Increase conversion rate by 50% in 4 steps, revealing the underlying logic of traffic acquisition!

When it comes to customer acquisition, there are only three factors to consider: products, traffic, and conversion rate. These three factors determine whether a business model can be established. Studying the relationship between these three factors can actually sort out the underlying logic and basic process of user conversion.

That is: demand insight - traffic accumulation - valuable service - experience conversion.

Next, based on this logic, we will analyze the customer acquisition strategies of the knowledge payment and online education industries. The outline of this article is as follows:

1. Demand Insights: Three Methods to Identify User Pain Points
2. Traffic accumulation: fission and community create traffic pool
3. Valuable services: Live broadcasts and training camps build word-of-mouth
4. Experience conversion: Diagnosis and experience classes win trust

1. Demand Insight: Three Methods to Identify User Pain Points

Any conversion-oriented activity requires advance insight into user needs, otherwise the activity you conduct will be ineffective and self-satisfying. This is a common mistake made by many people, and I sometimes make the same mistake. So, what methods can be used to avoid such things as much as possible?

1. Survey Questionnaire

Questionnaires are the easiest method to use. By conducting surveys on users, you can reduce a lot of blind topic selection. I personally think it is a very practical way to ensure the effectiveness of the event.

This may sound a bit vague. For example, the team I was in before was planning a family education activity. Summer vacation was about to begin, and parents would usually arrange summer tasks for their children in advance, including both learning and entertainment activities.

We feel that there must be some points that can be explored in depth. Although we have thought of some topics, we dare not use them directly. It would be best to confirm them. If we make a questionnaire and list all the pain points that parents can think of in educating their children during the summer vacation, it will depend on the parents' choices. As long as we have the results, we can preliminarily determine some topics worth doing and reduce the cost of trial and error.

Later, based on the survey results, we selected several themes with higher proportions to form a series of activities, which attracted more than 10,000 users.

Regarding how to conduct a survey, the core link is the design of the questionnaire. Everyone has different ideas about this. As long as it meets your own requirements, it will be fine. I personally think that the design of the questionnaire must include three aspects:

The first is what your user profile is like, such as grade, gender, region, etc.

Second, what are your users’ pain points? List enough of them, classify them, and place them in corresponding scenarios.

The third is the user's requirements and suggestions for the product.

After the questionnaire content is designed, it must be tested from a novice’s perspective so that adjustments can be made to the question description, question arrangement, etc. to make the questionnaire easier for users to fill out.

2. Observe your opponent

In addition to survey questionnaires, another way to gain insight into user needs is to observe your competitors and follow up immediately to see what activities they are promoting that are popular. Of course, the prerequisite is that there must be enough user overlap between you, otherwise you may not achieve the desired results.

For example, I have done an activity on homework tutoring. At that time, I saw that my competitors did it and the effect was pretty good. I planned to modify it and launch it, but the response was mediocre. I thought this was not a user pain point. Later, I realized that this had a lot to do with user attributes.

3. Subject calendar

The subject calendar is another way to judge user needs in advance. It is very simple, just list the activity calendar in advance according to the characteristics of educational users. Early planning is an efficient method that can prevent missing many opportunities.

I have come into contact with many educational institutions, most of which launch long-term subject activities, and each class in them is planned in advance according to the subject calendar.

2. Traffic accumulation: fission and community create traffic pool

Insight into needs solves the problem of creating something from nothing, and building a traffic pool is to solve the problem of going from no one having it to many people having it. In the specific process of building a traffic pool, I personally think that there are only two tools that need to be used, one is fission, and the other is community.

1. Fission

Fission is the preferred promotion method for most people. The choice of fission form is often determined based on the effect, rather than copying it immediately when you see others making a new way of playing, as if it will be useless if you don’t do it.

The first step in choosing a fission form is to see whether your users can accept this form. If this form has low operating costs and does not require extra time to learn, you can consider using it.

The second step is to look at how you retain users, or how you leave user clues. For example, if you need a mobile phone number, you can consider the paid fission method. If you don’t need a mobile phone number but just need to add friends, you can choose the personal number fission method.

After the first two steps, you can basically determine which form of fission to choose. Of course, if your activity is more complex and requires the support of a systematic fission system, that is another matter.

As for the fission forms, according to my observation, the commonly used ones are referral, assistance, group buying, and distribution. You can choose to use them according to the above two steps:

1. Referral: The strong forwards the information, and the common forms are group fission and personal account fission, such as reading 52 books in a year;
2. Assistance: Mission treasure gameplay, invite a specified number of people to follow the public account or join the community or add a personal account. For example, NetEase Open Class has used the method of inviting friends to join the group to do fission;
3. Group buying: Sign up for a group at a price lower than the original price. Typical examples are Pinduoduo and Lian Coffee. The fission level is low and needs to rely on channels with a higher start-up volume.
4. Distribution: A model of making money by recruiting people. It is rarely used in education, but often used in knowledge payment and social e-commerce, such as Qianliao, Lizhi Microclass, Himalaya and other platforms.

2. Community

Community is the second effective tool for building a traffic pool, and its purpose is to activate and retain the traffic attracted through fission.

Regarding community operations , there are many professional books and articles that can be used as references. The author will only talk about three points that I personally think are more important.

(1) Tell the community the purpose

The first thing you need to make clear to users is what the community is for. Otherwise, they will be very confused after joining the group and will quit the group after a short while, which can easily lead to loss of users.

Therefore, when traffic flows into the community, it is necessary to update the group announcement or tag someone in a timely manner to tell them the purpose and function of the group, such as sharing cases every day, organizing topic discussions, providing free courses, etc.

(2) Formulate community rules

The activity of a community needs to be guaranteed by rules, and the so-called rules include two aspects, namely group rules and hierarchy.

Group rules define what a group must do and what they cannot do. If something that needs to be done is not done or something that cannot be done is done, there needs to be a certain degree of punishment, such as being removed from the group for posting advertisements.

The level is a class division based on the performance of each user in the group, and is often expressed in the form of points. The higher the points, the more active you are and the more rewards you can get. Those with low points will not receive any rewards and may even be eliminated from the group.

Through community rules, you can discover or cultivate opinion leaders within the community, which will be of great help in future traffic operations.

Of course, community goals and rules can ensure good community activity and retention, but the premise of all this is that they can be strictly enforced. If this is not done, any goals and rules will become meaningless.

(3) Make good use of group effects

The so-called group effect mainly includes five aspects:

1. Facilitation effect: The group has the effect of promoting and improving the efficiency of its members;
2. Weakening effect: While groups can have positive effects on individual behavior, they can also have negative effects;
3. Convergence effect: Under the effect of group norms, individuals narrow the gap and tend to have the same opinions, views and behavioral tendencies;
4. Bandwagon effect: the phenomenon that individuals change their views under group pressure and keep consistent with other group members in opinions and behaviors;
5. Degeneration effect: The tendency for individuals to work less effectively in a group than when working alone.

Based on these five effects, users can be effectively activated and even converted. For example, the convergence effect can be used to share forwarding screenshots within the group to attract others to forward them; the bandwagon effect can be used to show off distribution results within the group to influence other users to participate in distribution, etc.

3. Valuable services: Live broadcast and training camps build reputation

After the traffic accumulates, it needs to be operated. The best way to make users feel involved and valued is to provide content. There are two specific content forms that have been proven to be effective, namely live broadcast and training camp.

1. Live broadcast

Live streaming has both service and conversion attributes. Its essence is to impress users with the level of famous teachers and urgently needed content, among which content is the absolute core. When polishing content, two issues must be clarified: what to say and how to say it.

The choice of live broadcast content is mainly determined by the field. For example, live broadcasts in the education industry are divided into categories such as further education and subject areas. Different types have different requirements for teachers and different depths.

Of course, most of the time the content of the live broadcast is decided by the teachers, and even the outline is drawn up by the teachers. After all, professionalism must be reflected. For example, some of Haifeng Education’s live classes are taught by professional teachers, and what the operators can do is to control and improve.

(1) How to control it?

First of all, the operator must become a listener and ask questions and suggestions to the teacher from the audience's perspective. This process should be done at least once, and as many as three to five times. Secondly, there should be a live broadcast test, where the entire process should be rehearsed, from the warm-up before the live broadcast, to the product conversion and information collection during the live broadcast, and then to the Q&A after the live broadcast, to troubleshoot all possible problems. Finally, there should be a detailed inspection of the ppt, live broadcast equipment, etc., such as volume, picture emotionality, delay, text color, animation demonstrations, etc.

(2) How to improve it?

The main part that needs to be improved is the conversion link of live broadcast, and the following details need to be paid attention to:

1. Content framework: Adhering to the basic logic of "what-why-how", the advantage of this is that it is easy for teachers to sort out their thoughts and the audience to understand.
2. Product conversion: The conversion process is concentrated on the "what to do" part. At this time, it is generally linked to the product selling points. The design must avoid being abrupt and use cases to convince users.
3. Product recommendation: After the main content, it is the formal product introduction part. It is recommended to use video or physical display to allow users to have a preliminary experience of the product and understand its characteristics and usage effects.

2. Training Camp

Boot camp is another way to enhance users’ sense of value. Its product details can be designed based on the addiction model, namely “trigger-action-variable rewards-investment”.

(1) Trigger

It is divided into external triggers and internal triggers. External triggers are daily class reminders and check-in reminders in the community, such as posting group announcements, sending red envelopes, etc. Internal triggers are the impact of course content and class formats on students. This is the core key point for whether the trigger can be effective.

The course content should be polished according to user needs and authoritative systems, and the teaching format should be based on the principle of immersion. For example, the dialogue mode of Panda Mini Class can easily attract attention and increase interactivity.

(2) Action

After being triggered internally and externally (i.e., reminders and classes), students will complete specific actions, i.e., practice and check-in, motivated by the desire to test their learning outcomes. However, according to "action = motivation + ability + trigger", if students want to successfully complete practice and check-in, they need to make this behavior simple and easy, that is, the practice and check-in method does not require students to spend any learning costs.

To address this point, we need to consider two aspects. First, the content of practice and check-ins. It is best to choose content that takes less time, such as doing a smaller number of multiple-choice questions, doing a few minutes of practical questions, etc. Second, the specific method of checking in, which can be solved by using a check-in mini program, such as allowing users to open the mini program to directly do questions, upload photos, etc.

(3) Variable rewards

During the check-in session, many training camps choose to ask students to write texts or make mind maps. This is obviously not in line with the principle of simplicity and requires extremely high rewards as a driving force. If this driving force is set reasonably, it will be very effective for students' investment in learning.

Rewards are generally divided into three types, and each corresponding strategy is briefly listed:

Social rewards: People naturally desire to be recognized, so this can be satisfied by setting up question-and-answer sessions and guiding students to share their views.

Prey Reward: Prey is anything that satisfies a certain need, such as money, information, resources, etc. The corresponding strategies include teaming up to punch in to get bonuses, and persisting in punching in to get rare information.

Self-reward: that is, the desire for pleasure. Based on this, a high-difficulty challenge activity can be designed on the basis of the original course to stimulate students' enthusiasm for participation and make them feel that what they have learned is useful.

(4) Investment

Through the three steps of triggering, action and reward, the students' behavior can basically be changed to make learning continuous. However, it is obviously more important to make students spontaneously and continuously engage in learning in the training camp. The strategy that can be formulated based on this is to gamify lectures and check-ins, and design them according to the PBL model (points, badges, rankings). For example, lectures and check-ins can earn points or coins for redemption. Different number of study days correspond to different levels, and the check-in rankings are updated regularly. For example, the community of the Operations Research Society has a relatively systematic points system that can be used for incentives such as rewards.

4. Experience conversion: Diagnosis and experience classes win trust

After the value-added service stage, people generally try to directly convert it into revenue-generating products, such as long-term classes in the education industry, year-round courses for paid knowledge, etc. However, this conversion rate is generally low and the efficiency is not high. Of course, this is not absolute. The conversion rates of products in different fields are different. For example, for children's programming, a customer unit price of 5,000 yuan can achieve a conversion effect of 40%.

However, based on my experience in the education industry, there is a relatively reasonable conversion path: value service - "diagnostic class + experience class" - core product.

1. Diagnosis

For the knowledge payment and education industries, diagnostic classes are a very effective way to increase conversion rates. However, this needs to be explained from the perspective of "what is diagnosis."

The basic logic of the diagnostic course is to expose users' problems through careful testing. This process can subtly deepen users' trust in you. It is then much easier to guide users to pay. It is a conversion method with a high conversion rate that can significantly reduce decision-making costs.

Taking the education industry as an example, there are two common forms of diagnostic classes. One is a unified selection test, which is suitable for enrollment in scarce courses. For example, in the past, there were intensive training classes, competition classes, cutting-edge classes and other products, which were often used in class models. However, they are now gradually weakened by various institutions due to force majeure, but they still exist, such as being changed to primary school students' xx ability test.

The second is personalized expert diagnosis, which is suitable for 1-to-1 products or 1-to-many small classes. Questions and services are given by highly professional teachers. It is a heavier conversion method, but precisely because of the personalization and professionalism, users can easily trust the institution and are willing to pay. However, most of the work that follows is sales, and the marketing costs are high. This is one of the reasons why one-to-one scale is not economical.

2. Experience Class

After diagnosis, it is normal for users to pay. However, for products that require heavy decision-making, diagnosis only tells users, “I know what your disease is and I have medicine.” But medicine is partially toxic and needs to be explained by test results. Switching to the perspective of products that require heavy decision-making, users need to experience your product and decide whether to pay based on feedback from the experience. This is the logic of the experience class.

The common product forms of experience classes are mainly divided into three categories:

Trial class: Price marketing methods such as free trial classes are often used to attract user participation. For example, many online one-to-one institutions put "Register for a free trial class worth hundreds of yuan" on the homepage of their official website. The purpose is to impress users through the classroom experience.

Open classes: They also use free or low-cost means such as 0 or 1 yuan to attract users to sign up, but the content tends to be specific subject content. The purpose is to use the teacher's professionalism and classroom experience to influence users. As for the format, it is mostly a single live class or a series of live classes, and occasionally there are recorded broadcasts, such as the open classes of Zuoyebang and Yuanfudao.

Introductory course: A new type of experience course, which adopts the community + training camp model. The content is mostly taken from part of the formal course, which is why it is called an introductory course. A typical case is Baby Playing English.

In fact, diagnosis and trial classes can be directly used as conversion methods, but they are more operational-oriented. If they are connected to products with lower average order values, it will be fine, but if they are connected to products with higher average order values, it will be more troublesome.

However, if you combine experience classes, diagnostic classes and value-added services into a unified conversion product, the operating cost will be relatively low. If done well, it will be easy to attract a large number of users at one time. This is obviously more efficient than any single conversion method. This is also the main reason why some knowledge-based paid players have high conversion rates.

V. Conclusion

1. There are three ways to gain insight into needs, namely questionnaires, observing competitors, and subject calendars.

2. To accumulate traffic, two tools, fission and community, are used. For the former, attention should be paid to the choice of form; for the latter, attention should be paid to the purpose, rules and group effect of the community.

3. There are two means of valuable services: live streaming and training camps. Live streaming requires control and improvement of details, while training camps can design products based on the addiction model to improve retention.

4. The ways of experience conversion include diagnosis and experience classes. Diagnosis is divided into unified test and personalized diagnosis. Experience classes include trial classes, open classes, introductory classes, etc. The combination of the two and value service means can significantly improve the conversion rate.

That’s all, I hope it’s useful to you.

Source: Dugu Operation