E-commerce operations: Social marketing product planning for e-commerce promotions (with practical examples from large companies)

How to organize a complete marketing campaign? Clear activity goals, rigorous product design, timely data monitoring and optimization, and a final review and summary of the overall activity are all essential links.

Today's topic is the design and planning of social marketing products for e-commerce promotions . The author has been responsible for many promotional marketing projects (Double 11, New Year's Festival, etc.) in cooperation between JD.com and WeChat. He was the first person in the department to try "Mini Program Marketing Product Design" and also innovated and optimized the model of red envelope marketing products. Several promotional marketing projects that I was responsible for also exceeded expectations and achieved their goals.

Looking at the results alone, it seems that everything is perfect and everyone is happy. In fact, there were many pitfalls in the process. As I encountered more pitfalls, I naturally accumulated some experience . Next, I will share my own analysis based on the examples at that time. It is still just a starting point. Friends who are interested can leave a message to discuss together.

Marketing objectives for big promotions

The most taboo thing when doing projects on the Internet is not having an aligned and clear goal.

Especially in the field of marketing, the business side often has unclear goals due to many considerations such as brand cooperation and KPI.

For example:

“An activity that was clearly intended to generate publicity and exposure should have focused on designing the user sharing route. However, because the brand thought the format was novel, they chose a small game such as claw machines. Although there was depth of participation, the publicity point was relatively weak. The end result was that everyone paid the cost and effort but failed to achieve the goal.”

The consequences of unclear goals are self-evident, so what are the common goals of large-scale promotional marketing campaigns?

This actually depends largely on the overall marketing strategy of the promotion . I have come across many of them. The more common and direct ones are to directly stimulate users to shop by issuing efficient coupons (high-quality coupons) during the warm-up period and the climax period; there are also those who make reservations through communication-type marketing activities during the warm-up period, and then use messages to reach out during the climax period to guide traffic to the promotion store for conversion...

On relatively mature e-commerce platforms, the overall marketing strategy is usually planned by the marketing and operations teams . This requires product managers to first align the goals of the marketing activities with marketing, operations and other business personnel . There are two points that need to be paid attention to here.

1. Activity goals must be clear and quantifiable

Wang Jianlin's small goal

This was a very popular joke on the Internet before. Putting aside its flaws (ps: although I still want to complain about it hhh), Boss Wang set a very clear goal, which was to earn 100 million, not 10 million, nor 1 billion. Only with a clear goal can there be a standard to measure the results, and there will be a basis for choosing the implementation method.

The same principle applies to e-commerce marketing. Only with a clear and quantifiable goal can the effectiveness of the activity be measured; only when designing the product form can there be a basis for selection; and only when encountering a problem can there be a point of entry to solve the problem.

So what dimensions do we need to clarify and quantify here?

For example:

A coupon-issuing activity with a goal of transaction volume:

• The ultimate goal is to drive a turnover of XXXX;
• Related indicators include: coupon issuance volume: XXXX, coupon utilization rate: X%, product diffusion effect indicators, etc.
• Detailed indicators include the conversion rate of each link: entrance conversion rate: X%, conversion rate of each behavioral conversion link: X%, etc.

The estimation of these target values ​​depends not only on historical product data , but also on the entry traffic of the current activity , the inventory of coupon resources, etc. Specific values ​​are not required at the beginning, but at least there must be alignment at the magnitude level.

1. The activity goal must be agreed upon by all project members

The members here include: product, business, data, R&D, and their respective bosses , etc. This is actually the basis for the successful completion of the project, and the benefits are obvious:

1. The execution level is aligned with the goals, and any controversial points during the project process can be discussed around the goals;
2. By aligning goals with your boss, communication will be smoother when you need his support and assistance in decision-making.

For the first point, an example can be given. If the business feels that the brand elements on the page are not prominent enough and hopes to increase the packaging space, but this will move the operation area downward and affect the conversion of the coupon issuance operation, then the point of coupon issuance quantity is raised. If everyone aligns on the goal from the beginning, the business side will also consider such needs.

The second point is also easy to understand. If the goal is transaction volume, then there are several dimensions to focus on:

1. Increase the traffic volume at the entrance to increase the number of users;
2. Optimize the conversion of marketing products to improve the efficiency of issuing coupons;
3. Optimize the quality of coupons to increase usage.

The above are all entry points for optimizing transaction volume. Once the transaction does not meet expectations, the boss may need to support entry resources or coupon resources. If you align your goals with your boss from the beginning, communication will be much smoother.

About the design of marketing products

1. Goal-oriented

When designing marketing products, only by being goal-oriented can the final designed marketing products meet expectations.

Taking the author’s previous New Year’s Goods Festival project as an example, the overall marketing strategy at the time was: “To stimulate users to make transactions by efficiently issuing high-quality coupons, with the target being transaction volume.”

The formula is (not rigorous):

Transaction amount = coupon quantity * coupon usage rate * coupon-driven order price

These are actually our focus points :

1. The usage rate is more determined by the quality of the coupon itself, so it is necessary to work with the business side to ensure the quality of the coupon;

2. The order price driven by coupons is more determined by the conversion efficiency of the store on the landing page. Generally speaking, the operation space of the store during the big promotion is relatively small (basically a common routine);

To sum up, the core point of product design here is how to increase the number of coupons issued .

If the goal is to increase the number of coupons issued (ignoring the entry traffic), the marketing product you design must have two characteristics:

1. Low threshold for issuing coupons;
2. It has communication points to drive the issuance of coupons.

1. Product design ideas

WeChat instant discount product model

Through the analysis of competitive products in the industry, we can find that the product form of "low-threshold coupon issuance + dissemination" is most typically the "share first, then get coupons" model of WeChat's instant discount: "After the user obtains the instant discount gift package, he can share it with friends, and he can get one copy himself, and his friends can also get one copy after opening it." The author also adopted this model in the Double 11 cooperation project with WeChat - the fission lucky bag, and achieved good coupon issuance and dissemination effects.

However, through the Double 11 project, we also found that since the issuance of coupons is limited by the sharing threshold, we lost nearly half of the users in the sharing link (and thus lost half of the coupons). Even if the number of users driven by the spread is still considerable, it is difficult to make up for this part of the loss.

So we started thinking, if the goal is to improve the efficiency of issuing coupons, then are there other product forms that have "lower thresholds for issuing coupons and can have a certain degree of dissemination"?

Soon, the product idea of ​​"issue coupons first, then use the magic coupons to attract users to share" came out:

User flow of the solution

Initiator: Activity entrance - get red envelope - open it to get coupons - share to draw JD coupons;

Participants: Share the link - open it to get the coupon - initiate your own red envelope;

Through business estimation (combined with user path estimation), we found that:

The overall communication effect of this model may be slightly weaker than the "share first, get coupons later" model, but the overall coupon issuance efficiency will be better than the former.

This meets our goal of driving sales by issuing coupons, so we ultimately chose this product model.

JD New Year Gift Red Packet

The final online effect was basically in line with our expectations in terms of basic coupon issuance, and was significantly better than the Double 11 case. In addition, this model gave us a big surprise in terms of dissemination. Although users' motivation to share was affected (because they received some coupons first), the impact was small (the diffusion index remained basically the same), which means that while we ensured the basic coupon issuance volume, the coupon issuance volume driven by the dissemination part was not affected. Therefore, this project also set records in the department's coupon issuance volume and transaction volume.

Data monitoring and optimization

A very important point in product thinking is data thinking , which requires product managers to be good at finding problems in data, exploring users' potential needs, and enhancing business value. The same is true in the field of marketing.

The most stressful time for a marketing product manager is probably the first few hours after the launch, right? After all, no matter how detailed the previous estimates are, no matter how hard you work overtime, you still have to take the product out for a walk. At this time, the product manager needs to master all the data on the front line and observe the conversion status of each link. If there is a problem in a certain link, solutions must be proposed in time, and rapid iteration and optimization must be carried out to improve the effect (I remember that there was a big promotion event, which carried out 5 rounds of rapid iterations after it went online).

Communicate the required data with the data experts in advance, including business data (coupon issuance, transaction, usage) and conversion data (conversion funnel), etc. If real-time data monitoring is required, you can communicate with the development experts to make some small plug-ins for regular data push, so as to obtain data in a timely manner and assist in decision-making...

These all help to obtain data for analysis as soon as possible after going online.

As for how to conduct data analysis, this is the basic skill of the product, but it basically cannot avoid the "generalize first and then divide" decomposition idea. If you are interested, we can discuss it together later.

Review summary

After the project is over, it is necessary to summarize and analyze the entire promotion marketing project. It is not only a summary of the activity, but also a personal summary. These are crucial for self-improvement and team capacity building.

A review usually includes the following points (more is better):

1. Overall effect analysis: What are the overall data? Has the goal been achieved? What is the specific conversion funnel?
2. What are the key issues encountered during the whole process? What kind of problems are they?
3. Different types of problems, corresponding solutions and optimization effects?
4. Distill key experiences and conclusions.

PS: If it is a report, a brief project description is generally required.

Although the marketing activity project of the e-commerce promotion has risks and pressures such as the unchangeable time point and the great business impact , it also contains training and opportunities. The author has benefited a lot from it. Here I would also like to thank the business, R&D, and data colleagues who cooperated at the time. It was their hard work and concerted efforts that enabled us to overcome those pitfalls and successfully complete the project.

If you are also interested in social marketing and user growth , you can follow the official account "A Lifestyle Home's Tree Hole" below to discuss and move forward together. The official account will also occasionally intersperse some insights into life and work.

Source: Chen Nilin