Operation and promotion of e-commerce marketing system construction

E-commerce marketing is a field with a broad connotation and extension. The e-commerce marketing mentioned here mainly refers to the promotion system in a narrow sense, including various marketing tools such as coupons, red envelopes, and lotteries, as well as promotional activities built on marketing tools, such as special subsidies, Juhuasuan, etc. This article analyzes the challenges and responses in building a marketing system from four aspects: cognition, operation, product and technology.

1. Cognition

The essence of e-commerce is retail, and e-commerce marketing is a typical marketing behavior. The general theories and models of marketing professionals, as well as some common knowledge of user psychology, can be applied to e-commerce marketing activities.

1. Marketing Model

There are some classic marketing models in the marketing field, such as 4P's.

4P's marketing theory, namely product, price, place, promotion, plus strategy, is referred to as "4P's"

The 4P model is easy to understand. If you want to launch a comprehensive marketing campaign, you need to clearly define the range of products participating in the campaign, the prices of promotions, the channels for exposure, how to reach consumers, and the rules for participating in the campaign (Strategy).

The 4P model is a highly abstract theory. In addition to the 4P model, there is also the 4C model.

4C includes consumer needs and desires, cost that consumers are willing to pay, convenience of purchasing goods, and communication.

The 4C model designs marketing activities more from the perspective of consumers. Because it focuses on users, the 4C model is more suitable for segmented markets.

In addition, some other theories, such as the marketing models launched by Alimama, the PDCA cycle, the AISAS consumer behavior model, etc., can help understand the design of e-commerce marketing activities.

2. Consumer psychology

To better understand e-commerce marketing activities, you need some knowledge of behavioral economics and psychology. After understanding basic user psychology and other knowledge, you will be able to achieve twice the result with half the effort when operating related marketing activities.

For example, every year on Double Eleven, merchants will distribute some large coupons in advance, which is to use consumers' preset psychological accounts and loss aversion psychology to stimulate users to buy, so that consumers who were originally hesitant or even had no intention of buying goods will also come to buy.

Many marketing methods can be analyzed from the perspective of consumer psychology. There are many similar operations:

2. Operation

E-commerce marketing is a field with strong operations and is absolutely operation-oriented. On the one hand, there are more and more marketing methods, and on the other hand, it tends to be more and more refined operations.

1. More and more ways to play

I don’t know if you have noticed that in recent years, the marketing activities of major e-commerce platforms have become more and more diverse.

Not only have various large-scale promotional activities emerged, such as Double Eleven, 618, Juhuasuan, and Pinduoduo’s 10 billion subsidies. Daily marketing activities are becoming more and more complex, such as coupons, discounts, flash sales, packages, red envelopes, raffles, auctions, group buying, group buying, distribution, one-yuan purchases, wish lists, buy more and get more free, low-price coupons, crowdfunding platforms, points redemption, exclusive offers for new customers, etc.

Why are there so many ways to play? Isn’t it annoying?

Since ancient times, deep affection cannot be retained, only routines can win people's hearts.

For comprehensive platform e-commerce, the trend of e-commerce marketing is that there are more and more ways to play.

Most of the preferential strategies derived from pricing, such as coupons and red envelopes, can essentially be considered as price discrimination. Increasingly complex promotional strategies make the pricing system more and more complicated and the cost of understanding higher and higher. From this perspective, the most perfect e-commerce promotion tool may be to make the final purchase price different for each person, which is called "big data killing the familiar."

I think the increasingly complex promotional strategies can also be understood from the perspective of the long tail theory. The long tail theory is applied in e-commerce. The short head refers to the few popular products at the top, while the long tail refers to the large number of unpopular products at the end. Popular products will certainly bring huge revenue, but making good use of the long tail can also create unexpected results.

For platform e-commerce, long-tail products represent GMV growth, and this part of traffic needs to be tapped. Take Taobao as an example. The platform has hundreds of millions of products, but most of the traffic through the main search entrance is directed to popular products.

How to tap the potential of long-tail products? This can be done through a variety of marketing activities, such as coupons available for various special events.

2. Refined operations

More and more ways of playing correspond to the refinement of e-commerce operations.

With the further development of e-commerce websites, the significance of e-commerce promotions is no longer just to stimulate consumers to place orders and increase GMV, but also an important means for platforms to achieve user growth, attract new users and promote activation.

In front-end operations, coupons and red envelopes are widely used as basic marketing tools. Taking coupons as an example, it is possible to provide good incentives for stratified users. The entire process from issuing coupons to receiving coupons can be customized. For example, for some users who have not logged in for a long time, coupons can be sent to their accounts in a targeted manner, which serves as an important means of user maintenance and recall.

Among App statistical indicators, people often pay attention to the data of "usage time". Through various marketing activities, we can occupy the minds of users, increase the gameplay, optimize user data, and obtain more accurate user portraits. We can then further segment the industry, conduct refined operations, and provide users with personalized services.

Many friends may feel disgusted with the building-building activities on Double Eleven. This is a manifestation of differentiated marketing. Customers who are not sensitive to prices will not spend time participating in such activities. On the contrary, a considerable number of people will be keen to participate in such activities and invite people around them to join in, ultimately achieving the purpose of attracting new users and promoting activation of the platform.

For example, Pinduoduo’s Duoduo Orchard can be seen as a special coupon-getting activity, but this coupon requires you to persist in planting trees and watering them in order to get it. The coupon can be directly exchanged for physical goods as an incentive mechanism in the gamification design.

3. Products

Various business-side gameplay requires a product to support it. What this product system looks like and how to design it are problems that product colleagues need to solve.

For a platform-based e-commerce company, promotional business changes frequently, and the design of e-commerce marketing products is difficult to support with one system.

Generally speaking, the marketing center of a comprehensive e-commerce company needs to include marketing tools and promotional campaign configurations for B-side merchants, activity selection tools and data indicator analysis platforms for platform operations, etc. In particular, some relatively independent products can be developed as separate product lines and become independent product systems, such as JD’s trial center and crowdfunding platform.

Social distribution is relatively independent, but it is also directly related to marketing tools such as coupons and red envelopes. For example, red envelopes can be obtained by sharing. In this regard, Pinduoduo can be said to have achieved the ultimate.

Furthermore, we can plan some tiered incentives for merchants, such as setting up marketing rankings and sharing promotional cases, so that merchants can intuitively see which peers have made money through XX promotional activities, thereby stimulating merchants' willingness to participate in promotional activities. The e-commerce platform is a typical two-sided market. The platform can use its power to make rules to balance the needs of merchants and users and maximize transaction volume.

1. Product Model

From the perspective of product model, you can refer to the 4P model above, combine the characteristics of different marketing tools, and abstract the corresponding product structure.

Taking coupons as an example, the following breakdown can be performed:

The main body of the marketing center is promotion activities (Promotion). For example, you can create a promotion activity with the title "1024 Programmer Sale Festival". The products participating in the activity include mechanical keyboards, digital peripherals, etc. For these products, you can set up platform coupons (Coupon) and full-discount activities (Activity). If the coupon is over 100-20, the platform will directly reduce 5 yuan (Promotion-Rule). Merchants who sign up for the activity (Range) can also set merchant-level coupons. The promotion channels of the event can be promoted through external H5 pages, such as designing a separate landing page (Landing-Page), or through offline channels (Channel), such as roll-up banners and posters in the subway.

Another focus of product model design is the design of promotion rules.

Consider a scenario where there are multiple discounts available for a product, including merchant coupons, platform coupons, category-exclusive events, newcomer-exclusive events, etc. How to combine different marketing tools? If you use merchant coupons, can you also use platform coupons? If I participate in the new member exclusive event, can I still use the discount?

If we rely solely on enumeration to implement it, we will find that there are more and more branches.

It is better to establish unified promotion rules and limit the combination of different rules through rule types and rule groups.

2. Interaction with other fields

Do you still remember the wool you fleeced in those years?

Another important part of the design of the marketing product side is the interaction between the marketing system and other business areas, especially order transactions, risk control and data algorithms.

1) Marketing and Orders

Marketing tools affect prices and directly affect order transactions. For example, in a certain type of e-commerce, there is a module that is crucial, which is the shopping cart.

If you regard the shopping cart as a container, then what it carries is the product information and the corresponding discount information. The shopping cart is an important entry point for marketing activities.

Furthermore, the determination of the status and scope of use of the coupon, the record after the coupon is redeemed, the calculation of the preferential price, the verification of the legality of the coupon, etc., all occur in the call to the shopping cart and the order.

There is another important module in the interaction between marketing and order transactions, which is the reverse process. In order transactions, the design of the reverse process is very important. For example, whether the coupon/red envelope will be returned after the user returns the product for a refund is a point that needs to be considered.

2) Marketing and risk control

Marketing and risk control complement each other and are two sides of the same coin. Asset losses caused by unreasonable allocation of marketing activities are often reported.

Similar examples were encountered in the early days of Taobao. The following is from "Taobao Technology in the Past Decade":

It is obvious that Pinduoduo's mistake this time was due to unreasonable coupon settings: there is no restriction on the usage categories of platform coupons and they can be used under virtual categories; there is no limit on the number of coupons that can be collected, and from the C-end there is no limit on the coupon inventory.

When creating various marketing tools, you need to consider risk control and possible financial losses:

From the perspective of marketing tools, the collection of coupons, red envelopes, etc. must be subject to quantity limits and restricted through inventory.
From the perspective of activities, in order to avoid financial losses, budget rules can be configured for each marketing activity, and alarms can be triggered when the budget amount approaches the threshold.

3) Marketing and data

E-commerce marketing activities are to maximize profits through marketing means. Adjusting prices will inevitably affect revenue, and the input-output ratio needs to be considered.

When designing a system, various types of tracking points are particularly critical and support must also be provided for operations. In addition, when conducting marketing activities, it is usually necessary to conduct an AB Test to verify the marketing effect through MVP and adjust the marketing strategy in a timely manner based on real-time data feedback.

4. Technology

I have participated in the construction of a commodity system before. For platform-based e-commerce, everything can be a commodity. The main complexity of commodity management is reflected in the differences in ordering processes and commodity attributes in different industries and categories, the resulting standardization governance issues, and the sedimentation of the category attribute system.

In a nutshell, the complexity of areas such as commodities and warehousing is mainly on the B-end, and the business scenarios on the C-end are relatively simple. However, marketing is different. The main business changes are on the C-end, and the complexity comes from the ever-changing marketing forms.

Technology serves the business. So, when faced with a business as diverse as marketing, how should we design the system?

The following will expand on the model, performance and selection.

1. Model

You don’t need a gun to kill a programmer, just change the requirements three times.

This sentence is of course a joke, but it also shows that most engineers don’t like to “frequently change requirements”.

However, for most Internet businesses, changing demand is a very reasonable thing. Especially in the e-commerce marketing scenario, timely feedback and timely adjustment of marketing strategies are required, and "changing demand" is almost inevitable.

Experienced engineers know that the stability of the underlying model is very important in engineering development. A good underlying data structure can reserve space for expansion, like a lever, to support more business development.

If a relatively stable and scalable model cannot be used to undertake upper-level business, development can easily fall into endless demand adjustments.

Then, a certain amount of abstraction is needed on the underlying model. The data model design for coupons, activities, etc. can be expanded from the following aspects:

Do entities of various marketing tools need to implement data models?
Can all kinds of promotional rules be enumerated?
How to deal with the relationship between different promotion rules?

One misunderstanding to avoid here is excessive abstraction and design.

In the design of the e-commerce field, there is a module with a particularly high level of abstraction, which is risk control.

When designing a risk control system, it is necessary to consider various transaction attributes, corresponding trigger thresholds, and risk control actions. But there is a big difference between marketing and risk control:

Risk control strategies are managed by the platform, while the users of marketing tools are merchants.

In other words, marketing tools cannot be made like risk control tools, which are a free combination of fields and rules. The functional design of B-side products is the boundary of the abstract marketing model. When designing the data structure, the ease of use of the marketing tools for merchants must be taken into consideration.

2. Performance

Another technical challenge of the marketing system is performance, such as real-time settlement of various promotional activities and performance optimization of the flash sale system.

At present, the marketing methods of certain e-commerce companies are becoming more and more complicated, especially during big promotions, when the same product may have seven or eight different marketing campaigns. All of these require real-time calculations in the shopping cart, which places very high demands on overall performance and concurrency.

The design of the flash sale system in e-commerce marketing is a classic example of high-concurrency engineering design, in which basically all kinds of extreme optimization methods are applied.

3. Model selection

Finally, let’s take a look at what technical components are needed for marketing development?

After completing the disassembly of the model and the requirements for performance indicators, specific technology selection can be carried out.

Web framework, RPC middleware, relational database and other components are relatively universal, so I will not expand on them here, but will talk about some more special ones.

Coupons have a validity period. After the validity period is exceeded, they will be marked as expired. The status can be adjusted according to the time change. This can be achieved through a delay queue, which can be achieved by Redis or MQ.
For different marketing activities, a state can be introduced in the front end, such as coupon expiration, reverse effectiveness, and the flow of state can be managed by the state machine.
Whether different rules are compatible or mutually exclusive requires the support of a rule engine. Depending on the scale of your business, you can choose to use Drools or EasyRule, or you can develop your own
For the representation of promotion rules, in order to make abstraction more flexible, you can use scripting languages for encapsulation, such as Alibaba's QLExpress, mvel language
In the reverse process, there will be more asynchronous tasks, such as returning coupons after a transaction refund occurs. You can consider using message queues, etc.
The display of promotions and the calculation of promotional prices have high performance requirements and require support from caches at all levels. Consider Guava and Redis
The C-end interface needs to consider anti-spam. You can consider adding a current limiting and degradation function to achieve stability, using Guava-RateLimiter or Alibaba Sentinel, etc.
When collecting coupons, it is necessary to avoid overissuance. If the concurrency is large, a distributed lock can be added to achieve