Case Analysis｜Review of Himalaya FM's "66 Membership Day" event

1. Activity Background

1. Market conditions

• Pay attention to the protection of network intellectual property rights
• Increase in disposable income of residents
• Users’ knowledge needs increase and willingness to pay increases
• Mobile payment functions are convenient and complete

2. Competitive product activities

2016 is the first year of paid knowledge .

A year has passed, and major platforms have once again promoted knowledge payment: in May, Duoduo held a "Knowledge Release Conference"; Zhihu APP launched the "Market" entrance; Fenda launched the "Paid Community". Himalaya FM, which organized the first paid content festival, naturally would not miss such a good day as its anniversary celebration. It created the first paid content membership day under the name of "paying tribute to the 1st anniversary of paid knowledge."

3. Current status of the platform

• Content : Ximalaya FM owns the audio copyrights of 70% of the best-selling books on the market
• Previous issue : In December 2016, Himalaya FM launched the "123 Knowledge Carnival"
• Platform : Ximalaya FM is the largest comprehensive knowledge payment application platform in China, with over 35 million active users and a user activity rate of 25%.
• Function : Updated V5.4.27 on August 30, 2016, added the "Anchor Member" function
• Market : The average monthly AR PU value of paid users on the platform has exceeded 90 yuan, and 97% of users have not purchased paid content yet.

2. Activity Process

Including a warm-up period and a cooling-off period, the 66 Membership Days will be held from May 31 to June 9, 2017.

In order to avoid user exiting to the greatest extent, the activity rules follow the three-step format of "become a member → get a 50% discount coupon → purchase at 50% off".

In fact, there are five steps from becoming a member to achieving real paid conversion :

The focus of this event is to allow users to obtain membership and 50% off coupons, and the sharing threshold is not high. This kind of benefit also captures the user's desire to try new things and think that it would be a waste if they didn't use it. Coupled with the attractiveness of the high-quality courses themselves, judging from the final activity revenue, the payment conversion rate is still relatively high.

3. Activity Cycle

Judging from the number of topics on the official Weibo account, May 31st to June 4th was the warm-up period for the event, June 5th to 8th was the detonation period, and June 9th was the cooling-off period. In other words, the membership redemption activity starting on June 1st is to build momentum for the entire event and to induce users to use the 50% off coupons for membership privileges from June 5th to 8th.

4. Activity Effect

According to the official news of Himalaya FM, at 20:00 on June 6, the number of members exceeded 2.21W; at 24:00 on June 8 (the day the event ended), a total of 3.42W+ members were gathered, generating knowledge consumption of 61.14 million yuan .

• In terms of sales , high-quality paid content such as "Speak Well" and "Elementary School Questions" still take the lead, and users tend to purchase personal improvement, business finance, and parent-child education courses.
• In terms of event costs , gift expenses include 66 Kindles, 2 128G iPhone 7Ps (about 50,000 yuan), membership/50% discount, external promotion cooperation fees, and labor costs.
• In terms of user self-propagation , promotional images and texts have appeared in WeChat groups , Moments , and various community platforms.

During this membership day event, the 50% off coupons could be used from 18:00 on June 5 to 24:00 on June 8, for a period of three days, generating revenue of 61.14 million yuan. Compared with the sales volume of "123 Knowledge Carnival" of "50.88 million yuan in 24 hours", this number is obviously lacking in stamina. But assuming that the average income per user is 90 yuan, the number of paying users for the "123 Knowledge Carnival" is 555,000, and the number of paying users for the "66 Membership Day" is 679,000. The member conversion rate is 19.8% . In addition, members can also generate some content payments later. The effect of the event is quite satisfactory.

5. Event Highlights

1. Creating your own festivals is conducive to forming regular brand activities

Through this event, Himalaya FM became the dual initiator of the Content Payment Festival and Content Payment Membership Day.

1. June 6th happened to be the day when the first paid audio program "Speak Well" was launched on Himalaya FM, so it was natural to choose this day as Membership Day.
2. With the experience of "123 Knowledge Carnival", Himalaya FM is well prepared for such activities.
3. The dates of "66 Membership Day" and "123 Knowledge Carnival" are both catchy, one in the middle of the year and the other at the end of the year, which can become regular activities for the products.
4. The identity of "member" can bring a sense of dignity to users. After enjoying the benefits of membership privileges, users may develop the habit of renewing their membership, thereby converting ordinary users into loyal users.

2. High correlation between activities during the warm-up period

(1) Built-in activity "When (class) did you change?" to retain users

On June 1, Himalaya FM, in collaboration with New List and Crawley, launched the event "Salute to the First Anniversary of Knowledge Payment: At what moment (class) did you change?", inviting anchors and users to tell their stories about knowledge payment. Himalaya FM is a platform that connects anchors and users. This event created a topic for "66 Membership Day". More importantly, through the voices of paying users, it conveyed the message that "paying for knowledge is justice" to non-paying users.

(2) Joint promotion with multiple brands

Through long-term accumulation, Himalaya FM has more than 2,000 big names. These celebrity resources were fully mobilized during this membership day, and both parties took advantage of the opportunity to achieve win-win results.

• Join forces with 100 industry KOLs . Dingxiang Mama, Piaohan Yikemao, Buer Dashu and other top 500 self-media on WeChat posted articles on June 5 and 6, which went viral. These public accounts are mostly about parent-child, growth, and emotions. Users have a high willingness to accept knowledge and have a high degree of overlap with Himalaya users. On June 6, China Unicom’s brand WeChat "WO Play with Traffic " pushed an article: "2GB Traffic + Himalaya Membership", which received over 60,000 reads. The complementarity of traffic and audio can effectively promote user activity.
• Joint brand official account. Himalaya FM and nearly 100 official brand accounts including Mogujie , iReader, Fliggy, and Changba jointly launched a wave of online linkage posters + forwarding draws to give away memberships, explaining the importance of knowledge to people from different perspectives.

(3) Advertising in Moments

We invited Yu Dan, Le Jia, Ma Dong, Cai Kangyong and other celebrity anchors from various fields to speak out together, and produced a tribute short video , which was posted on WeChat Moments.

3. Share to get membership and 50% discount coupons to prepare for the explosive growth period

There are two ways for users to enter the activity page: the built-in activity page of the APP and the external link sharing page.

The membership activity has the effect of recalling old users and introducing new users. The operation method of receiving the membership by opening the shared link reduces the user's participation cost to an extremely low level. After receiving the membership, users may browse the APP to see if there is any content that interests them, and then come back to purchase it on the 50% off day.

Activity communication path

User's behavior path after receiving membership

6. The event can be done better

As mentioned above, the sales volume of 60 million+ in the three days of membership day is actually lower than the single-day sales volume of "123 Knowledge Carnival". The Knowledge Carnival creates a 24-hour sense of urgency and utilizes various discounts such as "1 yuan flash sale" and "knowledge red envelopes"; "66 Membership Day" aims to give users the experience of being promoted to membership and gradually cultivate users' habit of paying for knowledge. The two activities have different focuses, but by comparing the two we can still find the shortcomings of the Membership Day event.

1. The course content is not concentrated enough

Judging from the course sales rankings of the two events, "Speak Well" and "Hearing Wu Xiaobo Every Day" are still popular among the premium courses (this also explains why the sales volume on Member Day is not as good as that on Carnival: some users have already purchased them). At the same time, the TOP10 lists in each sub-venue basically have a turnover rate of 70% to 80%, which shows that Himalaya FM has done a lot of planning and updating in the course content over the past six months. But compared with the homepage of the APP during the event period, it is obvious that the carnival atmosphere is more lively and visually impactful (in order to distinguish the indulgence of "carnival" from the dignity of "membership").

The carnival of rose red and the dignity of purple

In terms of content distribution , Carnival has customized personal course sharing pages for many big-name anchors. Users can enter the course page by scanning the QR code. The picture format allows users to get the course lecturer, content, and selling points in a short time. On membership day, there are only text links on WeChat and Weibo, so the impact is not great.

The presentation format of the carnival is high-quality courses, while the presentation format of the membership day is a hypermarket, which is to let users see that the content on the platform is good and abundant. However, because of this, some users may be lost in the process from obtaining membership to consuming content. Instead of expecting users to have the patience to find content, it is better to directly integrate the content and present it to them.

Solution: Use course classification to guide users and update sales of branch venues based on user feedback

• The courses on Membership Day are first presented by the celebrity avatars and names, which is not very friendly to users who don’t know these hosts. The design can indicate what category these big-name courses belong to.
• As a content platform, Himalaya FM distinguishes between light and heavy operations in course design, and the heavy operations courses are the premium courses promoted in each event. According to various market surveys and feedback from previous events, personal improvement and business and finance courses have the best sales, so these courses can be placed at the forefront of the event homepage and sub-venues, and the number of viewers and paying users can be updated in real time on the event page.

2. The cooling-off period ends too quickly

Compared with the self-promotion of the listed courses in Himalaya FM’s official WeChat account after the carnival, the official only pushed one picture and text to members in the future, which seems a bit thin.

Solution: Thanksgiving

The main activity time of Membership Day happens to be during the college entrance examination period. We can use June 9th and 10th to carry out the "Thanksgiving Return" activity, open 6,000 "new members" places every day, and automatically issue 20% off coupons to all members to attract a wave of user return.

3. Bugs in the new version caused user dissatisfaction

On November 22, 2016, Himalaya FM released V5.4.57 and launched the "123 Knowledge Carnival". The version update for Member's Day was carried out the day before the warm-up event started, and no corresponding preparation time was reserved, resulting in many users reporting that they were unable to launch the APP after the update. This was fixed on June 3.

Solution: Follow up development

Risk prevention at the technical level should be reflected in event planning , and follow-up should be maintained during the development phase of the event, and reserving time for testing and repair is the last resort.

7. Routine mumbling

Himalaya FM is like the Taobao of the audio industry, its premium courses are Tmall , and its UGC courses are Taobao Mobile. Last year, the failure to redeem coupons for the Carnival event and the removal of purchased audio products also caused dissatisfaction among users. Both events were initial attempts in the content payment field, and the results achieved were impressive. Activities, like products, are an iterative process of constantly discovering and solving problems, and they also require innovative gameplay and constant experimentation. In this regard, "66 Membership Day" demonstrates Himalaya FM's leading position in the audio field and also provides new possibilities for the development of content payment.

References:

1. iResearch : 2016 China Online Audio Industry Research
2. Li Beichen: How do the four major knowledge payment platforms celebrate their first birthday?
3. QuestMobile: New observations on the mobile Internet knowledge payment industry in 2017
4. Ximalaya FM "recruits" over 2.21 million members in one day to expand the paid content business
5. Mad Men: This is the most cool screen swipe I've ever seen