Xueersi’s promotion case study on the activity of bringing up new employees

Xueersi is one of the twin stars in the education and training industry and belongs to the New Oriental Education Group. Its core business is offline small-class courses. In recent years, it has been exploring online and dual-teacher businesses and actively developing the OMO model.

Its growth model is driven by word of mouth, which is difficult to analyze using the Internet's growth theory. After more than a decade of development, Xueersi's offline products have very high potential and almost achieved self-growth. But it does not mean that there have been no attempts in line with Internet thinking. This analysis is about Xueersi's model of attracting new customers by old customers.

The core of Xueersi's Internetization is to launch APP and mini-programs to help users pay fees. However, due to the existence of online courses, the APP has also begun to develop towards mainstream online education, adding functions such as online classes and class groups. In addition to relying on its offline business to promote the growth of APP and mini-programs, bringing in new users is another necessary way of growth.

I will break it down into three parts: product, channel, and creativity.

1. Products

Educational and training products are the foundation for driving the old to train the new. Their structure is relatively complex, and includes content and services. The content is the teachers’ lectures, and the services are answering questions after class and grading homework.

Content and services are rarely sold separately, but are packaged as a combination, which is the concept of short-term or long-term classes.

Xueersi's brand effect, teaching and research strength, and teacher quality make its long-term class products have a very high reputation. When the old-to-new customer acquisition mechanism is introduced as an auxiliary customer acquisition tool, it is easily used by Xueersi users; it not only benefits users, but also allows word of mouth to spread more quickly, killing two birds with one stone.

It can be said that Xueersi’s high-potential products are the core guarantee of its mechanism of bringing in new employees by old employees.

2. Channels

The entry point for Xueersi’s old employees to mentor new employees is mainly in the APP. The specific path is: download the APP->log in->open My Profile->click “Get Scholarship”.

After that, there are two entrances for inviting friends: inviting friends immediately and inviting face to face; the former can generate posters, and the latter directly pops up a QR code to satisfy offline invitation scenarios.

Most of the users of the APP are old users, so it is necessary to open a long-term entrance in "My" to divert traffic to old users and new users. This is an easy-to-understand strategy. Another large traffic channel is Xueersi's WeChat ecosystem, the core of which is the public account matrix.

Like other educational institutions, Xueersi will open a separate entrance in the menu bar of the official account, but Xueersi has an advantage, that is, it has many branches; such a huge channel system is not available to ordinary institutions. Recently, the official propaganda said that in 2019, 400,000 old users brought in 450,000 new users, which is an invitation ratio of more than 1:1. It can be seen that the scale of its old users bringing in new users is huge.

In addition, in the name of promotion, in order to highlight the importance of users and match the tone of Xueersi, the title of "Xueersi Spokesperson" was emphasized, but unfortunately this is just a publicity. If it can be used as a long-term gimmick to bring in new users, it may be more effective.

3. Creativity

Creativity is a key factor that cannot be ignored in the process of bringing in new customers. Sometimes when we design activities to bring in new customers, we will spend a lot of energy on the research and development of creativity, such as the rules, paths, copywriting, posters, etc. for bringing in new customers.

In order to systematically sort out what Xueersi has done in terms of creativity, we will use this formula:

The effect of old customers bringing in new customers = sharing efficiency × conversion efficiency × sharing frequency

1. Sharing efficiency

The factors that can improve sharing efficiency by mentoring new employees lie in the design of sharing motivation and sharing methods.

The deep motivation that drives Xueersi users to share is actually Xueersi's brand and excellent products. This is a natural advantage that is difficult for ordinary institutions to learn and requires a long period of practice (exceeding expectations of service and in-depth product polishing). Moreover, offline products are more scarce than online products (fixed time and space) and have higher prices. By inviting new users, you can get coupons of a certain amount (Xueersi gets a 100 yuan coupon for every person you invite), which obviously increases the motivation to invite. Not to mention that you can sign up for Xueersi's courses "for free" (there is no cap on the scholarship), so it would be strange if you don't invite people.

So how do users invite friends?

Xueersi offers two solutions:

One is to provide ready-made posters and personalized posters. Users can generate and save them, and then share them on WeChat channels. They can also click on the WeChat and Moments logo below to jump directly to the WeChat page to complete the sharing. Recently, I saw a short video officially recorded by Xueersi saying that you can share "square dance groups" and "vegetable market groups", which really hits the scenes that these users are concerned about and is worth learning.

Another invitation method is face-to-face invitation. You may not pay much attention to this, but it is actually very suitable for offline scenarios and can greatly improve the invitation effect.

2. Transformation efficiency

The so-called conversion efficiency refers to the degree to which new users are willing to participate after users share. This depends on the design of the invitation poster and the strategies and paths used to guide conversion.

The invitation poster of Xueersi is more friendly in style, but the copy does not highlight the marketing aspect, making it more of a word-of-mouth promotion. Even though new poster styles are added based on hot topics, user scenarios, etc., personalized poster functions are also designed to meet the needs of personalized promotion. However, the only prominent selling point is the 100 yuan scholarship. If it were not for the strong brand effect of Xueersi, I personally think it would be difficult to produce a strong conversion effect.

Looking at user conversion, there are two parts worth mentioning here.

The first is the user’s conversion threshold. For old users, coupons obtained through invitations are themselves a means to promote repeat purchases; but in the invitation rules, the requirement for old users to use coupons is to purchase courses worth more than 200 yuan, which is obviously to promote repeat purchases and conversions of long-term classes.

Moreover, there are requirements for old users to obtain the 100 yuan scholarship, including three points: new user registration, coupon purchase of courses, and completion of two classes.

This is actually a very high threshold because the cycle is long. Although the accuracy of the conversion is guaranteed, the conversion consumes a lot of energy, which provides room for the intervention of operational means.

The second is the user conversion path.

After a new user scans the poster shared by an old user, he or she needs to go through the following path to receive the coupon and try to sign up for the course: Scan the code to enter the page -> click "Get it now" -> Register -> Complete basic information -> Return to the page and click Get it again -> The mini program code pops up -> Select courses -> Go to checkout -> Use coupon -> Pay.

From the perspective of new users, the whole process is relatively smooth, especially the payment through the mini program, which is in line with the user habits of the WeChat ecosystem. It can also be changed to an h5 page. However, considering the offline business scenarios of Xueersi, the mini program may be the result of testing, but overall the path is still too long, and operational intervention is also needed to reduce churn.

In addition, the mini program, including the previous page, does not have an entrance to guide the APP, but the rules state that the APP must be downloaded for use. This place is worth modifying and iterating.

3. Sharing frequency

For old employees to bring in new ones, stimulating the frequency of sharing can either rely on operational means or on rules. We don’t know what actions Xueersi has taken for the former, but we can analyze the latter carefully.

Xueersi has taken two small actions to increase the frequency of sharing.

The first action is to design the invitation progress at the bottom of the invitation page. You can see the list of invited friends and the corresponding status, as well as the number of friends who have received, registered for classes, returned coupons, and refunded fees. These can indirectly increase the frequency of user sharing.

The second action is to add a crowdfunding-type tiered reward mechanism on the basis of no cap on invitation rewards, that is, to provide additional scholarships based on the number of invitations - specifically, after inviting the 3rd, 6th, and 9th new users to complete 2 classes, additional scholarships of 100, 200, and 300 yuan will be awarded; and it is cumulative, that is, inviting 9 new users who have completed 2 classes can get a total of 600 yuan in scholarships.

The logic behind this is actually to use step-by-step tasks to reduce the difficulty of sharing for users, making the invitation behavior more purposeful and acceptable, thereby increasing the sharing rate.

However, requiring new users to complete two classes may easily cause misunderstanding among users, because registration itself has a threshold, and asking the other party to take classes will easily consume the user's patience. Of course, this is for conversion considerations to avoid inaccurate old users bringing in new ones. It is recommended to design a set of tiered reward plans based on the three behaviors of registration, course purchase, and class, giving priority to ensuring the number of registrations. The process from registration to class can be handed over to the subject tutoring team, and the reward mechanism can remain unchanged.

IV. Conclusion

Xueersi's model of old customers bringing in new customers is actually a very basic referral model with relatively clear logic, simple creativity, and a highly replicable reward mechanism. It is consistent with its emphasis on word-of-mouth and is a growth method that can leverage brand potential.

But because of this, there is also a lot of room for improvement. We can add growth methods such as task-based systems, gamification, and self-propagation to improve sharing efficiency.

Of course, not every model of old employees bringing in new employees is fully applicable to any organization. We still need to explore a referral growth model that suits our own needs. From user engagement logic to poster copy details, it is impossible to completely learn from them.

When we talk about innovation, we tend to focus on large-scale innovation. However, some small innovations, especially innovations in operational strategies, can also bring incredible results.

I look forward to bringing new thoughts to everyone.

Author: Dugu

Source: Wild Operation Community (id: dugu9bubai)