, Tmall and Alipay clients remain unified, but the tasks are scenario-based for each. For example, the tasks on Taobao and Tmall are mainly to sign in, share, browse the Double 11 venue aggregation page, browse a brand flagship store or browse a certain category pre-sale venue, so as to collect advertising fees from various brands to subsidize marketing expenses. At the current stage, all tasks are traffic-related, and no transaction tasks are displayed. During the outbreak period, it is possible that transaction tasks such as the first order, number of transactions, and transaction amount during the event will be gradually displayed.

The Alipay client is mainly used for tasks such as signing in, watering Ant Forest, feeding chickens in Ant Farm, and collecting points from the membership channel. After completing some traffic tasks, it will gradually display business-related "pseudo" transaction tasks, such as completing a Huabei credit limit increase, setting Huabei as priority payment, collecting 500 yuan in reserve funds, starting 6 million medical insurance for 0 yuan in the first month, and credit card repayments.

What is certain is that Alipay’s tasks are accurately displayed in front of thousands of people. The main purpose is to divert the promotion traffic to core business lines, such as consumer finance, cash loans, insurance, funds, etc. In the future, it may be further displayed according to user attributes, such as: completing the first Huabei payment, completing the first offline/online payment, recharging Yu'ebao, setting up automatic life payment, automatic repayment, participating in mutual insurance and other advanced tasks.

It is worth mentioning that the operation staff put a lot of thought into the naming and level setting of the Meow Shop. There are different types of shops and corresponding cats in every five levels. Levels 1 to 5 are catering Meow Shops, corresponding to the God of Cookery Cats, levels 6 to 10 are life and home Meow Shops, corresponding to the Butler Cats, levels 11 to 15 are clothing and decoration Meow Shops, corresponding to the Fashion Cats, etc.

As the basic gameplay of this Double 11, Quanmin Kaimiaopu strengthens users' Double 11 awareness by unifying the front-end page and gameplay, and uses task scenario as a starting point to enable the core apps in the system to divert the huge traffic of Double 11 to core businesses and key brands, and limit the rewards of all-scenario activities to be redeemed only when purchasing physical goods on Tmall and Taobao, successfully realizing the traffic closed loop of big promotion diversion, traffic distribution, transactions and business conversion. The whole process will realize the most reasonable utilization of big promotion traffic within the ecosystem, which can be said to be a benchmark operation for integrated marketing.

The most ingenious thing is that the bottom column of the task center of Taobao Mobile and Tmall are all advertising spaces that divert traffic to Alipay, with the copywriting being "Go to Alipay to collect 50,000+ Meow Coins", which is very attractive to users who have completed the day's tasks.

After clicking, you can directly call up the Alipay App and locate the activity page. A narrow guess is that this may be an important reason why the Alipay team is willing to provide core resources and marketing expenses and actively participate in this promotion. After all, daily and monthly active users are always a huge burden on the operation team. As the end of the year is approaching, we have to make a push. Of course, the task center in Alipay also provides an entry to jump to Taobao Mobile at the bottom, but I don’t know if Tmall’s operation team is worried.

Building Challenge

1. Time

From October 25 to November 9, 9:00 to 22:00 every day

2. Form

Miaopu can participate after reaching level 5. A maximum of 5 users form a team. After spending a certain amount of "tickets", they can participate in the challenge. The system automatically matches and then the two teams compete according to the height of their buildings. During the process, the two teams can increase the height by having team members go online to help, pulling other people to help, etc. At the same time, by limiting each user to help 6 teams a day, the behavior of wool party members to brush tickets can be restricted.

It is worth mentioning that if a team member or helper is an 88VIP member, in addition to contributing his or her highest Meow Shop level to the team, he or she can also contribute an additional 5 levels. If a user participates in the Double 11 partner event for the first time and his or her naughty value exceeds 500 points, he or she can directly contribute 50 levels to the team. If a team of the same level attracts new users to the event, they will basically be crushed.

At the same time, during the entire Double 11 event, the 5% discount for 88VIP and the Double 11 discount itself can be used in combination. Seeing this, are non-88VIP users angry?

Don’t worry, Alibaba has “thoughtfully” launched an activity called “Sprint your naughty value and quickly upgrade to 88VIP”. Users with a Taobao value of 800 or above only need to invite friends to help, and by collecting 5188 Taobao values, they can sprint to 1000 Taobao values ​​and purchase 88VIP for 88 yuan. Basically, as long as you find two 88VIP friends to help you, you can meet the requirements. The clever operation colleagues took the opportunity to harvest a wave of paying loyal members.

Star Challenge

1. Time

November 1st - November 10th

2. Form

On November 1st, 4th and 7th, teams with 2 or more players will be awarded 1 team star, for a total of three stars. From 0:00 on November 1st, if the winning team participates in the building challenge, they can get one more team star from the other team.

Don’t you understand the purpose of this activity?

In addition to other forms of rewards such as cat coins, red envelopes, and allowances, there is now another star. One of the reasons is that Miaopu’s activity line was too long, lasting more than twenty days. The game is relatively simple, but it has fifty levels. When users are about to get bored, this little hook can be used to call them back to continue playing the game. As for the role of stars, it will be mentioned below.

Invite people to win red envelopes

1. Time

9:00 on November 10 to 22:00 on November 11

2. Form

Users can redeem the red envelopes received in the event for Double 11 red envelopes. After successful redemption, they can share the redemption information with users who have not yet redeemed the red envelopes. For every successful recall of three users who have not redeemed, they can win a Double 11 red envelope, and a maximum of three red envelopes can be obtained cumulatively.

This is another good move by the operations colleagues. The author speculates that it may be because they found during the review of the last Double 11 that although a large number of users participated in the event, they only tried it out and did not become heavy players. They did not have many red envelopes in their hands, and were too lazy to go online to redeem them when the redemption period came. This has lowered the order conversion rate of the event to a certain extent. This is why we added this link this year, allowing heavily engaged users to tease spectators through social relationships.

Regardless of the size of the red envelope, we want as many users as possible to redeem it. The red envelopes are deposited into the user's account after redemption. If the user does not use them, the sunk cost will increase significantly. In addition, the low-priced goods displayed through precise recommendations further entice users to complete orders during the event, which can be said to be a great way to bring people together for fun.

Win the Wishlist Prize

1. Time

November 11, 2:00pm to 10:00pm

2. Form

Users whose personal cat shops have reached level 50 or team members whose building teams have obtained 6 or more team stars are eligible to participate. At this time, the role of stars is reflected. As long as the team wins three games, all team members will be stable. In order to win the building challenge, team members will continue to improve their own cat shop levels, complementing each other.

The wish list prizes include Alibaba’s usual reward for emptying the shopping cart (up to 9,999 yuan), the right to purchase Tmall Genie for 0.1 yuan, the right to purchase Tmall Double 11 dolls for 0.01 yuan, the right to purchase brand merchant prizes for 0.01 yuan, etc., which are very tempting.

All red envelopes received during the entire event must be redeemed for Double 11 red envelopes between November 10th and 22:00 on November 11th, and can only be used to purchase physical goods on Tmall and Taobao. This is the final carnival harvest period. What’s different from last year is that this year’s Double 11 discount allowance has changed from 300-30 to 400-50, with no upper limit.

First, the discount was increased from 10% off to 15% off, which is more attractive. Second, the usage threshold was raised from 300 to 400. The core purpose is still to increase the average order value and raise the ARPU (revenue per user) per user. At the same time, there will be an immediate red envelope return event on Double 11 day to increase the repurchase rate and further increase the revenue per user.

During the event, in addition to Alibaba's three main platforms, namely Taobao Mobile, Tmall and Alipay, high-traffic apps such as Youku, UC, AutoNavi, Ele.me, Koubei and Fliggy all participated in the promotion in different forms and with varying degrees of intensity. They used their own marketing tools to distribute Double 11 red envelopes and shopping allowances through tasks, lotteries, games and other forms. Although their participation rate was not as high as that of the three main platforms, they all made their own contributions to sales to a greater or lesser extent, fully demonstrating the coordinated operations of multiple industries and systems.

It is worth noting that Alibaba apps such as Hema, DingTalk, Xianyu, Xiami, and Damai did not participate in this year's Double 11. The reason is unknown.

To sum up, this year's Double 11 event is indeed too complicated and not very user-friendly. Don't Alibaba colleagues know this problem?

I think they must know this, but they still choose to go ahead as needed. There is actually a certain operational purpose and logic behind this:

(1) Only through the core means of development games (Meow Shop) + short-term points level (Meow Coins) + task system can we ensure the fun and attract other business formats (Alipay, etc.) to willingly spend marketing expenses and core resources, truly participate in the Double 11 promotion, and achieve full linkage. At the same time, it is also necessary to meet the growing traffic demand of brand merchants in order to encourage merchants to subsidize users while spending large amounts of advertising fees to subsidize platform marketing costs and sky-high media placement costs.

(2) Too many KPIs: UV, PV, GMV of the entire site and each category, average order value, number of participating users, daily activity, monthly activity, new users, retention rate, number of paying members, etc. Different systems and different business lines have their own heavy indicators. If it is impossible to balance them all, who will invest huge human, material and financial resources to cooperate?

(3) Anxiety after the traffic dividend gradually disappears. According to QM data, the number of domestic mobile Internet users currently remains at 1.134 billion. In Q2 2019, the number of mobile Internet users decreased by 2 million. Behind this, the growth rate of large platforms is coming to an end, and WeChat even experienced negative monthly growth. In this context, how to continue to maintain revenue growth and the number of annual active and active consumer users to give investors confidence is a problem that management has to face.

When faced with such a large number of users and tedious and complex projects, even with all kinds of complaints and opinions, Alibaba's operations, business, marketing, products, development and other colleagues still use their professional qualities to let us see that in integrated marketing, they are still at the forefront of mobile Internet and are still the industry benchmark we are familiar with. Here, the author expresses his sincere admiration.

Author: Da Lao Wang

Source: Da Lao Wang