Online traffic diversion for training institutions: a universal formula for fission and new customer acquisition

"What is the biggest problem for your organization when doing online fission to attract new customers?"

Before writing this article, I asked a principal with whom I often communicated, and his answer was unexpected:

"The first one is definitely copywriting! Look at the fission and new customer acquisition in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Copywriting + posters + QR codes are put together and they become popular immediately. But we are in a third-tier small city and cannot recruit such copywriters. This year, our agency has changed 30 to 40 copywriters."

Afterwards, I asked principals from different places. Although the answers were different, they were mostly the same: there was no technical support, no useful tools, no good poster designers...

A colleague of mine who specializes in operational guidance for fission and new customer acquisition revealed to me: The above are all superficial. What the institutions really lack is the underlying logic of fission and new customer acquisition.

I totally agree. This is just like when you see a piece of clothing you like on Taobao, buy it home, put it on hastily, and then find that it doesn't fit you properly, so you return it angrily. In fact, it’s not that the clothes are bad, but that you don’t know how to match them. The matching method here is your underlying logic. If the underlying logic is correct, the fission and new customer acquisition will generally be successful. If the underlying logic is wrong, it will be a waste of time.

I have read many books on fission and new customer acquisition, and I have also run some related activities myself. So far, the theory that I agree with most comes from Mr. Yan Le, the former vice president of MissFresh. He proposed a universal formula for fission and new customer acquisition:

1. Sharing efficiency: Among the existing user base, how many people are willing to help me share.

2. Sharing frequency: Among all the people who are willing to share, how many times will they help me share during the user’s life cycle?

3. Conversion efficiency: After reaching the audience, how many people can be converted into new users.

This theory also applies to K12 offline education and training institutions. Next, I will share with you my own personal experience.

1. Sharing efficiency

As mentioned earlier, sharing efficiency refers to how many people among the existing user base are willing to help me share. At first glance, it seems to be the number of cold start users, but if you dig deeper, there are actually several other factors:

1. Number of cold-start users: For training institutions, they are usually employees + old students, so I won’t go into details here.

2. Sharing motivation: What motivates users to share after seeing the ad?

3. Convenience of sharing: Can users share information quickly and conveniently during the sharing process?

Let me give you an example. A principal sent me the fission poster of his institution.

After scanning the QR code, users will enter the group buying page. If 3 people join together, they can attend the class for free. It looks quite tempting, right? But the result may surprise you: after 3 days of the activity, only 8 people participated. Theoretically, these 8 people should have brought 24 people, but in the end, these 8 people became a group without anyone.

After some inquiries and experience, I have a general understanding of the agency's situation in the fission and new customer acquisition process:

1) Number of cold start users

The school is designated as the school's teacher. The principal is already aware of this problem, so I won’t go into details here.

2) Share the power

The sharing motivation of this school is to take group classes for free.

You may ask, it’s already 0 yuan, isn’t that enough motivation to share? This is actually a kind of self-entertainment thinking.

To give you a vivid example, if you are single and one day a maternity and baby care organization sells you XX diapers for free group buying, with a limit of 3 people in a group, will you share them without hesitation?

The sharing stage is to allow more non-precise people to help you gain wide exposure, which is the first step. Without this step, nothing can be discussed. Only when the net is cast wide enough can we cover more targeted groups of people. Your institution is unknown and the piano lessons are not a necessity. For these users, 0 yuan is like diapers to single people, and has no appeal at all.

Later, the principal finally realized the problem and decided to use non-curricular products as bait, such as children's picture books, for the next wave of attempts.

In fact, Xueersi has done a very good job in this regard. Friends who are familiar with me know that I have enrolled my daughter in Xueersi Mathematics. It may be hard for you to imagine, but I just helped my daughter apply for WeChat last month (for reading check-ins), and she only posted 3 messages on her Moments, and all 3 of them were Xueersi advertisements.

Why? My daughter said that there were many prizes in the Xueersi Points Mall, and she took a fancy to a microscope toy set. The teacher had even demonstrated this set in class, and she wanted it very much, so she forwarded the advertisement.

I went to the mall and took a look. Indeed, there were a wide variety of gifts that were eye-catching.

At this stage, if you are struggling to find a good bait, you can go to the Xueersi Points Mall to take a look.

3) Convenience of sharing

The rules of this activity are that after the user scans the code, a "Start Group Purchase" button will pop up on the page, but after the user clicks it, they need to fill in their name and phone number before they can successfully initiate the group purchase.

My colleagues and I frowned when we experienced this part.

First of all, the participants are not your consumers, and you have not established a relationship with each other yet. It is very annoying to ask them to fill in such private information right away. This feeling is like when you meet a blind date for the first time and he asks you directly about your job and income. Don’t you think that’s annoying?

Secondly, users have one-way thinking. When you promote “starting a group purchase”, users also think that they can join a group by clicking the button. However, you ask them to fill in information halfway through the process and cannot let them complete this action in one go, which is unpleasant. This feeling is like when you dial 10086 to query information, the long list of intelligent voice calls in front of you will drive you crazy.

Generally speaking, the sharing path should be as short as possible, preferably no more than 3 steps. But how complicated are the sharing paths of some institutions?

Have you ever done this: ask old students to share the poster on WeChat Moments for 3 days, and if they get a certain number of likes, they can deduct part of the tuition fee.

Not to mention how difficult this work is for the organization, the sharing process alone has at least 6 steps:

1. Save the poster image

2. Copy the text in the post

3. Send to Moments

4. Invite 1, 2, 3... friends to like

5. Save Moments screenshots after 3 days

6. Send the screenshot to the institution’s WeChat

So, stop complaining about how annoying parents are with your activities and instead do some self-examination! In terms of the convenience of sharing, there are actually many practical gadgets that can achieve this. For example, under the school manager system, there are marketing tools such as Xiaozhutong and electronic referral cards, which can easily achieve sharing within 3 steps and automatically record referral relationships, saving the work of data statistics.

2. Sharing frequency

This part is mainly about setting up the gameplay. How can we stimulate users to continue sharing? Most organizations play like this:

1) Result visualization

That is, after sharing, users can immediately see their income or progress. For example, Pinduoduo’s bargaining progress bar allows users to see the progress in real time, giving them a sense of pleasure and stimulating them to continue sharing.

Another example is the electronic recommendation card function of the school manager. Old students forward the recommendation cards to new students. After the new students register, the old students can immediately receive feedback on their mobile phones, and can also check their referral data and reward materials in real time, which also encourages old students to continue forwarding.

2) Tiered rewards

Divide the number of shares into several levels and increase the rewards gradually.

Let me share an experience of my own. During a public account user fission activity, we set up a rule that old fans could get corresponding points by recommending new fans to follow. For every 5 people you recommend, you can get a certain level of points. At the beginning, we set equal points, that is, 40 points were awarded for completing 5 people's shares, and the user sharing rate was average.

Later, we made adjustments: 30 points were given for completing 5 people, 40 points were given for completing 10 people, 50 points were given for completing 15 people, and so on. The sharing rate actually increased by 30%! This also shows how effective tiered rewards are.

3) Additional rewards

By upgrading the tiered rewards, users can get extra rewards after completing the tasks, which can further stimulate users to share.

3. Conversion efficiency

I may share less in this part because a lot of the content overlaps with what I have written before.

1) Communication content: Generally speaking, it refers to the text and pictures in your posters/events.

Here are two fission posters, let's compare them:

The former has always emphasized the advantages of the institution, while the latter externalizes its own advantages into the needs of parents, allowing parents to more intuitively feel the benefits of enrolling in classes.

This is just one of the points. If you want to know more skills, you can refer to my previous article "12 Tips for Online Traffic Generation for Training Institutions (4): Giving You a Universal Formula for Writing Traffic Generation Copy".

2) Conversion drive: How much decision-making cost does a user need to pay to sign up, and what can he get after paying.

The most common things here are free learning, purchasing courses for 9.9 yuan, etc.

PS: Do you remember the 0 yuan group purchase case of the previous school? So the 0 yuan here is not driven by sharing, but by conversion, don’t be confused.

Regarding "what you can get after paying", many institutions are driven by the number of courses, but I think Zebra AI's approach is more subtle. In terms of conversion drive, they will use "after purchasing the drainage course, you will receive a full-subject game card" as a deal bait.

In this regard, a certain principal also contributed his ideas to me. He plans to cooperate with supermarkets, cinemas, snack bars, and amusement institutions near the institution to initiate a membership alliance for mutual benefit. For example, if you purchase the school's drainage course, you can go to any of the above institutions for one free trial. In fact, Costco, the largest supermarket chain in the United States, and Tsutaya, the largest bookstore chain in Japan, also use this model when promoting their membership cards.

3) Conversion convenience: How many steps does it take for a user to convert? Is it complicated? This is similar to the convenience of sharing, and can also be achieved through tools such as School Manager Xiaozhutong and electronic recommendation cards. I won’t go into details here.

Finally, let’s summarize:

Please note that every link here requires you to do a lot of A/B testing. For example, when looking for sharing bait, should you use toys, stationery or books? After you're done, look at the data (many widgets will directly present the data in the background), keep optimizing, and you will be more and more surprised.

Author: Auntie Cai

Source: Auntie Cai