Operational Promotion: What is the promotional strategy behind Alipay’s “face payment”?

To be honest, I was tricked by Alipay a few days ago. The key is that I didn’t realize it until the end.

As usual, I went to the store I usually go to to buy Zhou Hei Ya. The waiter told me that I could get a 10 yuan discount if I bought any two boxes, so I readily agreed to buy two boxes and opened the Alipay QR code and waited for the waiter to scan it.

Unexpectedly, the waiter asked me to tap the screen of the machine in front of me. I thought it was a new type of code scanning device, so I poked it without any precautions. result! ! ! With a "beep", my face was scanned and an interface popped up on the screen asking me to enter my phone number.

Image from: Dandanzan

At this point, I realized that this was Alipay’s way of attracting new customers with its “face payment” feature. With just 10 yuan, I was able to successfully activate “face payment” in the store, and I was completely confused throughout the whole process.

The “face recognition era” is here! How can Alipay alleviate everyone’s privacy concerns and promote new payment methods?

1. What promotion methods has Alipay tried?

Alipay’s promotion of face-scanning payment can be traced back to 2014. At that time, Alipay had not yet packaged this technology as “face-scanning payment”, but instead proposed the concept of “KungFu” (empty payment), and the first launch location was chosen in Shanghai. At that time, netizens focused on whether they could recognize the girl before and after makeup and what to do after plastic surgery. Apart from worry, they also made fun of her.

A year later, Jack Ma brought Alipay's face-scanning payment abroad. He demonstrated the "face-scanning payment" function during a speech at the Hannover Messe in Germany and gave Merkel a Taobao gift. Soon, the Alipay client also launched the "face login" function, and the concept of "face scanning" gradually entered the public eye.

Since 2016, Alipay has been promoting "face payment" more and more vigorously. On the one hand, online, people can use face recognition to check provident fund, authenticate pension, and obtain marriage certificate. On the other hand, there are various offline cooperation and activities, including but not limited to payment experience in West Lake Plaza, cooperation with Hunan Satellite TV evening party, offline cooperation with KFC, and picking up items at self-service lockers by face recognition.

If the above-mentioned promotions were all warm-ups, then after entering 2018, Alipay's promotional actions became more obvious. In August 2018, Alipay announced at Ant Financial’s Open Day that the “face payment” function has matured and has commercial capabilities, and can be fully popularized in 2019.

Following the release of the Alipay payment device "Dragonfly" on December 13, 2018, "face payment" entered a new stage, and Alipay's marketing efforts became more and more ambitious. In January 2019, Wenzhou opened the country's first facial recognition payment commercial street, where users can easily shop by scanning their faces.

What's even more amazing is that the world's first facial recognition payment business district has landed in Xi'an. From January 26 to January 28, 2019, Alipay held the "Code Market" event in the small square on the west side of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an. The event brought together Internet celebrities such as the number one lady of Chongqing hotpot restaurant, the guy from Luckin Coffee, the kidney lady from Heihe, the Bingbing sister from Thailand, and the pomegranate brother from Lijiang. The lineup was very strong.

Of course, although the above marketing methods are powerful, they are not actually efficient. Why? Because users feel that "face payment" may not only be unsafe, but also involve some personal privacy, they would rather spend more time using other payment methods.

Therefore, Alipay quickly took advantage of the "March 8th" Festival and adopted a lot of new tricks.

Combining my own experience with that of other friends, I concluded that Alipay's new approach has two characteristics: First, it guides the process smoothly, cleverly reducing users' vigilance. The second is to integrate the activities of B-side merchants, adopt welfare incentives and take advantage of users' desire to get a bargain.

Why do I say so? Because when users are paying, merchants will not inform them in advance that the next payment method is "face recognition payment", but will first tell users that we now have a "full discount" event or a "buy X get X free" event. When the user is completely unprepared, the merchant guides the user to pay with the "Dragonfly" device (face-scanning machine). Basically, before the user can react that this is a face-scanning payment, the user's face has already been "scanned".

So, the next step was to enter the mobile phone number on the device to complete the payment. In just a few minutes, with a set of simple and smooth operations, Alipay completed the process of attracting new customers.

Moreover, the method adopted by Alipay to promote "face payment" is not to directly target users and earnestly "persuade" users to use it. Instead, it is more efficient by incentivizing merchants and asking them to help promote their products . This is Alipay’s “usual trick”.

2. How to learn from Alipay to open up the C-end market through the B-end?

In fact, using the B-end (merchants) to promote the C-end (users), "face payment" is not a precedent. It can even be said that Alipay is a veteran in this regard. After carefully studying some of the functions of Alipay for merchants, the author found that there are many points worth learning from.

It is worth noting that Alipay is not limited to incentivizing merchants to promote their products to users, but also simultaneously incentivizes merchants to promote their products to new merchants. The practice is similar to inviting new merchants. After the new merchants use Alipay to collect money, the inviting party may also receive dividends, which will not be described in detail here.

So what measures has Alipay taken to encourage merchants to actively promote Alipay’s functions to users?

1) Material incentives

Material incentives are the foundation and core of Alipay merchant operations. As the name suggests, it is to stimulate merchants with monetary or physical rewards. Currently, Alipay mainly has the following incentive methods.

① Earn rewards by using red envelope code

I believe everyone is familiar with the following "red envelope code". It can be seen in many offline stores, whether they are standard convenience stores or small private shops.

When I made offline payments many times, I encountered merchants reminding me to scan the red envelope code before paying, and I could use the red envelope to deduct some amount.

For merchants, as long as users receive the red envelope and use it to pay via Alipay, the merchant can receive an Alipay bounty with a random amount up to 99 yuan.

There was once a clever cabbage seller who made 5,000 yuan in 3 hours during the "Brick and mortar store Huabei red envelope" activity. This is how he did it:

The uncle hung a banner on a truck of cabbages with five big words "Free cabbages" on it, and then wrote "Cabbages are free, scan the code to get them" on a piece of cardboard, asking passers-by to first scan the red envelope code to receive the red envelope, and then scan the payment QR code to pay the received red envelope to himself through "Huabei Payment" to get the cabbage. For passers-by, the cabbage is indeed "free".

The uncle’s cleverness lies in the fact that he stipulates that different amounts of red envelopes can result in different amounts of cabbage (as shown in the figure below), but the bigger the red envelope, the higher his net profit . The activity setting of Alipay is that the red envelopes received by new users are often larger. It just so happens that most of the users who are interested in the "free" cabbage are middle-aged and elderly users, and they often do not have Huabei. So the uncle made a lot of money.

For Alipay, different red envelopes will be set up during different activities, such as general red envelopes in physical stores, Huabei consumption red envelopes, Huabei red envelopes in physical stores, Huabei installment experience red envelopes, face payment red envelopes, Yu'ebao consumption red envelopes, and Yu'ebao consumption red envelopes in physical stores. There are many ways, but they can all help Alipay promote a certain function.

② More collection, more insurance

For merchants who have not opened red envelope codes, Alipay also has an incentive method: more collection, more insurance. As long as merchants use Alipay to collect money, they can obtain outpatient reimbursement funds and reimburse outpatient expenses by uploading medical receipts.

It is conceivable that with such benefits, merchants will naturally tend to recommend users to use Alipay to pay.

③ Scan the QR code to order and win a prize

Alipay’s merchant service has a “scan code to order” function, which allows users to order by themselves or place orders online. In order to promote this function, Alipay held many lottery activities.

Merchants can participate in the event after opening the scan-and-order registration. The more payments received during the event, the larger the amount of the lucky draw pool they can participate in. Although it is not a 100% chance of winning, it is enough to attract some businesses to recommend users to use this function.

In addition to the above three strategies, Alipay also has a simple and crude way to incentivize merchants: the income obtained by using the payment code can be withdrawn for free. You should know that under normal circumstances, a service fee of 0.1% will be charged for withdrawals exceeding 20,000 yuan. In this way, merchants can save a lot of money.

In fact, such material incentives are not limited to encouraging merchants to promote to users, but are also applicable to scenarios such as incentivizing distribution. For example, when we sell operation maps, we give distributors the highest possible commission and use some measures to help them improve conversion rates, so that our distributors feel that they can easily make profits and thus help us promote our products more actively.

2) Material preparation

People's willingness to do something is generally equal to motivation minus resistance. After Alipay has given merchants enough motivation through material incentives, it has also prepared a series of materials (merchant tools) to reduce the resistance of merchants to using Alipay.

For example, the money-making package includes payment code stickers, standees, and hanging signs, as well as red envelope code stickers; official peripherals include Alipay waterproof aprons, "push-pull" doorplates, and brand L-shaped standees; the money-collecting equipment includes various payment collection speakers (which loudly report payments when collecting money), etc.

In addition to these, Alipay has also prepared a variety of posters for merchants, including event posters, recruitment posters, etc., and allows merchants to change the copy by themselves, which can be said to be very thoughtful.

In this way, on the one hand, merchants can save time and effort, and on the other hand, users can perceive the recognition and professionalism, killing two birds with one stone.

In fact, when the operating agency helps us sell maps through distributors, it also helps knowledge communicators prepare map materials and copywriting to lower the threshold and improve efficiency.

3) Activity Alliance

Alipay not only uses merchants to promote its own functions, but also finds ways to get merchants to help promote its activities. How does it do this?

When Alipay has an activity related to merchants, such as the "Pay in store for 19 days in March and share 900 million" activity, the merchants will be notified in a timely manner on the "Merchant Service" homepage, telling them that they can use the activity to increase their sales, etc.

The most thoughtful thing is that Alipay has even designed event posters for merchants. Merchants can choose to download pictures for free, print them themselves, or purchase other posters to get event posters for free.

Summarize

In the process of promoting "face payment", the methods used by Alipay have two characteristics: first, it guides the process smoothly and cleverly reduces the user's vigilance. The second is to cooperate with B-side merchants in their activities and let the merchants actively help promote their functions.

In terms of opening up the C-end market through the B-end (not limited to this, including distribution models, etc.), Alipay has given us three replicable experiences:

1) Provide sufficient material incentives to the B side to increase the motivation for promotion;

2) Help B-end prepare comprehensive and professional promotional materials to reduce the resistance of B-end promotion;

3) Cooperate with the B-end to promote the activities in a two-pronged manner.

Source: Operation Research Society ( U_quan ）