As we all know, offline education itself has a tradition of acquiring customers through word-of-mouth. Moreover, word-of-mouth customer acquisition is a set of corporate operating system. It not only involves growth, but also involves products and services. It is even the fundamental guarantee for word-of-mouth customer acquisition.

In addition, with the help of the Internet, word-of-mouth customer acquisition has been greatly improved in efficiency, and the effect has been multiplied. This has brought about new ways of operational growth, one of which is the various ways and tools to bring in new customers.

Many online education companies have an unsystematic way of mentoring new employees.

The so-called system is to design strategies to bring in new customers around different types of products, because different products mean different types of users, which obviously conforms to the characteristics of refined operations.

We know that if we stratify users from outside to inside, they are potential users, intended users and paying users. Next, let’s take a look at what kind of strategies can be used to bring in new customers for different types of users.

01Strategy for bringing in new potential users

An effective strategy for bringing in new potential users is to give free lessons to friends.

Let me explain first, I define potential users here as newly registered users and users who have registered but have not purchased courses. The users they invite are generally taken over by free products, which is a means to attract new users by bringing in old users. The free products are free live classes by famous teachers and the accompanying coupons.

Case: An institution once initiated an invitation activity for free live classes.

First of all, if the old user successfully invites others, the rewards are coupon rewards (up to 100 yuan) and cash rewards (up to 200 yuan) accumulated based on the number of people.

For the former, only new users need to register for the course to receive it, and if 5 people register, they can get 100 yuan. For the latter, new users need to purchase the course to see the cash credited, and the cash amount depends on the new user's consumption amount and the number of invitations.

We need to know that potential users generally have low brand awareness and poor stickiness. For these inviters, the rewards should be more direct. In this activity, the most attractive reward is cash. Although the threshold for buying courses has been increased (the purpose is to ensure the quality of new customers), it has stimulated dissemination to a certain extent.

However, new users need to purchase courses before distribution can be carried out. In order to ensure sufficient traffic from invitations, it is reasonable to use coupons as a hook to induce crowdfunding fission. However, coupons are not very attractive to potential users unless it is promoted to pure old users. The event homepage highlights the 100 yuan coupon, which cannot help but make people feel contradictory.

Generally speaking, those who use free courses as a means to attract new users will match them with telemarketing conversions. It will not be possible to promote them solely by relying on potential users. In this case, the agency’s activities are obviously aimed at paying users who have just completed the conversion. Coupons can be used to increase the number of courses, and there are also cash incentives, which can alleviate the low stickiness to the brand to a certain extent.

Crowdfunding fission was mentioned earlier. The organization has also used blind box lottery assistance to enhance the spread of referrals. The specific logic is that if a user invites 4 newly registered users to complete the assistance, he can get a chance to draw a blind box. There are 9 blind boxes in total. In addition to opening one by yourself, 32 new users need to be attracted, which greatly improves the efficiency of attracting new users.

Of course, giving away free courses is not a new strategy. They have also made other attempts, especially in improving conversions.

This is a "three lessons" activity for high school students. After users click "get it for free" to log in or register, they have to select one box from nine boxes. Each box represents a course combination. After selection, they will be guided to share. This design increases retention time and brings users a different conversion experience. After forwarding is completed, they will also be guided to join the QQ group to further precipitate users to be converted. However, in the process of joining the group, they need to jump to the feed and cross the APP, which will inevitably increase the loss.

02Strategy for bringing in new customers

Now let’s look at the strategy of bringing in new potential users: invitations to low-priced classes with gifts. Designing activities to recruit new customers by focusing on low-priced courses is currently the core way for most online education institutions to acquire customers through referrals.

Users of low-priced courses are potential users, and they are likely to pay just by experiencing the course (which is actually not high, with the top being around 10%-20%, and most below 5%). The channels for acquiring this type of users mainly rely on delivery, channel cooperation, traffic pool conversion, etc., but because their stickiness is much higher than that of potential users, designing a referral mechanism can maximize the overall user scale of low-priced courses, and naturally convert more paying users.

In terms of operations, referrals for low-priced courses are generally divided into positive referrals to low-priced courses and low referrals to low-priced courses. The so-called "positive-to-lower" means mobilizing positive-priced users to bring in new low-priced course users through referrals, while "low-to-lower" means mobilizing users who have already signed up for low-priced courses to continue inviting new users.

Of course, invitations to low-priced classes with gifts can also expand the scope of users, for example, to registered users, which can utilize the social channels of all users except those who pay full price.

Generally speaking, full-priced users have independent referral activities, and judging from the growth configuration of leading companies, it is difficult to utilize all resources, and low-priced course resources are still the main focus.

Case: A referral program for a 9-yuan course initiated by an institution.

First, let’s look at the path: participate in the event with a public account - log in/register - generate posters and scripts - copy and save - forward to friends circle/community/friends - new users who meet the reward threshold purchase - verify and send rewards.

From the user's perspective, the entire path experience is relatively smooth, with a uniform red visual color, which reduces a lot of interference.

The main copy of the landing page highlights "Receive exquisite gifts", and the button copy for generating the poster is "I want to receive prizes", which makes the core information clear to users - participating in the event can give them physical prizes, reducing the cost of understanding.

In terms of reward strategy, we choose 1, 2, and 3 people as the reward levels, and mainly select products that help with learning and improving habits, such as stationery, alarm clocks, massagers, dictionaries, breakfast machines, etc. These give people an unconventional feeling and can stimulate users' interest in participation, especially pure registered users, who will feel that they can get a bargain.

In terms of sharing, posters only provide a style, not an optional mode like poster walls. Although it shortens the path to a certain extent, the sharing rate may not necessarily increase, which remains to be discussed. It is also worth noting that an invitation text is also provided, and its position is very eye-catching, and the words reminding to copy are also very clear, which is a great help for users who have a strong desire to share.

The poster highlights the "5 free memory master classes", which is obviously using social trust and free hooks to increase the conversion rate of new users. However, there are actually small print reminding that you must purchase the 9 yuan class, and the QR code also marks 9 yuan, which will cause ambiguity among users and affect the conversion rate.

Overall, the agency’s invitation gift strategy does not have much novelty. The product selection has certain reference value, but the poster design is a failure. It violates the principle of starting from the user’s perspective and needs to be carefully learned from.

03Strategy for bringing in new paying users

Analyze the last strategy of old employees bringing in new employees: invitation and tuition refund. Inviting students to get tuition refunds is commonly known as "regular users bringing in regular users", which is obviously a strategy designed for old users to bring in new users (for K12, this means long-term class users).

Because K12 requires long-term services, renewing classes and expanding subjects are high-probability events for users. Obviously, the cheaper the better. Inviting tuition refunds just meets their needs for low-price repeat purchases. In addition, the quality of the social circles of paying users is very high, and the recommended users must be the most accurate among all channels. If the "positive leading positive" can be made bigger and stronger, it will be very valuable to the company.

Case: An institution once initiated an invitation to refund tuition fees.

We analyze from the old user side and the new user side separately. The old user end mainly includes activity landing page, old user rewards, posters, etc. The color matching of the entire landing page is not very comfortable. The blue does not match the red brand tone and easily creates a sense of blur. Moreover, the "blue-bordered white text" copy does not stand out, which is a visual shortcoming.

In addition, although the entire activity is about old customers bringing in new customers, another activity of old customers bringing in new customers is embedded in it, which can easily divert old users and reduce the overall participation. Users can easily confuse the two activities.

Let’s take a look at the rewards for old users. They are very simple, namely coupons with an amount ranging from 30 yuan to 200 yuan.

I looked at the policy carefully, and it is actually not easy to understand, because the tuition fees are divided into two tiers, which are probably designed according to the course type or user consumption attributes: the first tier is for consumption less than 500 yuan, and a 30 yuan refund will be given for each person invited to sign up for a long-term class; the second tier is for consumption more than 500 yuan, and a 50 yuan refund will be given for inviting the first person, 60 yuan for inviting the second person, and so on, with a maximum refund of 200 yuan.

In other words, new users are divided into two levels: low-consumption level and high-consumption level. The former will return 30 yuan no matter how many people are invited, and the amount can be accumulated infinitely. The latter will return 10 yuan more each time until it reaches 200 yuan, and it can also accumulate infinitely thereafter.

This kind of reward design can actually cultivate and screen out real cash cow users. This type of users brings the most high-intent users, that is, the most new users who contribute more than 500 yuan. In addition, for those low-engagement users who lack social resources but want to recommend, there is also a bargain (30 yuan is also money), so the overall scale of inviting new users will be considerable.

Looking at the poster part, there are two poster generation methods: one is the poster wall, which can provide multiple posters, and the other is the official account that pops up ready-made posters and scripts. From the user's perspective, the latter is better because it is more relevant to high-frequency scenarios and easy to spread. VIPKID has always adhered to this strategy.

Finally, let’s analyze the new user end. The benefits given to new users are free live classes and two 9.5% off long-term class discount cards, which are uniformly packaged as a welcome gift. To be honest, it is not very attractive. It may be better for potential users who understand it. If the users are from the outside circle, the appeal can be more abundant.

An interesting phenomenon was discovered here. When old users enter the new user page, they will be prompted to participate in other old-to-new activities, such as the free live classes for friends mentioned at the beginning of this article. Perhaps the two activities are the same old-to-new system, because the free live classes for friends have a crowdfunding fission design, which can provide more frequent hooks and lower the invitation threshold.

In my opinion, such a design is not necessarily a good choice, because users will feel confused. I think it is better to be specific and use only one strategy for a type of user. You can continuously optimize the single strategy. Repeated nesting is tantamount to harvesting.

04 Conclusion

In fact, the way old employees bring in new employees is not static for any company. Some strategies will disappear, some will survive, and there will be new cases emerging one after another, waiting for us to discover. Old employees bringing in new ones has become a new trend in online education customer acquisition in 2021. It will be worth looking forward to who will win in this important growth area.

Author: Wild Solitary Fungus

Source: Wild Sophora japonica