Meituan Maicai’s private domain traffic operation skills

In the second half of 2020, the community group buying war among fresh food e-commerce companies became completely popular. Companies such as Chengxin Youxuan, Meituan Maicai , Duoduo Maicai, Dingdong Maicai, etc. flocked in, spending money and traffic in various ways and competing for their own success.

In less than a year, each of them has invested tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of funds. The major Internet giants behind these e-commerce companies seem to have determined that what lies before them is a gold mountain, so they must take the top of the mountain first.

The most common situation at that time was that if you just strolled around the community, you would meet sales staff wearing uniforms of various colors, who would give you benefits and ask you to download an APP to buy groceries.

These Internet giants are obviously accustomed to using traffic thinking to do everything, but such a large-scale money-burning model is destined to be unsustainable in the long run.

Therefore, these e-commerce companies have to think about: after spending a lot of money to attract traffic, how can they retain this traffic to achieve repeated conversions?

If you only focus on attracting traffic to your own APP, it will easily cause a large number of users to leave due to low opening rate.

Building their own private traffic pool based on corporate WeChat has become the choice of many e-commerce companies.

Next, let’s take a look at how Meituan Maicai operates private domain traffic to enhance its community group buying.

1. Detailed explanation of the activity process

Activity flow chart:

1. The first step is channel diversion

The process and purpose of Meituan Maicai's private domain traffic are very simple, which is to first import external traffic to the official APP and WeChat public account, and then import this traffic to the corporate WeChat, and finally further guide users to continue consuming in the community by creating groups.

As a battle that must be won, Meituan Maicai has invested a lot of money in attracting traffic, among which there are four main ways to attract traffic:

Official APP homepage promotion:

There are various coupons and product discount promotions on the Meituan Grocery official app every day, with the aim of creating greater user stickiness.

But grocery shopping apps are not social apps after all, and they are not opened frequently. Moreover, users who don’t buy much fresh food on a regular basis will easily lose interest in opening the app and instead choose a more convenient offline supermarket.

Therefore, in order to increase users' purchase frequency, Meituan chose to set up various activity interfaces on the official APP to guide users to corporate WeChat for further conversion.

In order to make the users entering private domain traffic more accurate, Meituan Maicai also pops up a corporate WeChat QR code after the user places an order, inviting the user to add friends.

Official WeChat public account published:

Meituan Maicai’s official WeChat public account is also an important channel for pushing various traffic-generating activities.

As a public account dedicated to pushing activities, the average reading volume can always be maintained at around 10,000+, which is also very rare, indicating that the user stickiness is still quite high.

In addition, the menu bar of the official account has also become the entry point for various popular activities. After following it, users can find the latest promotion information at a glance.

Invitation courtesy guides user fission:

On the homepage of the Meituan Grocery official APP, there is a sidebar entrance for inviting friends to receive red envelopes. Users only need to click in to share to their Moments, WeChat groups, or send them directly to friends.

New users invited can immediately receive large coupons, and as long as the order is successful, users who share the event can receive red envelope rewards.

Using users’ friend circles and friend groups as traffic channels is a common way for companies to obtain traffic.

QR code push:

In addition to the above three online traffic channels, Meituan Maicai also uses offline marketing methods.

In the past, Meituan’s grocery shopping promotions were all about asking users to scan a code to download the APP, and after placing an order, they would receive various small gifts such as eggs and corn.

But later, as the user order rate began to decline, Meituan Maicai actually started another model. Instead of giving small gifts, it directly distributed flyers to invite users to join the company’s WeChat group to receive red envelopes.

The advantage of this is that you don’t have to rush to make a sale, but instead wait until the user joins the group, and then guide the conversion through community operations.

2. The second step is to accept traffic

Meituan used two methods to handle the traffic coming in through various channels:

WeChat for Business:

Meituan Maicai has chosen to use WeChat for Business to handle most of its traffic. As long as the user receives the coupon and places an order, a WeChat for Business QR code will pop up on the payment success interface, guiding the user to scan the code and add "Meituan Maicai Welfare" by receiving a red envelope.

After adding corporate WeChat friends, "Welfare Jun" will pop up a message immediately and invite you to scan the code to join the group to receive the "10 yuan coupon".

After users scan the QR code to join the group, they will also receive a timely reply and a link to "community exclusive benefits" to receive exclusive coupons.

After scanning the code twice, the users joining the group become more accurate, and subsequent operations will be relatively easier.

Official WeChat Account:

Once users join the corporate WeChat group, Meituan’s grocery shopping welfare officer will import some of the users into the official account by pushing links in the group, adding another channel to reach and convert users.

After all, the official account is also an important channel for event promotion. The discounts and preferential information recommended on it are not frequent, and some users who do not buy fresh food very frequently are still willing to pay attention to it.

The most important channel for undertaking business is of course WeChat for Business, which is not only highly efficient and can undertake a large volume, but also has obvious advantages whether it is one-to-one contact or community operation.

3. The third step: operational transformation

When it comes to operational conversion, there is almost no action on the WeChat official account, and the focus is on the operation of corporate WeChat communities.

Operational actions at different time points:

From the community welfare timetable, we can see that from 8 am to 10 pm, Meituan Maicai sets corresponding operational actions:

• 8:00, morning market recommendation;
• 10:00, big promotion information;
• …….
• 22:00, store closing notice.

The entire community operation process is rich in activities and the time points are very clear, which is definitely a benefit for users who often have needs for fresh food.

Various preferential recommendations:

In the group, the biggest highlight is the various product discounts. As long as users pay attention, they can always wait for their favorite products at a preferential price.

Sweepstakes:

Although the probability of winning the grand prize is almost zero, for most users, when they see the iPhone 12, they will still be excited to click in.

Even if you didn't win the grand prize, getting a coupon is a kind of consolation to yourself.

Group buying activities:

Group buying is one of the most commonly used and effective ways for businesses to promote sales online.

Moreover, here, it is specially divided into new customer group and old customer group. All users can participate in the old customer group, while the new customer group must have the participation of new users, which is equivalent to once again expanding the fission effect of old customers bringing in new users.

Interactive guessing riddle activity:

In order to increase the activity in the group, Meituan Maicai also specially added an interactive guessing game, and then used the opportunity of announcing the answer to guide users to participate in the coupon collection activity. While creating an activity community, it also increased the enthusiasm of users to participate in the activity.

4. The fourth step, fission growth

In terms of growth, what Meituan Maicai does is actually very simple. It achieves fission growth by having old users invite new users to place orders and obtain a 30-yuan no-threshold coupon.

In addition to the multiple "Invite and Get Gifts" fission entrances on the official APP, users can see the "Share and Get 30" activity entrance on the right side of all product links posted in the community after clicking on them.

There are two benefits here: first, coupons can encourage users to consume again and increase user stickiness; second, the prominent activity entrance on the right sidebar of each product can greatly increase the fission effect.

Event Highlights:

In the entire private domain operation process of Meituan Grocery, what points can we reuse?

First, various discount coupons and promotions increase user stickiness

Whether it is on the APP, the official account, or in the subsequent social groups, users are overwhelmed by the various coupon promotion information.

As long as the user uses the coupon for the first time, there may be countless coupons waiting for him later, which greatly stimulates the user's desire to buy.

Of course, this kind of tycoon gold-style subsidies require a lot of costs, but the effect is also significant.

Second, the standardized operation time process reduces the difficulty of operation and improves the efficiency of operation.

In many community operations in the past, the operators could perform various actions in an orderly manner at the beginning, but after a long time, they didn’t know what they should do. Over time, the community became a dead group.

However, if the entire operation is standardized and streamlined, this risk will be reduced a lot. Moreover, for users with needs, they will know when they can receive what kind of discounts in the group, which can easily form habitual behavior.

Third, the clever setting of product information page and group buying activities increases the fission effect

In addition to increasing revenue, the most important purpose of a promotional event is to attract traffic and accumulate more potential users.

In this event, Meituan Maicai’s several actions to guide fission were designed very cleverly.

For example, in addition to the normal APP homepage and personal information page, users can also see the entrance to the fission activity in the right column of each product information page. In addition, in the community operation process, the actions of guiding users to fission are also integrated into the group buying activities, which is quite clever.

2. Suggestions for Optimization

After going through the entire process, there are still areas that can be optimized. Here we would like to mention one point: the personality of corporate WeChat is too thin.

On the entire "Meituan Grocery Welfare" information interface, you can only see the four words "Meituan Grocery" and no other messages.

Meituan has so many discount promotions every day, so it can put more of these links in. This will not only enrich the personal image, but also add more traffic entrances.

The corporate WeChat account of Zuoyebang is different. It does a great job here. Users can see at a glance what activities and discounts are available, and are also very clear about the operational positioning of this account.

Moreover, in the community operation of Meituan Grocery, apart from seeing a bunch of discount links, there is no effective communication between the "welfare officer" and users. Over time, it is easy to be ignored by users.

It is still necessary to occasionally post to Moments or push one-on-one activities, at least to let users know that they can find this account when they have problems, instead of treating it as a robot.

3. Conclusion

Finally, let’s summarize the highlights of the entire event:

• Various discount coupons and promotions increase user stickiness;
• Standardized operation time process reduces operation difficulty and improves operation efficiency;
• The clever setting of the product information page and group buying activities increases the fission effect.

The competition in community group buying is still in full swing, but traffic is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. As users have more and more choices, establishing one's own private traffic pool is undoubtedly a moat to maintain its continued competitiveness.

Author: Seeding sales

Source: Seeding sales