How does Tongcheng operate blind boxes that are popular all over the Internet?

Tongcheng Travel spent only 9 yuan to buy the real-name information of every user participating in the event, stimulating the social fission of each user and accelerating the construction of its own WeChat ecological community...

It’s not wrong for users to want to get something for free, but Tongcheng’s marketing strategy makes every user a “digital laborer” who works hard to achieve Tongcheng’s KPI goal of attracting new customers.

1. The explosion of Tongcheng blind box on the Internet is not accidental

On March 4, the official account "Tongcheng Air Tickets" published a tweet titled "Open the 98 yuan air ticket blind box, don't like it? Full refund!", and the "Tongcheng" 98 yuan air ticket blind box was officially launched on the mini program. However, surrounded by similar products such as Qunar's 99 yuan blind box and China Southern Airlines' adventure travel, most travel KOLs have looked down on this product, believing it to be a waste of money.

Compared to Qunar, which uses real money to subsidize blind boxes, Tongcheng is like our plastic sisters. They want to hold a decent event but have no money. They have no money but want to eat the cake in the OTA (online travel) market. After much deliberation, the product manager finally squeezed out such a weird product.

On April 2, a post titled "Others buy tickets to Sanya, Qingdao and Shanghai for 98 yuan, but I buy tickets from Chengdu to Daocheng!!" instantly became a hot topic on Douyin. As of 2021/04/04, the total number of views of Douyin topics #Air Ticket Blind Box and #98 Yuan Blind Box Air Ticket exceeded 100 million, and the Air Ticket Blind Box officially became popular on the entire Internet.

1. Timing: User travel demand has increased significantly

In early April, the country began to organize and promote the comprehensive vaccination of the new crown vaccine, and people were no longer afraid of the virus. At this time, the number of users willing to travel increased significantly, which led to price increases and out-of-stock air tickets.

At the same time, most airlines’ blind boxes for air tickets have been taken off the shelves, and the remaining "China Southern Airlines Adventure Travel Blind Box has also changed its purchasing rules", which has been criticized by users. As a result, the Tongcheng blind box, which was once regarded as a useless product, began to enter the public eye. On the Douyin platform with a DAU of over 100 million, a seemingly ordinary copywriting video officially fired the first shot of OTA blind boxes in spring.

2. Geographical advantage: the product logic behind blind boxes

Although the business form of air tickets is different from that of Pop Mart, in essence, the logic is the same: "Consumer users' curiosity and expectations of the unknown." Opening the blind box of air tickets is a process of making a small investment for a big gain. The price of 98 yuan is already a bargain compared to the air tickets sold on OTA platforms. Finally, the blind box can be returned if not used, which provides the last layer of insurance for the blind box. From the user's perspective, if the air ticket is reasonable, you can travel; if it is not reasonable, you can get it for free.

3. Renhe: Pinduoduo’s community fission model

Everyone laughs at Pinduoduo, and everyone is Pinduoduo. Tongcheng uses a blind box of air tickets at a bargain price of 98 yuan as a "hook" to attract high-quality seed users to participate. After the seed users are awakened, they first undergo a wave of real-name authentication and then invite 5 friends to help. The 5 supporting friends invited 25 more friends to support again. By repeatedly attracting new members, splitting and attracting new members, they achieved viral spread and increased the popularity of their own activities. On the evening of April 2, the search volume of Tongcheng Travel APP successfully topped the iOS list in the tourism field.

2. How does Tongcheng operate blind boxes that are popular on the entire Internet?

1. Product cold start

The launch process of Tongcheng Blind Box was not as highly publicized as other blind boxes. It only released a tweet through Tongcheng’s official account, and other promotional channels such as Weibo and APP banners were not used. Under this premise, people who can access the product in the early stage are already experienced travel enthusiasts. They love to explore new things and are willing to experience blind boxes and give feedback.

This may be due to the hasty launch of the product. In the early stage of the product, the blind box had too many bugs, such as: "ticket sales date does not match, ticket issuance error", which caused the first batch of users to complain. Fortunately, Tongcheng also absorbed user feedback, constantly fixed its own bugs, and through its own efforts, retained these high-quality seed users.

After polishing its own products, Tongcheng changed the traditional way of reaching out through banners and closed platforms, and its operations staff chose to use open platforms such as Douyin to reach out. Tongcheng Blind Box, a product that combines low price, uncertain destination and uncertain date, with copywriting that openly complains but secretly praises, quickly achieved its goal of reaching users and gained a large number of users on third-party platforms.

2. Simplify the user purchase process

From the initial requirement of 5 friends to help each other at the beginning of the event, to the requirement of 3 friends to help each other in the middle stage, and then to the current hidden friends to help each other, the participation threshold of the event has been continuously lowered, allowing more people to participate in this event at a lower cost. The reason is that the number of people reached by the activity has exceeded the expected number of people set for the activity. For the sake of the experience of those customers who have been reached but did not purchase the product, we have to give up further efforts to attract new customers.

Tongcheng's operation goal is not to attract new users in the short term, but to retain all users. Therefore, they are not in a hurry to attract new users, but give existing users who have not purchased the product the opportunity to experience it. We can see this from the three consecutive sales sessions held by Tongcheng Blind Box on April 3 (in the previous 25 days, there was a single sale at 10 am every day).

3. Understand the user's audience psychology

Every company uses blind box promotions in 2021, so why is Tongcheng the only one that’s popular? The fundamental reason is that Tongcheng is very good at grasping the user mentality. People are social animals, and everyone has the need to get emotions from others. Tongcheng has firmly grasped this point, and with the help of Douyin, a traffic monster, through the topics #98 yuan blind box air ticket and #air ticket blind box,

It triggers a competitive mentality among users. Then they will go to participate. No matter whether they win a ticket to fly within the same province at a huge loss or a ticket to fly to Sanya or Shanghai at a huge profit, it will trigger their emotions of complaining or showing off. This sentiment will dominate user groups in expressing their opinions on social platforms. Up to now, the total playback traffic of Douyin has reached nearly 100 million, and the hot topic on Weibo #Blind Box Air Ticket has also reached 2.6 million popularity. In the more private circle of friends, countless users spontaneously promoted Tongcheng Blind Box Air Ticket, and in a short period of time, Tongcheng Blind Box Air Ticket successfully broke the circle.

3. Is Tongcheng Blind Box really doing charity?

From the perspective of ROI, we can analyze the cost expenditure and profit return of Tongcheng.

1. The cost of attracting new customers is extremely low

I randomly dug up the flight data of 20 users on the Douyin platform, and calculated the average subsidy cost of users based on the difference between the flight price and the blind box price on that day.

From the samples, we can find that the flight dates are basically weekdays, and the flight times are basically red-eye flights. Of course, due to the insufficient sample size of the data, there may be a suitable time point to fly. Let’s get back to the subsidy cost. The cost range of a single flight subsidy fluctuates between 82 yuan and 352 yuan. Of course, there may be higher subsidies, but judging from the average, the subsidies will not be too high.

Coming back to the point, if every user really redeems the air ticket, Tongcheng will need to subsidize an average of 184.85 yuan per ticket. Isn't this a real bargain for users? This is where the problem arises. With air tickets now gradually recovering, what flights can be taken with an average single ticket price of around 285 yuan? To give an intuitive answer, the blind box is likely to contain early or late flights in the same province on weekdays, or low-cost flights at good times, but without any checked baggage allowance.

These moments are often on Monday or Sunday nights, so for office workers, this part of users will not redeem the items and will simply give up and end their blind box dream. Therefore, from a realistic perspective, the number of people who actually choose to redeem the ticket may be less than 5%, and the cost per registered user is only 9 yuan, or even lower.

2. High rate of return

For Tongcheng, using the cost of 9 yuan to acquire a potential user is not only not a loss, but a huge profit. When users are trying to get free deals, they need to use their real-name information and phone number for authentication. This is Tongcheng’s first profit point, the user’s personal information. Secondly, in the process of user payment, Tongcheng has completed the first payment ice-breaking behavior, completing an actual payment through the behavior of purchase-lottery-refund, and guiding users to develop purchasing habits. This can be seen in the second wave of activity on April 22.

Tongcheng’s third profit point is to significantly improve the construction of WeChat’s ecological community. Tongcheng has its own APP, but the company’s slogan is: Tongcheng travel hidden in WeChat payment. Tongcheng hopes to use the convenience of mini programs and the WeChat traffic pool to encourage users to develop the habit of purchasing on WeChat and accelerate the construction of the integrated Tencent ecosystem as much as possible.

Author: Lee's self-review

Source: Lee's self-review