Case Practice | Is scanning QR code for door-to-door marketing still effective in 2021?

It’s already 2021, is door-to-door QR code scanning still useful for education businesses?

My answer is yes.

Some time ago, the company went to Xuzhou to organize offline promotion activities. In the subsequent data statistics, the effect was surprisingly different compared with online channels!

• User traffic increased by more than 40% year-on-year;
• The conversion rate increased by about 20%;
• Labor costs have dropped significantly by about 50%;

Overall, the traffic generated by offline QR code scanning this time far exceeds that of online channels in terms of user accuracy and conversion rate.

However, some unexpected things happened during this period.

As a full participant in the project, I summarized and reviewed the entire project, and shared the details of the entire planning ideas and execution process in full, hoping to be inspiring to everyone!

1. Preparation

Our ground promotion is not completely the traditional ground promotion, but an innovative ground promotion. Offline is responsible for capturing accurate traffic fans, while online is responsible for taking over this part of the traffic and completing subsequent community retention and conversion work.

So based on the above understanding and knowledge, we need to think about some issues before executing the activity:

• How much traffic can a personal account or community handle, and what will be the total amount of precise traffic it will face?
• When promoting through scanning codes, what kind of content do we need to provide to make users willing to stay and share on social media?
• Have the subsequent user retention and conversion work been designed?

The reason for thinking about these issues is that we will encounter uncontrollable problems in offline marketing, such as whether we can carry out marketing activities by scanning codes at the entrance of the examination room, etc. These are unknown factors, so we need to plan online maintenance in advance to ensure that the traffic brought by the offline marketing will not be lost and to increase community activity.

To give an analogy, attracting traffic through ground marketing activities is like filling a bucket with water. If there is a problem with the bucket, no matter how much water we introduce, it will be of no use!

Next, I will review the event background, specific processes, common problems, etc.

2. Activity Background

Xuzhou will organize a written test for teacher recruitment on July 29th and 30th, and will organize an interview test about half a month after the written test. Subsequently, major institutions will accumulate new users for the interview class through this ground promotion activity, and our goal is to win users for the teacher recruitment exam.

It should be added that the users of this event are taking written tests, so the traffic is pouring in rapidly in a short period of time, which places relatively high demands on the work account's carrying capacity and time. It is also necessary to prepare subsequent plans to avoid problems with the account and miss the best time for traffic entry.

The activity was carried out in such a background!

3. Specific process

First, here is a planning mind map.

This is the arrangement of the ground promotion activities and the subsequent conversion content, including the activity time, activity process, supplementary content, etc., so that everyone can have a general understanding of this event!

Establish an online conversion group: On the 28th, we established ten communities for each test center based on work accounts, among which the work accounts were mainly six new accounts and supplemented by two old accounts.

Start promotion: There was only one regional exam on the morning of the 29th, so we had enough energy to monitor the captured traffic, and any disruptions or competitors stealing traffic during the period were promptly cleared out of the group. The community's performance is very good in terms of both activity and retention rate, and its status is tending to be stable.

Stabilize traffic and stop losses in time: In the afternoon of the same day, when traffic began to flow in, our work WeChat account was too new, and we had been using third-party management software to send texts and files in the community, which resulted in three accounts being blocked to varying degrees of violations.

Not only did we suspend the use of third-party platform services, all accounts also stopped receiving traffic, and asked offline colleagues to use private accounts to temporarily create groups to re-take over the traffic and minimize the losses.

Based on the problems of the previous day, we decided to establish a community based on the offline team's private account to receive traffic from scanning the code, and the work account will act as a community administrator to manage the community content in a timely manner.

This not only reduces the risk of work accounts being blocked, but also allows the online team to play a corresponding role!

In the community, we will deliver different content according to the time nodes. For example, after the first day of the exam, we explained the exam questions to the students through open classes.

Due to insufficient preparation this year, the exam questions were obtained from competitors. It just so happened that the exam had major changes this year, so everyone got very few exam questions, which just happened to cover up our shortcomings!

Active conversion: At the same time, online operations will first meet the needs of users entering the community with the collected traffic, and then transfer users in the banned community. After the account becomes stable, we will take over the community work and then carry out community maintenance work.

I thought everything would go smoothly here, but...

But when we took over the community, we found very serious problems!

4. Unexpected issues and details

1) Problems with poor follow-up operations after community traffic generation

Due to lack of timely maintenance, the community has lost a lot of users, and there is no communication within the community, turning it into a "dead group"!

We can only bite the bullet and do some activation actions, such as notifying everyone that this group is no longer in use, and that they can join the big group in time to watch tonight's real test analysis and other baits.

As a result, we found that many users joined the main group as required. This made me understand one thing. Although many users are unwilling to communicate in the community, they have always been paying attention to the community, so we need to deliver content that can meet their needs in a timely manner!

During this period, there were also problems caused by part-time partners, such as demanding wages, joking with each other, and other issues that disrupted the order of the group. This required repeated emphasis on the work content and corresponding rules!

2) Deactivate the QR code for the community entrance in a timely manner

Everyone also needs to pay attention to the need to deactivate the social QR code in a timely manner! For example, if a candidate takes the exam at 3 o'clock, the community QR code can be deactivated before the exam. This can effectively prevent non-target users from entering our community or advertisers from sending irrelevant information to the community.

3) Material differences have an impact on drainage

When we were promoting offline, we found that there were some differences in the materials people chose!

For example, some competitors choose to distribute some stationery exam bags to attract people to scan the code and join the group, while we use pre-exam topic materials.

In terms of effect, both have their own advantages and disadvantages. There is basically no waste of stationery, but non-candidates also need it, it is not very targeted, and the cost is more expensive than general promotional materials.

Although subject knowledge has a lower cost and can filter out non-candidate users, it suffers from serious waste of materials and often results in a mess.

4) There are pitfalls in the conversion process!

We made a serious mistake in designing the subsequent conversion process!

Because we did not finalize the interview class information in a timely manner, we had no interview class content to communicate with users in the early stages, and thus lost a lot of potential users.

In contrast, competitors have designed subsequent conversion work in advance. For example, a company pushes mock exam content before the written test, promotes interview classes during the test, and arranges classes for everyone after the test, thus seizing the market in a timely manner and following up very quickly.

Not only that, they rarely release topic prediction information to the community, and focus all their energy on obtaining the latest regional announcements.

For example, they put the course promotion in the table of written test scores, and pushed the processed notices to the community as soon as possible, cleverly using the notices as a carrier to spread the course content, and coupled with one-to-one sales contact, greatly improving the course conversion rate.

In short, numerous problems occurred, and this hectic process made me actively reflect after the event, and summarize some of the most important and critical issues of this promotion.

5. Important content - Summary of thoughts on the most critical part of the activity

There are two key factors for this offline push scanning code:

1) How many users can be received and how to turn traffic into retention!

Since the scanning situation of this offline promotion is rather special, the time requirement is extremely strict. Once the user traffic exceeds the maximum carrying capacity, the best opportunity to scan the code and capture users will be missed. It is necessary to have a backup plan to stop the loss in time.

2) When traffic comes in, the online operations team needs to find a way to retain users in a timely manner

For example, in order to meet their needs, we divided the time nodes to release different contents. When students were waiting for the exam, we released some predicted questions, knowledge frameworks and other contents to the community;

After the exam, we put out reference answers, encourage students to share their test questions, and prepare open classes on analysis, etc.

Users will also have some of their own "needs that they actively express", and we must also meet them in a timely manner. For example, after the exam, many students will ask in the group "Can I pass the exam with this score?" We will push the admission scores of previous years, and during this period we will use private accounts to stimulate the community by saying "A classmate of mine checked the answers, how many points did he get?" to get everyone talking.

In short, we need to create value that meets their needs, and preferably provide content that exceeds their expectations, thereby solving the question "Why should I join this community?" so that users stay. This is not only the key point we should consider when building a community, but also the key to subsequent retention and conversion issues.

Of course, first of all, we need to ensure that the traffic we can capture is of high quality and can be turned into usable "assets". This is the basic premise.

Finally, here is an inventory of some “deceptive details” in field marketing, hoping to help everyone avoid the pitfalls.

6. Common Problems - Practical Details and Pitfall Avoidance Guide

1) Create more groups to prevent problem groups from causing process interruptions

During the use of the community, unexpected situations may easily occur, causing the community to be unsuitable for further use.

For example, a part-time QR code scanner at a primary school examination center pulled parents who were registering their children for primary school into a community, but decisively abandoned the community after discovering problems.

Of course, there are also cases where competitors disrupt the community and maliciously insult people, but this will not affect too many users and reduce the negative impact on the community.

2) Be careful to avoid account violations

The disadvantage is that the work accounts are under too much pressure. On the afternoon of the first day of the event, three accounts were blocked and the remaining accounts received official warnings, which indirectly led to the loss of management of the community.

This is not only because of the large amount of traffic in a short period of time, but also because of the use of third-party management software to @ students in the group and push information.

Due to the above reasons, accounts have been blocked or forced offline one after another! Try not to use third-party management software. You can use WeChat for Business and send information every three to five minutes to reduce the frequency of disturbing users.

Later, we adopted a group strategy, offering free open courses to all communities and concentrating users in the main group. Although we lost some traffic, we were able to initially screen out active users or users who were interested in us.

3) Organizing part-time work requires setting up a unified work group to handle communication issues

The way to calculate the salary of part-time employees is base salary + number of code scans, but it should be noted that it is necessary to establish a part-time work community and tell them that if they have any questions, they need to communicate in the part-time work group in a timely manner and prohibit them from entering our traffic group!

Let me tell you about the mistakes we made with part-time staff:

• We have not established a part-time job community, which has resulted in many part-time workers communicating in user communities, causing a negative impact.
• The deadline for scanning the QR code was not made clear in the early stage, which led to some conflicts with part-time wages, and part-time staff slandered us in front of target customers.

Although the part-time staff has since apologized, it still caused a negative impact. Not only that, part-time staff also spread random messages in the social network, and there were even extreme cases where they insulted students for not scanning the code.

These risks may occur at any time, especially offline partners need to do a good job of risk management and avoid unnecessary risks in a timely manner.

4) We encountered pitfalls in offline execution

• When scanning the code offline, it is recommended that you stay in the same hotel near the test sites and take a taxi to each test site!
• Offline marketing also requires attention to avoid conflicts with urban management, try not to post or hang banners randomly, and promotional materials must be stored separately to avoid confiscation, such as near green belts, stationery stores, etc.!
• According to different materials, choose different time periods for delivery! Before entering the venue, the main thing is to scan the code, and after leaving the venue after the exam, the main thing is to distribute promotional materials!
• The levels of part-time staff vary greatly. It is recommended to use aunties as the main force and assign corresponding team leaders. This can reduce a lot of workload. It is strictly forbidden to scan codes randomly and formulate corresponding scanning rules!

7. The final “key”

Regardless of online distribution fission or offline scanning code promotion, it is essentially a way of acquiring customers. What we need to solve is the problem of insufficient traffic, rather than being limited to the problem of insufficient traffic under "certain means".

When we lack traffic, the first thing we should think about is how to obtain traffic continuously and efficiently. We need to remain calm and not blindly choose a popular method.

The above is my complete summary of this event. I hope it can help everyone.

May everyone receive protection from the “God of Growth” and achieve good results!

Author: Ma Yinghao

Source: Ma Yinghao