K12 Online Education User Growth Traps

Education is one of the best means of transferring wealth between generations, especially for middle-class families. Because most of them do not make money from money, nor from the exchange of time and physical strength, but from professional skills, like doctors, teachers, corporate executives, etc. These skills often cannot be passed on directly to the next generation, so an intermediary is needed to help them transfer wealth, and schools and educational institutions play such a role.

In recent years, online education has been in the limelight, but many education platforms have simply added an Internet cable to the original offline education model, trying to take off along with it; many friends who have come to me for free consultation have also said that current online education platforms do not have any Internet feel at all.

If we dig deeper into the reasons, we will find that they are still using people to sell goods, without customizing growth plans based on user psychology.

1. User psychology at different stages

From contact to observation, from experience to payment, from repurchase to dissemination, the psychology of users is constantly changing throughout their entire life cycle. However, most online education platforms on the market do not develop growth strategies based on the changes in user psychology. Instead, they advertise low-priced courses, collect user contact information, and then have sales teachers follow up to place course orders.

This method of buying volume + manual sales is crude but extremely effective during the wild growth period. However, with the rise of leading players, it will gradually enter an era where it is not cost-effective.

2. Problems and optimization solutions at different stages

1. New stage

1) Core problem: high traffic loss and increasing conversion costs

2) Common model: using trial classes as the main body to buy advertising volume → manual intervention to convert regular price classes

3) Model analysis: mainly obtain customer form information through traffic platforms, then experience low-priced courses through manual intervention, and then convert them into full-priced course users; there will be two key conversion factors here, one is the traffic cost, and the other is the intervention conversion rate of full-priced courses.

4) Mode problem:

① Traffic costs are getting more and more expensive:

The target audience of online education is extremely precise, with a complete user portrait, and is generally composed mainly of parents from middle-class families in first- and second-tier cities.

As more and more players enter the education platform market and the delivery cycle lengthens, large platforms will find themselves in an awkward situation where their core target users have been almost completely washed out in the market, and they can only continue to expand the advertising coverage and dilute the accuracy. In order to survive, small and medium-sized companies are forced to accept the ever-increasing costs of purchasing traffic, and thus focus more on sales, making it impossible to develop healthily.

② The conversion rate of manual intervention stabilizes:

Regardless of the size of the platform, once the user information is obtained by the sales teachers of the education platform, all subsequent communications are like entering a standardized operating workshop; this set of SOPs has been continuously refined over time to minimize the impact of individual sales personnel on conversion rates and maintain a stable conversion rate.

• For communication on the first day, you should refer to page 3, item 5 of the document: Today is the last day of the event;
• At the end of the first lesson, you should refer to the document page 6, item 1: How to praise your child's talent;
• If you haven't placed an order for 5 consecutive days, you should check Article 4 on page 9 of the document: How to scare her, your child will lose at the starting line.

③ Serious traffic loss:

If traffic is compared to raw materials, sales to workers, and full-priced classes to good products, then this assembly line-style short-term sales model has a very high defective rate and requires a large amount of raw materials to be wasted. One day, when raw materials that meet the processing conditions become increasingly expensive due to market competition, this high-loss assembly line model will inevitably be forced to be eliminated.

5) Optimization plan: build three traffic ponds

It is perfectly reasonable for a patient to go to a medical institution, register, see a doctor, and take medicine. However, when a parent faces an educational institution, he or she will hesitate. Is it because they are reluctant to spend money? No, it is because they lack the ability to judge the current situation; once they make judgments and discover the seriousness of the problem, their subsequent actions will naturally be much smoother.

However, the problems solved by education are not easy to be verified immediately, especially the quality-oriented education for young children; therefore, the key lies in how to improve parents’ ability to judge the problems faced by their children.

Pond 1: External traffic, cultivating users’ ability to discover problems

Discovering problems and creating anxiety is the process of creating demand; if the combination of love and diamonds is the most classic marketing case of the last century, then children and programming may be another marketing story of this century.

It has triggered a panic about the unknown among parents of young children. These parents often have no background in Internet technology and lack basic judgment on programming. Their only understanding of programming is like what is described in the advertisement: In the future of the 21st century, it doesn't matter if you don't know English, a simultaneous translation machine can solve that problem, but without any programming knowledge, your children will be out of touch with the whole world.

Not only traffic bought with money is called a user, and not only users who have been dealt with sales talk have conversion value. It is ironic that educational platforms lack the ability to educate users on a larger scale. This educational process is no longer centered around products and platforms, but helps users discover problems, generate anxiety, and then guides them to choose solutions, making the traffic pool larger and more accurate.

Pond 2: Internal traffic takes over the role switching

The products of many educational platforms adopt the e-commerce display logic of people looking for goods; the APP page is almost piled with various courses, for fear that parents will not be able to find them; for most parents who have no ability to distinguish and judge, whether to let their children learn history or mathematics, what is the difference between this ancient poetry class that costs 38 yuan per class and that Chinese class that costs 76 yuan per class?

The core demand of parents is to solve their children's education problems, not to pick products for their own use. This is like throwing a patient into a hospital pharmacy and requiring him to read the instructions on each box of medicine to take the medicine. Would he dare to do so?

Especially these platforms are often only used by parents with purchasing power, ignoring the real users: children.

The target of internal traffic should not be parents, but children; after all, there is no need for parents to stay for a long time, and children are often the most overlooked source of traffic.

Currently, the more successful ones include tool-type ones like taking photos to search for questions, and content communities that are purely for teaching discussions. They all meet the rigid needs of the student group and can better absorb active traffic, which will not be wasted due to no orders.

Pond 3: Timely exit from the growth bottleneck period of large platforms

Most of the earliest large-scale education platforms are now facing the same growth problem: the targeted users in the market have been screened once, and the cost cannot be reduced by screening them a few more times; the ROI of non-target groups cannot break even under this model, and although other growth channels are also being tried, they have never been able to replace advertising. What should they do?

Abandoning small and micro sellers can rebuild an e-commerce giant, and another idea is to break out of the circle in time and expand the battlefield; failing to seize the huge market of sinking users may lose the next wave of growth opportunities; users in third- and fourth-tier cities, especially those focusing on early childhood quality education, have a low consumption conversion rate for courses, but they do have educational needs.

They have a high sense of uncertainty about whether payment can affect the results, so the payment unit price is low, but they are willing to cooperate with the time-consuming behavior; users in this circle cannot directly use conversion as the goal, and user scale is the core key; ultimately, this traffic pool is used to occupy the user's mind and feed back to course conversion.

2. Conversion stage

1) Core issue: The willingness to repurchase fluctuates greatly, and early childhood quality education is the hardest hit area.

2) Root cause of the problem: long feedback cycle for target results and inconsistency between consumers and user groups.

3) Problem analysis:

Education is one of the most effective ways to transfer wealth between two generations. If there is a financial institution that promises to help you transfer your wealth from point A to point B within one year, but you cannot participate in the process and may be told after one year that the wealth transfer has failed and your principal will be lost, would you do it? The same principle applies to early childhood quality education.

People need constant positive feedback to strengthen their cognition. Education and fitness, to some extent, belong to the field of long-term slow feedback; especially early childhood quality education. Parents spend money to let their children study for one year, but in the end they are not sure whether their money is worth it. Maybe parents did not know what kind of results they wanted in the first place, so many people feel that their money is wasted afterwards.

4) Optimization plan: satisfying parents’ desire for control and providing a sense of value

Without a goal, there will be no feedback, and value cannot be measured, which will naturally affect the payment experience and repurchase rate.

Have you ever been asked by the client to revise your proposal countless times, but you did not feel that the revisions were reasonable, or even felt that they were stupid? Sometimes the client just feels that since they have spent the money, it would not be cost-effective not to revise it a few times - this is called the executive ability of will, which is very suitable for interpreting people's desire for control.

Since it is difficult to achieve specific goals of quality-oriented education in the short term, we can put some effort into curriculum setting, parental intervention, and data reporting.

Some parents felt good after taking a trial class on an education platform, but after paying a year's tuition, they felt like they had become hands-off bosses; from the initially attentive sales teacher's comprehensive analysis of the pros and cons of education, it seemed that parents felt that whether they sign up or not might affect their children's lives; now the teacher only gives one or two sentences of feedback on the class every month, and even after questioning there is a little discussion; this feeling of gap would be unpleasant for anyone.

From the perspective of user consumption psychology alone, we need to make those who spend money happy, especially when it comes to early childhood quality education. The teaching results should be quantified as much as possible. If a student who was originally learning painting suddenly wants to learn programming, he can change classes; if he doesn’t like the teacher, he can change him; don’t wait until the end of one year to make a report on the results. Such moments that can make parents feel a sense of value should be triggered frequently.

Early childhood quality education seems to be educating students, but in fact it is educating parents , making you feel that your money is worth it!

3. Dissemination stage

1) Core issue: low willingness to share courses.

2) Root of the problem: Education is a competitive process.

3) Problem analysis:

Sharing courses to receive referral money is a very common fission method on the Internet, but it is not applicable on educational platforms. There are several reasons:

• Not much money: Most of the user population is middle-class families in first- and second-tier cities, and the fission reward of dozens of yuan is not enough to motivate recommendation;
• Very embarrassing: actively recommending an education platform to other parents’ children feels a bit contemptuous, so generally I won’t actively recommend it;
• Fear of competition: The most important thing is that within a small circle, children’s learning is mostly in a state of competition. If your child’s ranking improves after tutoring, parents are afraid that others will know how they got there, so how can they promote it again?

4) Optimization plan: Change the fission subject and replace the platform with students

Just as mentioned above, recommending a platform is a thankless task, as users have no intrinsic motivation to share; however, showing off children’s photos is something most parents love to do.

• My child has a report performance;
• My kids have a vote;
• What award did my child win?

Not to mention giving money, even if you ask parents to pay for it, they will still post these things; for example, paying for votes is one of the situations. The platform provides parents with the materials needed to show off their children: students + honors. Parents will naturally try their best to help you attract more traffic, and will provide more trust endorsements for the platform in the promotion of showing off their children; after all, no one wants to be told that their child’s award is nothing.

Therefore, when designing fission ideas, don’t just focus on the sales volume of the product itself. You need to stand from the user’s perspective to see what the user cares about. The traffic growth brought about by this may be higher.

3. The next wave of growth: self-operation or empowerment

I browsed many teacher introduction pages in K12 platforms and had a sense of déjà vu until one day when I saw the personal homepage of a delivery boy, and then I suddenly realized; the same display interaction, similar templated labels, the only difference is that one is called teacher and the other is called knight.

Education is people-oriented. Parents strive hard to buy housing in school districts, but it is only for the sake of obtaining better teaching resources for their children. The teaching level of teachers is the core wealth of this resource. But when have you ever seen a K12 platform talk about the teaching staff when placing advertisements and focus on introducing a certain teacher?

Because most of the education platforms nowadays are involved in a series of links including customer source, conversion, teaching, course development, and operation. Teachers have no personal influence on the platform.

However, teachers are the real front-line force and the key to truly influencing students' teaching outcomes; from the perspective of traffic monetization, teachers are only an after-sales link, and sales are the core assets, but from the perspective of traffic growth, teachers are the breakthrough point for growth.

Empowering them, helping them to make an impact, providing the necessary conditions to better implement teaching, and treating them as platform users will be a development direction in the future.

From the user's perspective, this relationship is similar to when a patient chooses a hospital, does he pay more attention to a major hospital or a famous doctor?

4. Summary

Finally, let’s summarize how the K12 platform needs to grow:

Author: Professor of Operations

Source: Operations Professor