Case summary: How can an offline store attract 2,000+ people in two hours?

Seeing this title, I believe many people are a little bit skeptical.

You may ask: I work hard for a month but may not attract 2,000 people to my store, so how come there are 2,000 people in just two hours?

Anyone who has worked in business or marketing should know that the cost of directing traffic to products is becoming increasingly difficult. More than 2,000 people were diverted in two hours. This kind of case is not common. Our team has previously worked on this for a buffet restaurant in Shandong called Obaro, and the results were also very good. It attracted 20,000 people in 4 days, established more than 200 communities , and users queued in line for more than a month in the store . Many people have also written about this case online.

In the Internet marketing circle, especially those who have worked in community building should also know that most of the common traffic-generating cases are by selling courses online, such as the popular courses on NetEase, New World , Sanlian Weekly, etc. The best thing about these courses is that the cost does not increase with the number of participants.

In other words: the cost of selling a course to one person is the same as selling it to 100 people, the most that will be different is the effort invested in operations .

But it’s different with offline stores, as every product sold has a cost. For example, the fission event of the Jinan buffet that we did cost at least 30 yuan, not including water, electricity, rent and labor costs. If not controlled properly, using physical products for fission activities can easily cause a business to go bankrupt.

Therefore, when you do offline store activities, you must remember to calculate the costs . The ultimate goal of marketing activities is to make a profit for the company. Even if there is no profit, the activities should not be conducted at a loss.

Okay, now that everyone understands this important point, we can explain some of the specific operational processes of our fission activities for stores, and see what exactly needs to be done to make fission activities that seem to lose money but ultimately bring greater benefits?

Let's take a look at the outline I prepared. There are 5 parts in total. The first four parts are the process, and the last part is the precautions:

1. Accumulation of seed users
2. Initiation of fission activity
3. User Engagement Path
4. Traffic conversion retention
5. Things to note in practice

Below I will explain to you in detail the entire practical process of store fission marketing and some "pitfalls" to pay attention to.

1. Accumulation of seed users

What is a seed user?

Seed users are the first batch of users when we launch our activities. This group of users will be very supportive and actively participate in the activities of the store or platform.

Just like many fans of celebrities, these fans are very happy to participate in whatever the celebrities ask them to do. This step is very critical for the subsequent fission initiation.

Why do I say so?

Because if there is no accumulation of seed users, who will help you share your activities with more people? Fission must be an exponential growth process based on the basic users spreading the word from one to ten, from ten to a hundred, and from a hundred to a thousand.

Therefore, it is necessary to accumulate such seed users in the early stage.

I look at the early seed users in two dimensions: one is quantity and the other is quality. In other words: it’s not enough to just have a certain number of users, but also the quality of these users (some people who have studied growth fission may have other terms for “quality and quantity”, but this is not important, as long as you understand it).

1. quantity

So, how do we accumulate the number of users?

Some stores have the habit of keeping users on their own platforms, which is very good. Before we did the fission on Shandong Yueyan Buffet, this restaurant did not have many users, and the store’s customer service WeChat account had only a few hundred people. So when we provided them with marketing consultation in the early stage, we first asked them to accumulate users through two methods.

(1) Offline acquisition

The normal daily customer flow of physical stores are all real and accurate users, and they must be retained. So I asked them to add the customer’s WeChat ID to everyone who came to the store as a record in preparation for the next event.

(2) Obtain through online fission

Since there was not much offline traffic in the early stage, the speed of adding WeChat was a bit slow, so we thought of another way, which was to ask users who had already added us as friends to help us invite their friends to join our WeChat group .

Through this simple method, by the time we started the event, the number of member users reached more than a thousand.

1. quality

The accumulation of quantity is far from enough. What we are worried about now is zombie fans. There may seem to be a lot of people, but they are actually useless. So we still need to operate the user quality.

It also starts from two aspects :

(1) Community activity

It is to attract users to the community, conduct regular red envelope draws, topic chats, etc. every day to mobilize everyone's enthusiasm and make the group active every day. While doing so, it will also stimulate community users to visit the store to shop every day.

Think about it: there are so many restaurants nowadays, but consumers only have one mouth to feed. If they don’t eat at your restaurant, they will go somewhere else. So the most worrying thing is that consumers forget about your restaurant.

We pull users into the group, which is equivalent to advertising to them every day, and they are very happy! Because the total amount of our red envelopes every day is less than 10 yuan! The 10 yuan can be recovered as long as one more customer is encouraged to come to the store to make a purchase. In fact, there are more than one person who come to the store to make a purchase every day because of the red envelope activities in the group! For example, community members will make appointments to dine in the restaurant.

(Social media screenshot)

(2) Store trustworthiness

Online is always just a weak-relationship social method, and it must be brought offline to build trust and further enhance the trust and interaction between users and stores.

We will set up membership days for the community users in the store, designate one day a week for offline gatherings and exchanges, and also organize various offline games for them to come to the store to play and participate, thereby increasing the number of contacts with the store.

It’s like many people find me through my “Mr. Monster” public account . No matter how we talk, I always feel like something is missing. So when I am working in Beijing, I will often meet with Mr. Monster readers offline to increase trust.

In short, the first step is to accumulate seed users in order to prepare for the subsequent fission launch. The reason why fission is not effective for many people is probably because this step is not done well.

2. Initiation of fission activity

When our early users reach a certain level, we can start our fission activities.

I will divide this part into three points:

1. Start the conversation
2. With the help of tools
3. Startup time

Let’s first look at how to start the conversation:

1. Start the conversation

The gimmick of our event is "Operation Free Meal", which is similar to the last time at Obaro Restaurant.

Another very important point is: there must be a legitimate reason for doing promotional activities.

We told users that we did this because of the anniversary and Double Eleven (the launch time was late October), not because the products could not be sold. This way, users will cherish and be more convinced of the authenticity of the event.

This will prevent users from thinking that the product is being promoted at a low price because there is a quality issue or the store is unable to continue operating. I have often mentioned this in my previous articles. There must be sufficient reasons for users to do promotions.

(Partial screenshot of the group conversation at startup)

After hearing this, some people may have questions - "Editor, didn't you say before that each coupon has a cost? The cost of a coupon is 30 or 40 yuan, so isn't this activity a loss?"

I said at the beginning that the ultimate goal of marketing activities is to make a profit, or at least not to lose money . This is especially true for restaurants. Losing a few thousand is heartbreaking for the owner! So how can we avoid losing money?

Because according to our analysis of the behavioral habits of users who come to the store , it is known that users rarely dine alone when they come to a buffet. In other words: even if you win a free meal coupon, you will not come to dine alone. Many people will bring at least one person to eat at the buffet together.

As long as the person who gets the free meal brings one or more people, our costs will be recovered.

People who are good at math should be able to figure it out: if the income between two people is 78 yuan, the investment will be recovered.

In reality, many people bring two or three family members or friends to dine together, especially those who have won the lottery. Just think about it, among thousands or tens of thousands of people, only more than 300 people can win the prize. If you win, you will be so happy. Many people will share it with their friends and family, and bring them to enjoy the joy of winning together.

Therefore, the design of our entire activity ensures that we will not lose money because it is based on our judgment of user behavior habits.

1. With the help of tools

We set up 50 groups at the beginning and directed users to the groups to participate in the lottery. Because a group needs an invitation to join if there are 100 people scanning the QR code , later 120 groups were established.

At that time, there were more Shandong Oubaro buffets, and more than 200 groups were established. Moreover, the activity only lasts for three days. To manage so many groups and recruit members, it would take at least a dozen people if we follow the traditional community management and recruiting methods. But there were only two of us operating the whole process, and most of the time it can be handled by one person.

(Group screenshot)

Because we use Internet tool software to help us attract people and respond to wording, friends who do social marketing should be more familiar with this. (There are many kinds of tools. Readers in need can add Mr. Monster’s WeChat to privately chat and he will recommend them to you. Many of our tools are free during these events).

We use tools in the community and set up robots to automatically reply to people who join the group and tell them what to do. I will talk about this specific design process in the third section below, “User Participation Path”.

1. Let's look at the startup time

This is also very critical. We start at 8 o'clock in the evening.

Why choose 8 o'clock?

Because according to the analysis of WeChat's user behavior data : 8 to 10 pm is the peak time for most people to check WeChat and browse their Moments .

If we start at 8 o'clock, the first batch of seed users can start to swipe the screen, and their friends will continue to share and swipe the screen when they see it, thus causing the local people's circle of friends to swipe our screen.

People have the habit of following trends. Even if they don’t know what’s going on, when they see so many people posting something on their friends’ circle, they will definitely pay attention and be curious about “what is this”. Then most people will also participate because they are afraid of missing out on something. Then it will easily explode in an instant within a short period of time!

Like the recently popular Koi event and Zhao Liying’s wedding event, many people paid attention to them by swiping their WeChat Moments. This is the herd effect at work.

We started at 8 o'clock, and it instantly took off in the circle of friends of local people.

Therefore, getting our rhetoric, tools and launch time right are key to launching.

The above is what we traders need to do when fission starts. So what do users need to do to participate? This is the third topic I want to talk about: path design for user participation.

3. Paths for User Participation

The process we use to get users involved is not fundamentally different from the current fission participation process of most online courses. It all involves scanning the code to join the group, sharing it on WeChat Moments, taking screenshots and sending them to staff to receive prizes, etc.

But the only difference is: there are almost no cases of using offline stores to achieve user fission on the Internet. This may be the biggest difference from other fission activities.

Based on the actual situation, the specific path for user participation is as follows. I will post it for you to see.

Those who have done social marketing fission or participated in online course fission activities should be familiar with this path design.

Then, according to the robot we set up earlier, we enable users to share posters to Moments or other WeChat groups. When other users see them, they will scan the code to join the group, and our robot will start working. Anyone who joins the group will automatically reply according to the words we set.

Be sure to set it up so that everyone who comes in @ him . Although you will see a lot of group information, it can ensure that everyone who comes in knows what the group is about and what to do. Because some people may have come in for no apparent reason after seeing the poster in the circle of friends. So, in this way, there will be no chaos after each user joins the group.

(Screenshot of one of the activity groups)

After joining the group, send the posters and copy we set to your circle of friends, then take a screenshot and return it to the group.

At this point, some people think that taking screenshots is a bit redundant. Anyway, when you receive the prize, you can look at the user’s Moments to know whether he has shared it. Why bother with this?

In fact, there is a reason why we do this. What is the reason? Friends who study marketing should have guessed it - user testimonials and the herd effect.

Because when everyone in the group sees that many people are sharing screenshots of their Moments to the group, and the rapid sharing covers the entire WeChat group, it will invisibly put pressure on those who have not shared yet, and thus they will share quickly. This is also why when we see a store with a long queue on the street, many people will walk over to take a look for no apparent reason. This is the herd effect, which I mentioned earlier.

Another thing is to make users believe in this activity. Because many of the people who join the group through fission may be hearing your store name for the first time, they may have trust concerns such as "Is this activity real? Is it a scam? etc."

When users see many other users sharing and participating, their concerns will be dispelled - this is the role of user testimonials - whether it is true or not, no matter how many times the merchant says it, it is not as effective as a real user telling you that it is true.

Therefore, the entire path process must be designed in accordance with user psychology, so that users can participate in the event happily and smoothly, and the effect of the event can be maximized.

So. What if a lot of people participate in the end, but no one wins the prize?

The last part of the whole process is about how to convert and retain the traffic that did not win the prize.

4. Traffic Conversion and Retention

After all, only a few people win. So for those of us who didn’t win the prize, we shouldn’t waste this hard-earned traffic.

1. We convert users who did not win the prize

After participating in this event and the lottery, many people have already paid sunk costs such as "sharing on WeChat Moments" + "scanning the code to join the group + continuing to pay attention to whether they have won a prize". Users will feel disappointed that "I have worked hard but did not win the prize."

So after the winners were announced, we provided a benefit to those who did not win the prize - they could use 49 yuan to purchase an all-you-can-eat buffet voucher originally priced at 78 yuan. At that time, Shandong Oubaro’s product could be purchased for 39 yuan, but the situation in each store was different, so the prices set were also different.

Even though it is only 49 yuan, it is lower than the original price of 78 yuan. This is also another unexpected gain for those who did not win the prize. And at 49 yuan, it’s not a loss for the store.

1. We need to retain all participants

It is not easy to attract these people, so don't waste this traffic easily. It is best to direct traffic to personal WeChat accounts or communities.

1. We want to let participating users spread the word

For example, we may set the permission for users to purchase another copy for 49 yuan, so if they help us forward the set poster, we can give them this permission. This will allow users to help us spread the word. Although not everyone will do this, many people will forward it to their friends in the hope of getting a chance to buy again.

The above three points are what we will amplify again when the entire activity is about to end, so as to maximize the effect of this fission activity.

5. Notes on practical operation

The last part is a few points that we recommend paying special attention to in practice:

1. During fission, the robot's replies must not be interrupted, so that users can know what kind of group it is, what to do, and other information after joining the group.
2. The start time is critical, and the best time is 8 pm. Some people do not achieve good results in their activities, and the main reason is that the start time is not right.
3. As mentioned earlier, the number and quality of startup users are also critical. Without a certain number of seed users, it is difficult for an activity to achieve the desired fission results.
4. The robot’s reply should be clear, explaining key content such as participation method, event time, lottery method and prize drawing time. Otherwise, users will keep asking questions and it will be impossible for one person to handle it.

Of course there are other points to note, but these are the problems we often encounter in actual operations and require special attention.

Finally, send the entire outline to everyone and save it for easy organization and summary.

remind

1. The premise of these activities must be based on the team execution, product cost, service, business district characteristics, etc. of the entire enterprise, otherwise it will be counterproductive.
2. Different stores and industries have different situations and operations. This article is for reference only.

Source: Mr. Monster