As the leader in English enlightenment and K12, Yuanfudao has a fast and creative iterative growth strategy, and can be regarded as a leader in the entire K12 education industry. Many of its growth strategies and methods are worth analyzing every once in a while.

1. Case Name

Disassembly of Yuanfudao's full growth system

2. Case Background

The company owns a number of online education products including Yuanfudao, Xiaoyuan Search Questions, Yuantiku, Xiaoyuan Kousuan, and Zebra AI Class. Yuanfudao provides courses in all subjects for primary and secondary schools. Primary and secondary school students in any part of the country can take live classes taught by famous teachers at home.

Yuanfudao was founded in 2012. After eight years of growth, it has entered the first camp of online education. Currently, Yuanfudao’s main businesses, K12 large-class courses, early childhood education (Zebra AI courses) and adult education (Chalk Public Examinations) have achieved certain results and are still growing rapidly.

On October 22, Beijing time, Yuanfudao online education company announced that it had recently completed a total of US$2.2 billion in financing in the G1 and G2 rounds. After the financing was completed, the valuation of Yuanfudao online education company reached US$15.5 billion, exceeding that of Indian education technology company BYJU'S, and ranked first among global education technology unicorn companies.

3. Business Analysis

1. Products

The company owns a number of online education products including Yuanfudao, Yuantiku, Xiaoyuansouti, Xiaoyuankousuan, and Zebra AI Class, providing users with diversified intelligent education services such as online classes, smart exercises, and problem analysis.

Product Matrix Analysis

It can be seen that the three apps "YuanTiKu, XiaoYuanSouTi, XiaoYuanKouSuan" are all tool types, and their functions are all free.

It is an auxiliary tool for "Yuanfudao App and Zebra AI Class", and also serves as a traffic generator for the courses of the two apps.

Yuanfudao APP and Zebra AI Class are also the main sources of revenue for Yuanfudao, covering the entire stage from enlightenment education to K12.

2. Traffic (source of customer acquisition)

2.1 Own traffic

Users accumulated from the early Ape series products

2.2 Product Diversion

Divert traffic and acquire customers between products: push advertising information between Xiaoyuan Search Questions and Yuantiku.

Through the tool advantages of Xiaoyuan Search Questions and Yuantiqu, we can quickly accumulate customer traffic. Traffic generation through tools + monetization of educational products form a good combination of the underlying logic of Yuanfudao's operations.

(In less than a year, Xiaoyuan Search has more than 50 million users), tool-type APP is the main traffic lever (using this fulcrum to leverage traffic) to push Yuanfudao course information to users on the tool APP, thereby driving traffic to other Yuan series products; allowing traffic to form a closed loop within its own product.

2.3 Brand Marketing

Yuanfudao and The Brain variety show/Kaijiangla IP joint event promotion method.

Zebra AI Class Happiness Trio Variety Show Title Sponsor

2.4 Delivery (online/offline)

2.4.1 Online Delivery

WeChat Moments ads, Weibo ads, WeChat public account articles…

2.4.2 Offline Distribution

Subway ads, bus station ads…

2.5 Media Matrix Customer Acquisition

2.5.1 Tik Tok/Live Streaming

2.5.2 WeChat Matrix

Each product brand has its own WeChat public account + service account + mini program (I won’t take screenshots here)

2.4ASO SEO Customer Acquisition

Xiaoyuan Search Question, YuanTiKu, and Xiaoyuan KouSuan are more of ASO promotions

SEO/SEM Promotion

2.5 E-commerce

Available on all major e-commerce platforms

2.6 Referral & Fission

Referral: Yuanfudao APP and Zebra AI Class are courses, so they all have their own referral function (and the iteration speed is very fast).

Fission:

1. Physical fission

2. Virtual fission

3. Virtual + physical rewards fission

It is reflected in several apps such as Yuanfudao, and the gameplay is particularly rich and diverse.

The purpose of most fission activities is to attract new users to the product

3. Monetization

5. Operational Logic Analysis

1. Attract new customers

Here we take Zebra AI class as an example and select several important drainage channels for detailed analysis.

1.1 Tik Tok

The average monthly growth in the number of education advertisers on Douyin has reached 325%. The TikTok platform naturally became one of the options for online education institutions to acquire customers. As early as 2017, "Zebra AI Class" has entered the Douyin platform. After 3 years of operation, it currently has a total of 1.068 million fans, and the content it outputs is mainly parent-child English and spoken English in life scenarios.

KOL sales data (Zebra AI course)

Typical strategies & conversion paths

1. Information flow advertising. Use the "impulse + sunk cost" method to make users pay in one go.

Advertisement Purchase Course Process

2. The official account produces a large amount of interesting content to increase user activity. In order to cater to the platform's tone, we focus on learning interesting content, guide potential users' attention, and increase exposure. Every 10 works will include an entertaining video such as dancing. Each video is less than 15 seconds long and is created frequently, with basically one update every day.

The video contents mainly include: Zebra Children's Songs, Zebra AI Classes, Foreigners Series, etc.

1.2 WeChat Ecosystem

In the WeChat ecosystem, Zebra AI Class has three traffic entrances: official accounts, service accounts, and mini-programs. By placing information flow in the circle of friends, cooperating with soft articles, and fissioning activities, we can obtain a large amount of exposure, and then direct the traffic to official accounts, service accounts and mini programs.

Take the service account as an example. When a user follows the service account for the first time:

Attract users to sign up for English trial classes for RMB 49: 10 AI interactive classes + 10 days of tutoring by a dedicated teacher + free shipping of supporting teaching materials;

2. Retention & Conversion

Zebra AI class has 3 conversion models:

· 0-yuan trial class: Generally, the trial period is 5 days, which is used to activate users.

· 49-yuan trial course: The trial period is usually 10 days. It is the core way to switch to high-priced courses and is also the product that Zebra has launched the most.

· 2800-year course: The original price was 3600 yuan, but now it only costs 2800 yuan. The general learning cycle is one year. It is the core source of income for Zebra.

The community has not conducted a complete experience and will not disassemble it.

6. Referral + fission

1. Referral

Take the Zebra AI course referral as an example

1.1 Free trial and referral

The 0-yuan trial class is a course that appears on the homepage of the APP after the APP is downloaded. Compared with the 10-day experience course of 49.9, the 0-yuan trial class does not have a physical package. You can start the class by clicking to receive it. For general users, the participation cost is the lowest.

Reward Rules

1. Click to share to Moments to get 10 Zebra coins, which is approximately equal to 0.1 yuan;

2. For users who see the poster and want to take the course, they can get 400 Zebra coins, which is equivalent to 4 yuan in cash;

3. Each user can share 10 Zebra coins every day, only once

1.2 Referrals from regular-priced courses

The execution process for old students of regular courses is very simple, which is to generate a sharing poster in the background and then share the screenshot on WeChat Moments.

For the sharing activities of students taking full-priced courses, rewards are given directly to users for the actions they perform, which seems to be very considerate to old students. In addition to the direct deposit of sharing funds, the reward for purchasing a trial course through sharing is the same as the reward for referring the trial course mentioned above. Diamonds will be directly exchanged for goods, which is relatively humane.

1.3 Introduction to the 49.9 yuan course trial

The entrance for referrals of low-priced courses at 49.9 yuan is in a column in the personal center. The entrance is hidden quite deeply, and generally only old students will pay attention to this entrance. It should be more biased towards old students. The participation format of 49.9 yuan is different from the 0 yuan course. There is no reward for sharing posters. There will be rewards only if users place orders. The requirements are also relatively strict.

2. Fission activity

2.1 App fission

Invite friends to form a team in the APP, and everyone can receive physical prizes. By forming a team, new users can be guided to download the app and register, which can divert traffic to the app (this team function is reflected in Xiaoyuan Kou Suan and Zebra AI Class)

2.2 WeChat Ecosystem Fission

There are still many physical reward mission treasure activities on the Zebra WeChat account, which are mainly to increase the number of fans of the official account and then convert them into low-priced trial classes of 0 yuan or 49 yuan.

There are still many points that can be disassembled in detail here. Due to limited time, I will add more later.

7. Highlights and Reusability

Short video traffic generation: As a short video tool with hundreds of millions of users, Tik Tok generates traffic by providing users with a short-term sense of satisfaction. However, in order to obtain accurate fan traffic, short video operations must provide high-quality content.

Public account matrix: By establishing public accounts with corresponding product segmentation characteristics, users can be attracted through fission activities and practical output.

Low-priced course placement: By purchasing low-priced courses, users can initially experience the content quality and service level, and thus make decisions on online brand selection and whether to purchase.

First, you buy 5 classes for 0 yuan, then spend 49 yuan, and finally upgrade to full-price classes. Gradually reduce parents' decision-making costs and psychological defenses, dispel users' doubts and guide them to pay.

Referral + distribution + fission: By formulating corresponding user incentive strategies for old users, such as gifts for recommendations and gifts for invitations, we can encourage old users to attract new users. Although it costs a certain amount, the conversion rate is relatively high due to the word-of-mouth spread brought by old users, and the customers brought in are more accurate.

8. Personal Thoughts

Regarding the investment, I may have more feelings. For example, the growth of our company mainly comes from paid investment in the WeChat ecosystem, but the overall conversion rate is relatively low. Sometimes more emphasis is placed on investment rather than polishing the product itself and subsequent operational services. In my opinion, this is not a healthy growth model. Instead, a healthy growth model should pay more attention to word of mouth and the subsequent services for users who use the product. Education itself is an industry that relies heavily on brand and reputation.

Traffic is very expensive, and buying it without thinking will not work. Only through high-conversion methods of attracting new customers, retention operations through private domain gameplay, and products and services that satisfy users can a company achieve rapid and healthy growth.

“Buy customer traffic. Then turn this traffic into private domain traffic for your own brand. However, traffic is very expensive, and buying it without thinking will definitely not work. Only through high-conversion methods of attracting new customers and private domain retention operations can a company grow rapidly and healthily.”

Author: Wild Operation Community

Source: Wild Operation Community (dugu9bubai)