How can physical stores tap into private domain traffic?

In the years when the online economy, represented by Taobao e-commerce, experienced explosive growth, various voices frequently emerged - the real economy will gradually shrink. To this day, many practitioners are still facing huge challenges while constantly thinking about solutions. It all comes down to thinking clearly and solving one question - what is the biggest dilemma facing entities?

As a physical store, what it seems to lack most is the design of the traffic entrance. In essence, the physical store operators lack the concept of traffic in their thinking and business philosophy, and they are confused about the true meaning of traffic. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there is awareness but no method - there is will but no power.

Entity is tradition, private domain is the future. The private domain mentioned here does not specifically refer to the mobile Internet tool WeChat. In fact, whether it is a physical store or current e-commerce, the essence of private domain traffic is to increase LTV and reduce CAC.

Let me explain the logic of this business model - if you don’t know who bought your product, this is a traditional enterprise; if you know who bought your product, this is a future enterprise. Private domain operations, data-based management, self-operated KOC... are all channels to the future.

From the perspective of user growth, tradition and the future are concepts of quantitative and incremental. Traditionally, a purchase is a consumption, and the next consumption is a long way off. In the private domain, a purchase is a one-time purchase, which will last a lifetime and be continuously operated. In this process, the user value will be gradually amplified through operational means. The key point lies in the innovation of the business model. However, it is more about the expansion and improvement of the business model than innovation. If the entity needs to complete its evolution and growth, it must open up an integrated online and offline operation model.

Let's get to the point. All physical store operators or businesses, regardless of size, should first pay attention to the fact that you must value every customer who comes to your store and treat them sincerely (even if they have no demand for your products or services). Don’t learn from some luxury goods store clerks whose eyes are on the top of their heads, or from a certain car brand that has to sit on the hood and cry to get justice... Customers are not God, but they are our bread and butter, and the source of a company’s survival and development. It is important to recognize the reality.

In this process, there is actually something to be done for every sensory touchpoint, from vision to touch to interactive interaction. All of these must be designed according to your own store and product (service) mechanism to attract and retain customers in the private domain system... In the current environment, if you want to run a good physical store, relying solely on the natural traffic coming and going in front of the store, it is difficult not to be stretched with high rents and operating costs. If you can still live a comfortable life, it means that you really have your own core competitiveness.

But from my observation, most physical stores are struggling to survive, and the life cycle of newly opened stores is very short. In this situation, what is the point of talking about poetry and distant places...

Let me share a case first - Baodao Glasses. This is a very rare and highly valuable case for reference - for most physical stores and physical business enterprises. You may not have such a scale, but the innovations made by Baodao Glasses, even if you only extract a few links to learn and implement, the increase in overall sales is clearly visible.

Baodao Glasses, a company founded in 1979, has 1,200 stores across the country. It started digital operations in 2015 and has successfully transformed its employees into more than 7,000 KOCs across the entire network. As of this year, Baodao Glasses has more than 30 million members, and all of them are maintained and connected through private domain tools. This data is roughly equivalent to this concept. For example, it is equivalent to you creating an account with 30 million active fans with needs, and this account has strong interaction and stickiness. What value do you think this account will generate? Think about it again, what is the positioning and function of your physical store at this time?

Mr. Wang Zhimin, CEO of Baodao Glasses, participated in the transformation throughout the entire chain. He launched a digital business strategy under extremely unfavorable circumstances, opened up links, and established models to achieve counter-cyclical growth, with a 5% growth during the epidemic. This achievement is not accidental, but the result of accumulation and precipitation.

The counter-cyclical growth of Baodao Glasses is entirely due to the change in corporate thinking - from the original business logic to social logic, and from the brand and store marketing to the creation of optometrists and the output of professional value .

Nowadays, many people are no longer unfamiliar with private domain traffic. Many industries have already started to practice it, including retail, fresh food, supermarkets, beauty, etc. Well-known brands in different fields have been building their own private domain traffic pools, and through efficient private domain access, they continue to amplify user value...

Among these cases, not only the Baodao Glasses mentioned above, but also Watsons, P&G, Walmart, Pop Mart, Uniqlo, and Jomoo... have achieved remarkable results in the application and practice of private domain operation tools such as WeChat and mini programs and the entire network's self-media matrix. Companies such as Baiguoyuan, Watsons, and UR have linked shopping guides and members/consumers through private domains, rapidly expanded the scale of online sales, and obtained unexpected returns.

However, most people still stop at the starting stage, and some are still on the road, groping, stepping on pitfalls or conceptualizing. During this process, I am very familiar with most of the modules and have formed best practices. I can completely break them down and share each link in detail.

The difficulty is that as a physical enterprise, you must believe and determine that this thing can bring about the evolution of your business model. At the same time, you must have keen insight and forward-looking thinking, and be able to perceive the power of breaking through the private domain earlier than others and start to lay out.

In order for physical stores to develop private domains, they need to establish an ecosystem in the system. This is a complete closed-loop business model. The basic plate must include "store + mini program + APP + community + official account + corporate account + personal account + self-media matrix + after-sales system ". However, it is limited by the product configuration, organizational structure and advantageous resources of each enterprise (physical store), which does not mean that every item in this system needs to be done.

My personal opinion is to simplify complex things, find your expertise and core strengths, start with one or two points, and improve through practice. Next, I will share some practical tips. When you don’t have the funds and resources of a large enterprise, the following things are particularly applicable to small and micro enterprises. If you do them well, you can directly see the growth of performance:

1. Store experience upgrade
2. Drainage path design
3. Contact Embedding
4. Sticky conversion strategy
5. Self-media matrix construction

1. Upgrade the store experience

Think about it: If you run a physical store, do you know what is the most important thing for a physical store? Or to put it this way, why is a physical store called a physical store? What is its biggest advantage over online stores?

The underlying logic: the store is the entrance to traffic

The upgrade of store experience determines the customer's residence time and touchpoints, and the residence time and touchpoints determine your traffic opportunities and pre-buried traffic embedding points. Whether or not you can successfully attract customers requires a complete mechanism.

If you observe carefully, you will find that many offline stores are already using private domain tools to achieve growth. There are many ways and methods, and they are very flexible. Several common and effective strategies include: first, preferential policies, adding discounts, coupons, exemptions, etc.; second, free guidance and consultation; and third, free delivery.

The biggest difference between physical stores and online stores is experience. From a human perspective, the most direct experience comes from the senses: vision, smell, touch, hearing... The overall design of experience upgrade is divided into two categories: one is hardware facilities, and the other is soft environment (service perception).

To put it simply, the execution level is about the decoration (features, details, culture) and the professional qualities of the service staff. To improve these two aspects, just stick to one principle - wherever the above senses can reach, wherever there is room for improvement, it should be optimized.

If you are limited by funds, you can simplify the store experience upgrade work, but the store must be clean, tidy and well-planned. As for the service, it is very dependent on manpower and requires systematic training. From the aspects of dress, appearance, reception, speech, affinity, etc., Haidilao is a model entity. Experience and learn more to learn from each other's strengths and overcome one's weaknesses.

The only thing that needs to be reminded is that during the service process, you should find the right time to enter through word of mouth, guide customers to scan the code, and divert traffic to the private domain. For this work, as long as the store staff are aware of this, they can quickly test out the best practices (one week is a cycle) and share and summarize them every morning and evening. This practice is then compiled into a case, formulated into a standardized work process, and an incentive mechanism is designed, with all employees exploring, optimizing, and iterating together.

At this stage, small-scale businesses (stores) do not need to rely on system tools and can complete the task through manpower, which is more intuitive and gives a clearer feeling.

2. Drainage Path Design

After the store experience is upgraded, it is time to start deploying stores, which is to design the paths for attracting traffic. Path design is actually about finding a handle for traffic diversion . We have always emphasized user portraits. In fact, the traffic diversion path also has portraits, and in this path, user behavior portraits are even more important. This model requires collecting data and information based on the actual situation of your physical store.

The user behavior portrait mentioned here refers to the big data of the customer's behavior trajectory from entering the store to leaving. In layman's terms, where the customer first looks after entering the store, which direction he takes the first step, where he stops, what products he is interested in, what questions he asks the waiter, and when the service staff intervenes...

After establishing this model, it can not only provide a reference for setting up the gripper for operations, but more importantly, in terms of the drainage path, we can manually control and design it (think about the path you take when visiting certain scenic spots, and the flow of people in some shopping malls).

To give a simple example, the promotional materials at the entrance of a store are the first entrance. The subsequent paths can be deduced based on user behavior. The poster below has a good design and a good publicity gimmick, but unfortunately, there is no drainage entrance. If the shop owner guides these customers into the private domain, keeps the circle of friends updated every day, creates groups and organizes appropriate and interesting activities, the user's continued repurchase behavior will be constantly stimulated.

3. Contact Embedding

First entrance: front foyer

The shop signs, posters and welcome signs at the entrance of a physical store will give customers an intuitive feeling and impression at the first time. If the physical store is not doing well and there are few customers, what kind of creativity do you need to use to attract attention, make people stop, take pictures, scan the code and even share it...

If you observe carefully, you will find that at least 90% of offline stores do not make good use of this entrance. Is business good? Customers need to wait, what can we do during this waiting time? The same logic applies, making full use of the window of boredom when users are waiting (the essence of Focus Media’s elevator media is to take advantage of the audience’s boredom and use this opportunity to create value for users). These all need to be planned and designed according to the actual situation of the physical store.

Second entrance: Staff

After the customer enters the store, how should the staff greet and guide them? When should they add WeChat? Should they add a public account, a corporate account, or a personal account? What is the reason? This requires an opportunity and should be designed based on the product/service. I generally recommend using public accounts, which are essentially for content accumulation and will be responsible for distribution once the traffic is large enough.

In my past practice, the core functions of the official account are also these two points, which are used for content display (marketing material sedimentation) and distribution (personal number QR code). Moreover, the functionality and scalability of official accounts will be better.

Let’s take Baiguoyuan as an example. Customers of their stores are basically guided by shopping guides to follow the official account first and then register as members. Then, the official account tweets include the mini program for group buying. Users click on the official account content and jump to the mini program. The only thing you need to do here is to train your store staff, let them test based on the above data, and then summarize and share to form a set of standard processes.

The third entry point: payment

After the store completes the transaction, what needs to be designed is how to get the customer to come back again. This is the core logic. To sum it up in one sentence: give customers a reason to come back. (Follow the official account/add WeChat to get discounts, coupons, discounts, etc., depending on the products and services)

The above three entrances are actually a coordinated process. There is no need to repeat them to avoid customer disgust and repeated visits. If one link is not added before moving on to the next link, there will always be a link that touches the customer. However, when we actually do it, it is definitely not limited to the above methods.

Store traffic diversion is itself a highly flexible thing, and people play a big role, which requires us to see clearly, understand and look at it with an open mind. Through a systematic approach, we just want to cultivate people's awareness and get closer to our strategic demands. This is the level of Tao. But all of this cannot be idealized, and all technologies must be optimized and iterated in practice. In addition, it is necessary to do daily summaries and data statistics, and create tables for data management and user stratification, which involve operational work.

4. Stickiness and Conversion Strategy

This section is all about operations, and one point that needs to be made clear is that stickiness and conversion complement each other, and the difference lies in priority. Whether to build stickiness or conversion first depends on product attributes and whether extended services are needed. In addition, both conversion and stickiness require a character to maintain. It’s not that other characters are not possible, but only characters have soul, emotion, and warmth. This is the eternal underlying rule of private domain traffic operations. Several roles for reference (not absolute, depends on the product):

1. Consultant/Assistant, Universal, Mass Consumer Products;
2. Experts/talents are suitable for the operation of consumer groups with very obvious characteristics, such as health and education categories;
3. Private/exclusive roles, suitable for products, services or fitness industries with high average order value;

Stickiness comes from interaction, value output and accumulation of cognition (impression). In this process, angle positioning and content output are very critical, and content operation needs to be done well. Another thing is, appropriate event marketing and topic marketing. The third point is to interact and communicate more with customers. Conversions are mostly created by discounts, value and trust. Most users have to be "nurtured" to achieve conversion. Therefore, focus on content, make good products, and constantly show your valuable side, and conversion will come naturally.

Social media is a pretty good conversion tool, especially in the fast-moving consumer goods category. It is the core of many companies’ private domain strategies. They will guide users of offline stores to their respective community groups as soon as possible. Each offline store will have 2-3 or even more WeChat groups, with each small group having about 200 people and a large group having 400-500 people, and group purchases and activities will be promoted in them every day. If you use groups to make conversions, activities and creating an atmosphere within the group are the core.

In addition, you can also try to use the common live broadcast tools. Of course, if you have live broadcast embedding points, you can also distribute users to the live broadcast room.

5. Construction of self-media matrix

Whether to do this or not depends on your marketing thinking. There is no need to elaborate on the basics, such as Weibo, official accounts, and Douyin... In addition, based on the characteristics of the physical store and the product audience, you can choose platforms such as Dianping to pre-embed content and promote products (Xiaohongshu is also a high-quality price comparison platform).

The functions of the self-media matrix are exposure and traffic diversion.

Let’s focus on TikTok here. Douyin is another super traffic portal outside the private domain ecosystem, and the key lies in content operation. Attract user interaction through high-quality and interesting content, and finally import it into the private city traffic pool.

Take the fresh produce example mentioned above, Baiguoyuan’s “Suck a Coconut” challenge. During the shooting process, they upgraded the brand visual effects, put labels on the products, exposed the brand, and then launched the challenge. The entire video has been viewed over 600 million times. After seeing the content, many users actively seek out their communities for consultation, which completes the import of private city traffic. After that, the store manager will also initiate group buying for users to purchase directly, which completes the sales conversion...

In addition, according to the positioning of the physical store, product attributes and user portraits, choose suitable communication channels, which are nothing more than mainstream media platforms such as Weibo, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Toutiao, Zhihu, etc. It should be noted that you should choose the priority according to the target group. Whether to do content dissemination or grass-planting depends on your demands and operational configuration.

at last

To sum up, if physical stores want to operate private domain traffic well:

• First, upgrade physical stores and optimize the experience;
• Secondly, open up drainage paths and build reservoirs;
• Secondly, O2O integrated operation and model establishment;
• From this, we will develop a self-media matrix to expand the traffic channels and improve conversion;
• Finally, carry out meticulous operations for users to enhance stickiness and encourage continuous repurchase.

Let me say a little more. This point is very important. I deliberately put it at the end. There is not much content, but it is very crucial. In one sentence: ideal results in most cases require professionals to complete them. People are the most basic and important configuration in a business model.

above.

Author: Xiao Su Ge morning

Source: Xiaosuge morning