The private domain skills of urban beauties with over 200,000 followers!

Affected by the epidemic, many traditional retail companies have to transform into private domains, and Urban Beauty, known as the "Queen of Underwear", is no exception. How did Urban Beauty achieve 10-fold growth and accumulate 200,000 private domain users through private domain operations ?

The successful upgrade and transformation of Urban Beauty has also provided a sample and benchmark for traditional brands to enter the new world of private domain.

Affected by the epidemic, many traditional retail companies have to transform into private domains, and Urban Beauty, known as the "Queen of Underwear", is no exception. However, the huge distribution system built by traditional franchising and the high inventory generated by the ordering model have made it difficult for Urban Beauty to make further transformation.

On the other hand, online and offline channels have always been operated separately in the past, which has also laid "reefs" for brand unification and deep transformation. Take the nearly 60 million members of Urban Beauty as an example. It is not just as simple as being scattered online and offline. There is also the trouble of the interweaving and interactive integration of various channels and platforms.

Focusing on the present, why do urban beauties still decide to fully develop their private domains in the face of these troubles? We believe that these data can provide the answer:

• Excellent store performance increased 10 times
• Mini Program Live Streaming from 0 Transactions to 10 Million in Monthly Sales
• WeChat for Business has accumulated 200,000 old customers and attracted over 10,000 new customers in a single day

Let us explore the underlying logic and story behind this. as follows:

1. Adjustment of organizational structure

From the very beginning, Urban Beauty has clearly defined its private domain positioning - giving back to stores. Therefore, Urban Beauty's private domain model is to develop both online and offline platforms. Online, it reaches users through various methods such as grass-planting, live streaming, and short videos. Offline, it extends the store's business hours and business radius through mini-programs and live streaming, which ultimately feeds back to the store's sales.

However, achieving the above goals is not a small challenge:

• Among the more than 5,000 stores of Urban Beauty, a large proportion of them are operated in partnership in the form of franchising. How to coordinate and empower dealers so that they actively participate in the private domain system?
• In the past, online and offline channels have always been operated separately, which has also laid "reefs" for brand unification and in-depth transformation. Take the nearly 60 million members of Urban Beauty as an example. It is not just as simple as being scattered online and offline. There is also the trouble of the interweaving and interactive integration of various channels and platforms.
• There is a lack of unified understanding across the company, and it is difficult to form synergy in a short period of time. Although top management attaches great importance to it, the middle-level managers often have a shallow understanding and are slow to promote it, and it is even more difficult to ensure execution at the grassroots level.

Therefore, Urban Beauty readjusted its organizational structure. The headquarters established a smart retail division to comprehensively coordinate private domain strategies, and then refined the methodology by creating benchmark stores . Ultimately, it achieved the goal of empowering operations at all levels and terminal shopping guides, and deepened the relationship between online and offline, direct sales and franchises.

In terms of implementation, Urban Beauty formulated a strategy of first direct operation pilot and then franchise follow-up, which greatly reduced problems such as slow implementation.

2. Store Empowerment Strategy

1. Mini Programs

Urban Beauty has unified its store mini programs into "Urban Beauty+", and the members' exclusive shopping guides will assign mini program users to corresponding stores. Through interactive methods such as community operations, the shopping guides will provide exclusive services to members.

The cold sales transactions are supplemented with the warmth of "acquaintances". At the same time, through the unified operational support of the headquarters, stores are enabled to establish private domain stores that are open 24 hours a day to increase store turnover.

At the same time, the store’s existing members and shopping guide friends circle users can also connect with the Urban Beauty membership system and operate in a unified manner through the "Urban Beauty Membership Center."

2. Refined member operations

Through in-depth cooperation with Tencent, Urban Beauty's active members are matched with Tencent's 800 million users to further understand the real needs, purchasing motivations, wearing occasions, value realization and price matching of public and private consumers, laying a digital foundation for the headquarters and stores to jointly realize precise member operations.

3. Store shopping guide empowerment

Urban Beauty has formulated measures such as a "three-level supervision mechanism", "daily tracking mechanism", and "headquarters assistance and guidance" to activate the enthusiasm of stores for transformation through a set of systems from top to bottom.

In the past, although first-line shopping guides have established many communities, many WeChat communities eventually fell silent due to their lack of continuous content output and interactive activation capabilities.

To this end, Urban Beauty has unified the organization and planning and output of content materials through its headquarters to help shopping guides continuously activate dormant communities and improve performance conversion, while also integrating performance PK and speeding up promotion. In terms of operating models, social networks, corporate WeChat, live streaming and other models are flourishing.

In addition, the costs such as preferential subsidies generated by private domain event promotions are shared between Urban Beauty headquarters and franchisees, and the interests of the franchisees are aligned. On the premise of common interests, the cooperation between the two sides is more frequent and more efficient.

4. Pilot in directly-operated stores, and follow-up promotion in franchise stores

In terms of implementation, Urban Beauty adopted the strategy of "direct operation pilot and franchisee follow-up" .

In terms of selecting pilots, Cosmo Beauty also proposed a corresponding strategy: first, select stores with high cooperation, strong execution of front-line shopping guides, and an open and welcoming attitude towards private domains as pilots;

Secondly, in order to make the model more universal and able to be promoted nationwide, Top stores, ordinary stores and small-scale community stores were also included in the pilot program.

In terms of promotion steps, we will first set a benchmark and run the model in highly controllable directly-operated stores, and then promote the mature strategy to franchisees. The benefits of this approach are that it reduces reform risks, minimizes costs, explores replicable paths, and ultimately achieves large-scale promotion.

3. WeChat for Business

First, the traditional retail industry has a high turnover rate for shopping guides. Once a shopping guide loses a customer, adding a new shopping guide will cause a new round of harassment, which is not conducive to user experience and brand image maintenance. Secondly, the customer approval rate will be relatively low, which is not conducive to the retention of the company's private domain customers. Finally, the refined management of shopping guides is also a major problem.

In order to solve the above problems, Urban Beauty directs customers to corporate WeChat. After an employee leaves, the company obtains the customer list of the departing member and reallocates them to other members. This prevents customer loss and effectively retains customers . At the same time, it also becomes convenient for managers to count the number of incremental users.

In terms of specific strategies, Urban Beauty divides the corporate WeChat community into two directions.

1) Headquarters community: operated and managed by the headquarters, with the main purpose of attracting old customers and accumulating private domain fans

Direct customers from different channels such as official accounts, live broadcast rooms, and social platforms to corporate WeChat communities to form a private traffic pool. Compared with personal WeChat, corporate WeChat has no risk of being blocked, has no upper limit on the number of friends, customer information can be stored centrally, and can automatically group and label traffic based on traffic sources, and group customers by tags, preparing for subsequent precision marketing.

2) Store community: initiated by the shopping guide of each store, with the main purpose of recruiting new customers

Utilize WeChat enterprise gadgets to create rankings for multiple indicators such as new customers, sales, and order volume, set up rewards, and guide healthy competition among shopping guides.

After using this tool, Urban Beauty's shopping guides attracted more than 10,000 new customers in a single day, and the number of new customers increased by more than 50,000 in a week. As of January 2021, Urban Beauty has accumulated more than 200,000 private domain customers on WeChat for Business.

4. Live Streaming Strategy

2020 was defined by Urban Beauty as the first year of live streaming. After many attempts by the team, the online and offline linkage mechanism was finally finalized. Therefore, various combinations such as live streaming by large franchisees and live streaming by store shopping guides were tried successively to expand sales channels.

In terms of the linkage between headquarters and store live broadcasts, Urban Beauty headquarters live broadcasts are clearly positioned in three aspects: brand promotion, hot product marketing, and store empowerment; at the store level, under the control of the headquarters, they independently formulate live broadcast formats that are rich in regional characteristics.

In terms of live streaming marketing, the team uses "online coupon issuance and offline verification" as the main means to bring a large number of customers to offline stores, create additional in-store consumption, and further bring new sales to store.

In terms of live broadcast operation strategy empowerment, Metro Beauty has also iterated the most suitable gameplay:

1) Shopping guide activation

Incorporate live broadcast performance into store performance, and give shopping guides who participate in live broadcasts commission rewards to stimulate their sales enthusiasm and store managers' management enthusiasm.

2) Training and empowerment

In order to help shopping guides quickly improve their ability to sell goods, Urban Beauty has formulated the "Anchor Star Plan" to provide live streaming skills training for shopping guides and store managers. The training for the first batch of 40 anchor stars has been completed.

In addition, in order to improve the uneven sales capabilities of the team, Urban Beauty will also invite shopping guides with weaker sales capabilities from each store to the headquarters for targeted training.

3) Internal PK

In order to encourage shopping guides to continuously improve themselves and boost their enthusiasm, Urban Beauty will also organize anchor PK competitions based on regions and stores, and then conduct a comprehensive evaluation based on four aspects: on-the-spot performance, number of viewers, number of viewers and amount of goods sold. Finally, outstanding shopping guides will be rewarded with cash red envelopes, certificates of honor and other rewards.

Digitalization and privatization are the focus that brands must pay attention to in their transformation in recent years, and are also the weakest links of traditional chain brands. The successful upgrade and transformation of Urban Beauty has also provided a sample and benchmark for traditional brands to seize the dividends of private domain traffic.

V. Conclusion

The private domain is by no means just a structural shift from offline to online, but requires attention to absolute growth. Because the structural shift from offline to online is actually not difficult, such as launching some coupons that can be redeemed online in stores. But this transfer, in the final analysis, is a switch of channels, and has not brought absolute user and performance growth to the brand. It is just a game of left hand to right hand. The real private domain is to provide professional and in-depth services to users and try to tap the growth potential that has been neglected in the past.

For companies with a large number of dealers and store terminals, the biggest challenge is how to empower dealers and let them actively participate in the private domain. If dealers cannot be impressed and there is a lack of unified understanding between the upper and lower levels, the brand’s plan to build a private domain together with the channel can only remain in the concept stage, which is a loss for both parties. And this step of solving the problem must be taken by the brand in order to promote the implementation of the idea.

The key word behind the Urban Beauty case is empowering competition. The so-called empowerment means that the headquarters provides materials and support, unified training, and empowers all stores and employees. The so-called competition means that the stores are independent teams and their accounts are relatively independent, which makes it easier to calculate and differentiate performance. The headquarters then uses incentives to compare and compete the performance of different stores and shopping guides, forming a virtuous circle.

Author: UFIDA Private Domain 2.0

Source: UFIDA Private Domain 2.0