Case analysis: How to use WeChat fission to attract traffic to offline stores?

Offline "shopping malls" generally encounter a problem when planning online communication activities: it is difficult to mobilize all merchant employees to participate in forwarding, and everyone is afraid of difficulties, which leads to the inability to make good use of the customer resources of the store manager's and clerks' circle of friends.

The case I want to share with you today is this: Shi Yue, the marketing director of a shopping mall under China Resources, introduced the classic Internet e-commerce method of "real-time payment on WeChat + two-level distribution" into the offline retail industry: he easily mobilized all members to forward the messages on their own, providing powerful energy for the dissemination of the event.

Some employees even posted to their Moments more than three times a day, and forwarded the event posters to WeChat groups of customers in other nearby business districts. With no investment in advertising channels , the event posters went viral in the local business district.

The reason for such a big change is that before, the "shopping mall" and the store managers/clerks were not direct employees, so there was no management authority to require others to forward the mall's promotional information.

They can only rely on relationships between employees, or send red envelopes in the group to ask for forwarding: but after people forward the articles and posters, they don’t know whether the people in the circle of friends like them, and there is no data feedback, so they will only feel that they are advertising and resist in their hearts.

Now the "shopping center" has teamed up with the stores to package a hot-selling "lucky bag" for "eating, drinking, playing and having fun": one free coupon for a certain tea/pizza brand/amusement park, etc. that is perceived as high value by users + buy one get one free for high-gross-profit items such as accessories/cinemas + one free dish from all restaurants.

The total overall value exceeds 300 yuan and the selling price is 29 yuan. It is installed on the mini program with the function of "real-time income transfer + two-level distribution", and fission sales are carried out through the social relationship between store manager and clerk.

At this time, the store manager forwards the activity link to the clerk → the clerk forwards it to the customer → after the customer purchases the "lucky bag" worth 29 yuan: the clerk can get a first-level distribution income of 15 yuan, and the store manager can also get a second-level distribution income of 10 yuan.

In the past, due to the lack of any interest incentives, the store manager/clerk would forward the public account article once and nothing would happen afterwards...

Now, after integrating with the distribution system, all actions of the store manager/clerk can be tracked: after the clerk shares the "activity poster" on WeChat Moments, he will soon receive the first-level distribution fee of 15 yuan via WeChat payment.

Therefore, the clerk will be motivated to share the "event poster" with some customer groups, so he will soon receive WeChat payment arrival reminders again and again, and then he will post it on his Moments several more times to increase the publicity of this shopping mall event.

Secondly, the store manager/clerk now has an extra motivation: to encourage customers to forward the event (anyway, many people go shopping offline with friends), because if the customer invites his or her friends to buy the "lucky bag", he or she will also have a secondary income of 10 yuan.

But in the past, whether customers forwarded the activity or not had nothing to do with the store manager/clerk, and they had no motivation to mobilize customers to forward the activity.

When many students from offline business districts/stores plan online activities, they are very worried that the online traffic is from all over the country and is not accurate. The "WeChat real-time payment + two-level distribution" gameplay we planned for China Resources this time was able to control the screen-sweeping among the local business district crowd and accurately divert traffic to offline. There are three main reasons:

1. Spreading soil

Characteristics of WeChat social relationship chain: “circle effect”.

Translated into plain language, it means: What kind of person you are, what kind of people your WeChat friends/circle of friends are. If you are from Shenzhen, then many of your WeChat friends also live in Shenzhen. If you are a teacher/designer/salesperson, many of your WeChat friends are also in this industry.

So if we want to launch an offline event, we need to complete the cold start forwarding among the community population within three kilometers of the store. For example, we found 100 people in a community in Wuhan to share the event on their Moments. Most of the new users they brought are definitely local Wuhan people. It is impossible that all of them are from Shenzhen.

Therefore, even if it is an ordinary store, it only needs a distribution tool and combines it with the neighborhood customers who come to its store to plan a "single product" distribution fission activity, allowing old customers to share in the circle of friends to attract new customers to the store.

2. Pricing Strategy

The reason why the lucky bag is priced at 29.9 yuan is because the data report of WeChat Payment shows that 20-30 yuan is the payment amount with the highest number of payments and the lowest threshold for customers to make purchase decisions (basically, money is not treated as money).

For event communicators, the first-level and second-level commissions are 15 yuan and 10 yuan respectively, and the income can easily exceed 100 yuan, which is a very strong incentive. If the selling price is set at 9 yuan, although the payment conversion rate will be higher, the communicator only makes a few yuan for each copy sold, and has to attract dozens of people to earn 100 yuan, so the sharing incentive is not strong at all.

Therefore, the price of 29.9 yuan is the best balance point between payment rate and sharing rate in a fission activity.

In addition, those who work in offline retail know that the performance indicators for each big promotion are fixed (for example, 10 million per day), but before that, advertisements are placed on surrounding buildings/subways/buses, and tracking and predictions cannot be made, so the number of people who come to the store on that day can only be left to fate.

However, based on this online pre-sale coupon planning, not only can the number of people coming to the store be accurately estimated, but the sales volume of the day can also be inferred by the coupon redemption rate. The payment conversion rate is higher than activities such as "Free Order Festival" and "Free Meals" where there is a lot of free shopping.

3. Operational Details

Every link in the operation has a multiplication effect. Every link must be achieved at 90 points for the final score to be high.

1. A good poster can attract more users to click and share. Based on hundreds of successful fission activities in the past, we have distilled them into the following six elements of poster design (the same applies to the design of the details page).

2. WeChat’s related reports show that 20:00-22:00 is the most frequently used time for Moments, followed by 7:00-9:00 in the morning and 11:30-12:30 in the afternoon . Therefore, in terms of controlling the promotion rhythm, we will focus on promoting event posters at these time points to obtain maximum exposure.

In addition, we also use store managers and store clerks as the first circle in the rhythm of publicity and promotion, which can easily drive the conversion of old users with high trust and then join in the forwarding and dissemination.

Next, we worked with the community square dance team leader (a KOL among middle-aged and elderly people) to launch a promotion campaign in the dance team/community WeChat group. Finally, we used offline promotions at various entrances and street stalls at the shopping center itself to supplement the exposure.

3. After the user pays, he will be prompted to "join the mall WeChat group" to participate in the lucky draw. The staff will guide every new user to participate in forwarding the event poster to earn commissions.

(Many people do not read the activity rules. If you do not remind them, they will not know. Our own data shows that the sharing rate of users guided in the group is 5 times higher than that of groups without guidance ).

At the same time, colleagues can show off their income in the group, which can stimulate users' competitive psychology.

Then it depends on the situation: the person who gets the highest commission in the group can get an additional bonus/prize, which will motivate the top users to spend more time inviting friends in order to compete for the generous prizes (many of our past activities have shown that the top three will invite far more friends than others in order to compete for the first place ).

at last

Under the influence of Tencent's All in "Industrial Internet" wave, more and more offline retail merchants have begun to consciously build their own WeChat private traffic pools.

Like Xibei Youmiancun, it has established 3,000 store managers' WeChat accounts, and their Moments constantly post pictures of the grassland to promote the freshness of the ingredients. It also uses beautiful photos of store diners, discounts and promotions to build the brand's image.

Companies like Walmart and Wanda put roll-up banners in their stores to guide users to add the store manager's WeChat, set up WeChat groups based on stores, and then push limited-time flash sales, group purchases, pre-sale recharge gifts and other mini-program activities in the groups every day.

However, in today's retail industry, there are very few people who understand both the ways of the Internet and offline physical operations. As a result, the current situation is that WeChat accounts are used as customer service, which increases the workload of store clerks but does not translate into effective sales.

WeChat groups have become a disaster area for customer complaints. They have failed to utilize the "third-party reputation" of the community to build trust and the "herd effect" to increase payment rates, let alone create a matrix of "mini program + service account" to generate more traffic and form a closed loop of online transactions.

How offline retailers can make good use of WeChat to complete online fission and drive traffic to stores is a topic that requires long-term study. In the next issue, we will use cases to explain how the retail industry can make good use of WeChat’s four major traffic pools.

Author: Jian Feng | CEO of Zero One Fission

Source: Jianfeng | CEO of Zero One Fission