10 ways to attract new members in the education industry

I don’t know since when, a community trend has emerged in the education industry, and everyone is competing to see who has the largest number of community members, as if the number of community members has become a very important indicator for assessing a company’s business volume.

That is indeed true. The rise of communities has affected the front-end entry and new customer acquisition methods of many companies, especially for the education industry. Coupled with the "force majeure factors" in the general direction this year, many institutions that originally only did offline enrollment have to transform to online. For online enrollment, everyone has a tacit understanding of using the same entry point, which is community enrollment.

By attracting new users in the front-end community, the user circles are transformed into private domain traffic, and then through subsequent community operations, parents are guided to sign up for classes and renew their subscriptions.

Because the community can help you retain users and make multiple conversions, and at the same time you can use existing users to attract new users and gain more users. At the same time, the customer acquisition cost for educational institutions is already high. In order to reduce the customer acquisition cost, the WeChat community recruitment method has become relatively more "cost-effective".

Therefore, the base number of the front-end community openings will largely determine the conversion rate of institutional enrollment in the later stage. Using a commonly used institutional enrollment funnel model as an example, taking the lecture method as an example, only when more people join the group at the front end can the number of people watching the lecture be guaranteed, and then the course recommendation exposure after the lecture will ultimately determine the course conversion rate of this event.

In terms of attracting new members in the community, various institutions have various ways to attract as many people as possible. Here are some common ways for educational institutions to attract new members in the community:

1. Online

1. Group fission (information + free books)

The most commonly used method is community fission, especially in the education industry. Usually some electronic materials are packaged and organized, such as test paper collections, real question study packages, etc., and then packaged to make the content in the package appear very precious, thereby guiding users to invite people to join the group to receive the material package.

If you have the resources, you will use physical books as bait to achieve fission. In fact, physical things are definitely more attractive to users than virtual things. But if we use physical content to achieve fission, we need to calculate the average order value here, because it involves costs.

Usually, if physical content is used for fission, the cost is basically the cost of the book + the shipping cost divided by the number of people in the group to get the average order value.

So how do you control your average order value? We can divide the total cost by the number of people joining the group. If the final unit price of the number of people joining the group is lower than the market level, then we can do it. If the unit price obtained is higher than the market price, then you have to consider whether this activity is worth doing, or you can raise the threshold for receiving it so that it is ultimately equal to or lower than the market unit price. But we also need to consider the issue of user participation threshold. If we just control the unit price and ignore the height of the threshold, the end user will directly give up participating because of the participation threshold.

2. Full of people to send benefits

I think this can be done together with other activities. For example, when we do the group fission activity mentioned above, you can add another community incentive action on the basis of sending information books and inviting people to join. For example, when the group reaches a certain number of people, a wave of other benefits will be distributed.

The number of people is usually set at 100 or 200 people, and accumulated online in sequence. Of course, if it is a precise user group, it can also be set as an incentive for every 50 people. This will encourage users with a certain degree of influence to continue to invite people.

3. Open Class Fission

This is actually very simple, especially for the education industry, the most popular activity is definitely live lectures. We can use a lecture or a series of lectures as a gimmick for the event, and require users to share the poster on their Moments before they can join the group and attend the lectures.

There are two ways to share Moments. One is to put a virtual person QR code on the front poster. Users first add the virtual person, and then the virtual person guides them to share Moments. After taking screenshots and reviewing them, they are pulled into the group.

Another option is to create a registration group and a formal class group. Put the group QR code directly on the poster, and users can join by scanning the code. After joining the group, they can be guided to share it on WeChat Moments, and then take screenshots and add them to the group, thus bringing the formal class group closer. Of course, this requires the use of live codes and tools, because if the volume is large, the group QR code has a limit on the number of people, and the group needs to be changed.

4. Training camp recruitment + fission

Training camps are also a commonly used method for attracting new members and promoting activation in the education industry, but in many cases they are only used to promote activation and conversion of communities. In fact, community recruitment can also be carried out in the name of training camp recruitment.

For example, after the training camp activities are planned, what we need to do is to promote it and recruit a certain number of users to participate in the activities. At this time, we can design the copywriting and posters for external publicity. On the surface, the training camp is recruiting seed users, but in fact it can attract a new wave of people.

During the process, the training camp is usually done in conjunction with this mini program. Users can be guided to check in after completing the day's tasks, and the check-in poster can be automatically generated with a QR code. Because the mini program cannot force users to share their friends circle because it involves induced sharing, here we can use the community + mini program method to allow users to check in and share their friends circle every day. In the group, we can specify sharing rules. Users are required to share the poster to their friends circle after checking in every day to unlock the next level or tomorrow's related courses. At this time, new traffic can also be brought in through users' daily sharing.

5. Course group buying + flash sales

In the e-commerce industry, group buying and flash sales are very common, because on Taobao and Mobvoi, we can often see various products on promotion.

This logic can actually be applied to education, with just a slight change in the product. Taking Double Eleven as an example, we can select a course system, design an event poster, and emphasize the discount of this course on Double Eleven. Of course, the most important step is how to use activities to build up the group.

When promoting on the front end, you can add a small threshold to the activity, that is, you need to join a group to be eligible for the flash sale. Let users concentrate in one group, and when the activity starts, they can directly conduct the flash sale of courses in the group. This will also facilitate community conversion in the later stages.

6. Public account entrance diversion

Some branded institutions usually have their own official accounts, and attract followers by posting real-time policy reports and learning-related content.

It is actually easier for public accounts to cooperate with activities to attract fans, because it is more like an officially initiated activity. If an organization has a certain brand influence and a large number of fans, then embedding the entrance to the community in the menu bar of the public account is a good channel. In a month, the public account can also bring a certain amount of community traffic, and it is relatively accurate.

7. Competitive product group traffic

Many organizations that have just started to operate online do not have the resources and channels in this area, but do not want to spend money on promotion budgets, so they lurk in the competitor group to poach people, which means there is relatively little promotion cost involved. But to be honest, in the current WeChat ecosystem, I think the difficulty of poaching people from other groups has increased greatly.

Due to the strict enforcement of WeChat, if you add people to the group and are reported, you will face the risk of having your account blocked. If you lose an account just to get some traffic, it will not be worth it.

But if you look at it from a long-term perspective, it still has certain value. For example, you can continuously output content in other groups, establish an IP, and let other users actively add you. In this way, both the quality and the number of people coming will be improved.

In addition, from the perspective of later operations, you can also learn from the operational ideas of some competitors and see how they operate in the group, so as to improve your own operational capabilities in this area.

2. Offline

1. Ground push and pull group

Educational and training institutions usually conduct offline promotions, especially for some major test festivals, such as the high school entrance examination, college entrance examination, joint examination, art examination, CET-4 and CET-6 examinations, etc. Because they are very precise target users, during these examination periods, many institutions will recruit some part-time employees or mobilize department personnel to go out and distribute orders. Some of them will go directly to the scene to let parents scan the code to join the group and package the WeChat group, for example, they can get information by joining the group.

Regarding this area, I have previously written an article specifically about ground promotion in the education industry. If you are interested, you can take a look at it. "Efficient marketing methods applicable to the education industry"

2. Call in to the group

For organizations operating in the local market, user lists are a very important market resource. For some large organizations with certain resources, they hire some part-time workers to do outbound calls, the purpose of which is to build a group.

If you have thousands or even tens of thousands of accurate phone numbers, you can also set up a WeChat group of a certain size. Of course, it would be best to embed some information and benefits in the group, so as to convince more users to join the group.

3. Offline activities to attract traffic

Many organizations will hold offline activities to promote conversions, such as salons, exhibitions, etc. Through early invitations, guide them to attend the exhibition on site.

For this type of activity, we can also set up relevant on-site activity groups offline. For activities like this, most users will bring a friend to participate. Setting up an on-site group can facilitate subsequent conversions and bring this group of users into the same WeChat group. But in fact, it is more about bringing in new users.

In fact, in general, when it comes to attracting new members in the community, some of the ways of playing are actually similar, mainly open courses, training camps, giving away gifts to create group fission and other methods. Some companies can attract thousands or even tens of thousands of new traffic, while others can only attract dozens or hundreds of people. The key lies in the control of details during each activity.

So far, the education industry has always been a piece of cake in the market. Major companies want to get involved, including ByteDance, which recently announced the public release of its Dali Education brand and began to develop and enter the education field with all its strength. From the release of various signs, we can see from these events that the education industry cake, which has remained unchanged for a century, will begin to become smaller and smaller. Without strong teachers and very hard products, it will be difficult to survive in it.

Therefore, in the field of education, if you just attract people without strong products, you will not have a good reputation. For educational products, I think the product must come first, followed by customer acquisition.