Analysis of China Merchants Bank’s private domain operation strategy!

When it comes to banks, everyone thinks that this is a high-end and respectable industry that is closely related to everyone's daily life and should not have to worry about traffic at all. Few people will associate private domain traffic with banks.

But the reality is that the current competition among banks has also turned into a game of traffic. If you fail to retain traffic and operate it effectively, and instead continue to acquire traffic through a wide-ranging marketing approach, it will also result in huge operating costs.

In fact, many banks have already laid out their private domains, and have gained huge advantages due to factors such as the high quality of relevant personnel and concentrated product types.

Compared with the traditional four state-owned banks, China Merchants Bank is more proactive in private domain traffic operations and digital transformation.

Relevant data shows that the MAU of China Merchants Bank’s two major mobile apps, “China Merchants Bank” and “Life on Palm”, is as high as 107 million. The transaction volume of the two life scenarios, "meal tickets" and "movie tickets", was close to 10 billion, far higher than the Big Four banks.

In addition, in order to achieve refined operations, China Merchants Bank has divided the users of the APP into the following three layers according to stickiness, and by embedding a large number of financial and life service scenarios in these two apps, it continuously promotes the conversion of customers in the outer and middle rings to the inner ring.

• Inner-ring users: users who have downloaded the APP and bound their CMB debit cards. They are the core customers of CMB.
• Central users: users who have downloaded the app and bound a CMB credit card or a credit card or debit card from another bank;
• Outer ring users: users who downloaded the app but did not bind their bank account information

In addition to the company's own APP, another core of private domain traffic, and also the most effective user connection path, is the WeChat ecosystem.

Next, let’s take a look at how China Merchants Bank operates and plans its own WeChat private domain operations .

1. WeChat public account push

As long as the user follows the WeChat official account and binds his bank card, the official account will automatically send reminders of related transactions after each consumption.

In this scenario of frequent interactions, the community’s traffic-generating language is embedded in it. Not only can users see it at any time, the traffic generation effect is good, and the users who are attracted are users with certain consumption power and are more accurate.

At the same time, in order to facilitate more refined private domain operations in the future, China Merchants Bank did not allow users to join a group at random, but obtained the user's geographic information authorization in advance to assign appropriate private domain communities to users.

In addition to the community, China Merchants Bank also attracts users to the event page through the "Nearby Offers" menu bar. Then use the special activity banner - "Join the group to receive 3 consumption funds" to invite users to join the group. There is also some other activity information on this page to further increase users' enthusiasm for participation.

2. Fission drainage

Another more effective way to attract traffic is to use old users to invite new users. By designing a recommendation benefit mechanism, users are more motivated to invite their friends to apply for cards.

The discount for users recommending their friends to apply for a card is the greatest, and as the number of referrals increases, the benefits are also added in a stepped manner, increasing the user's motivation to invite friends.

The general corporate practice is to first add users to the personal corporate WeChat account, and then guide them to the corporate WeChat group for conversion.

However, China Merchants Bank skipped the step of adding personal corporate WeChat friends and directly pulled users into the corporate WeChat community. Once users in the group have further needs, they will be allowed to add the corporate WeChat account of CMB’s exclusive operations staff. This will allow for more accurate user screening and facilitate 1V1 service.

After users join the group, they will immediately receive a welcome message automatically pushed to the group, including a detailed list of community-exclusive benefits, such as what benefits will be available at what time on what day of the week, so that users can see it clearly.

After guiding users into the WeChat group, most of China Merchants Bank’s operational conversion actions are basically completed within the group.

1. Lifestyle benefits

At special time points such as morning, noon and evening, the group will automatically push some food discounts to users. Users can purchase and use it directly, which greatly enhances the stickiness of the community.

2. Movie benefits

In addition to discount information on some dining activities, the group will also frequently push "cinema film special offers", which is also an important means for China Merchants Bank to attract users. For movie lovers, this kind of "community-exclusive movie ticket benefits" is very attractive.

3. APP traffic diversion

CMB also uses welfare activities to link the community and its own APP. Users can scan the QR code of the community activity, enter the CMB official APP to complete the "Collect Meow Meow" task, and obtain various welfare coupons, which not only enlivens the community atmosphere, but also increases user stickiness on the APP.

In addition to those mentioned above, there are also various welfare activities in the CMB community, such as "welfare lottery", "holiday fun activities", etc., to promote user conversion.

Finally, as for the growth of new users, China Merchants Bank’s approach is relatively simple and crude, which is to use benefits that are enough to impress old users to guide them to invite their friends to apply for cards. The more friends you invite, the greater the benefits old users will receive, which can greatly increase users' enthusiasm for participation.

The above is China Merchants Bank’s WeChat private domain traffic operation method. Flexible and diverse activities are designed for different user scenarios, bringing extremely high user experience.

However, we can also find one shortcoming, which is the lack of refined "one-to-one" operations for users.

Although there are many and varied promotional activities in the group, individuals may not be interested in all of them. When there is a lot of information, finding content of interest in it will also affect the user experience.

If we label users according to their different preferences and categories during the operation process. Based on these tags, if we conduct targeted private chat push or circle of friends push, we can reach users more accurately and increase the participation rate of the event.

Currently, more and more banks choose to tap into private domain traffic, but how to utilize it and how to actually implement it is a rather serious problem.

China Merchants Bank chose to enter the life consumption scenario to build a private traffic pool, which is one of the many scenarios of the bank. We can design different ways of playing based on our own actual situation and product characteristics to give full play to the role of private domain.

For banks, if they do not promote conversions, build scenarios on the platform, and embed relevant financial services into them, then even if they have a lot of traffic, they will not be able to exert huge value and generate actual benefits.

Author: Zhuge Jun

Source: Zhuge io Data Coach