The 2020 summer advertising war is about to end, and the giants have invested 4.5 billion in crazy online customer acquisition.

Today, with homogeneous channels for acquiring customers, small and medium-sized online education companies have been squeezed out. Without the high-level market investment budget, how to maximize the use and activation of existing student users has become a difficult problem that every small and medium-sized education company must solve.

Therefore, private domain traffic operation in education has become the first choice for every enterprise.

But how to operate private domain traffic? How to build an effective private domain traffic strategy? How to find talents in private domain traffic? It has become a big problem faced by every small and medium-sized education enterprise.

This article will focus on the project of Renren Distribution of Private Domain Traffic, revealing the gameplay, system construction, problems and opportunities of Renren Distribution of Private Domain Traffic, hoping to solve the mystery of Renren Distribution of Private Domain Traffic for educational enterprises.

1. Why can Renren Distribution rise in the WeChat ecosystem?

As the name suggests, everyone who comes into contact with this organization participates in referring the organization, bringing in customer lists and placing orders.

It seems that everyone distributing products should have only benefits and no harm. For all small and medium-sized education companies, the most difficult thing is how to start and how to do it. Product distribution in the WeChat ecosystem has become popular for a long time. What is the underlying reason behind this?

1. WeChat is the first to integrate social networking, payment, and transaction logistics on one platform

Traditional channel distribution is based on people, whether it is the long-standing Amway or the traditional home appliance industry; for example: if you want to expand from Guangzhou to the whole country, you need to hold channel meetings at each level, establish a channel network, a better organization, and establish the Internet SASS.

Traditional distribution takes a long time to establish, which is why prices are very expensive for many companies when they actually sell to first-line consumers.

With the advent of WeChat, this problem has changed greatly, especially during this year's epidemic, the channel for traditional goods has become online live broadcasts.

In addition to making relationship building more convenient, WeChat has for the first time connected social interaction, payment, and transaction logistics on a single platform, allowing users to consume in the WeChat ecosystem very conveniently.

2. Product supply exceeds demand

After years of development, e-commerce has an unprecedented variety of products, and users have begun to have difficulty choosing and are afraid of purchasing the same product.

The emergence of WeChat ecological consumption is based on trust consumption behind users’ social relationships; for ordinary users, it not only saves time but also greatly reduces the difficulty of choosing products.

3. Users are used to living and making decisions in small tribes

WeChat has three core tribal products: Moments, groups, and official accounts.

• The Moments is a form of public display - a display of users' personal social relationship dynamics, and behind it are what each user loves, feels, and thinks.
• Everyone is familiar with WeChat groups - that is, a group of people with similar interests, connecting through group discussions and relationships.
• A public account is actually a group - a group of people who share certain opinions and aspirations and follow one person.

During more than 70% of users’ social relationship time, users are accustomed to making their own purchasing decisions based on recommendations from their friends circles, communities, and public accounts.

After understanding the reasons for the rise of Renren Distribution in the WeChat ecosystem, let me introduce to you how to get started in educating self-operated distributors. This is also an issue that must be paid attention to before starting a Renren Distribution project.

2. What should self-operated education distribution do before starting a project?

Before starting the self-operated distributor project, I communicated with partners from several education companies who were also doing self-operated distributor projects. Each company had different issues to consider before starting a project.

After about a year of practice, I found that it is crucial to consider the following three issues before launching an education distributor project.

1. Product audience, urgent needs, and consumption frequency

When I was promoting the education distribution project at Yifan, some of my friends who were doing economist training came to me for advice: "Can my project be distributed by Renren? I heard that the cost of distribution by Renren is very low."

Before facing the problem, I would ask him: "Is your product online learning? Are there users who purchase it every month? How strong is your user demand?"

When many educational projects launch distribution projects for everyone, they lack consideration of the issue from the user's perspective, and are more focused on the perspective of how to reduce costs by doing this.

According to my current practice, the Renren distribution project, which seems to have low costs, actually has costs that are not that low.

2. The product’s learning rate and referral rate

Educational projects are different from social e-commerce. Products can be packaged externally to improve distribution and recruitment effects. After recruitment is completed, there is an opportunity to improve user experience by optimizing the product supply chain.

However, educational products are different. Many start-up companies begin to consider self-operated distributor projects before completing the internal testing of the first batch of users. This is actually counterproductive.

Since it is educational distribution, the foundation must be that the product is best when it has good learning reviews and basic referrals - because with these two prerequisites, there are the prerequisites for the establishment of a self-operated distributor project.

If this condition is not met, as an operator, you must know the possible results in advance and make plans for both bad and bad results.

3. Sustained profit motivation for product promotion

In addition to the emotional connection itself, the continued benefits brought by distributors' participation in this promotion are also crucial.

We have communicated with many different types of distributor programs and found that it is crucial to consider the promoter's continued motivation based on the lowest monthly income in the three-county city.

The design of sustainable income comes from the profit-sharing model of different promotional actions of promoters, which needs to be based on the company's own weight in profit distribution.

The above three aspects are what I think are the three necessary prerequisites for establishing a distributor project. In order to let everyone understand the different characteristics of distributors at different stages in a more practical way, I have compiled the characteristics of promoters of four different types of attributes: preschool, elementary school, secondary and high school, university education, vocational education, and adults. You can refer to them separately (see the figure below).

We compare the five dimensions of user participation willingness, user's ability to bring others, participation cycle, promotion difficulty, and degree of fan damage, and we can see that:

• Early childhood education: Early childhood education is the easiest to promote. Baby Play English received a round of investment from Tencent at the end of 2018 due to its low customer acquisition cost and high profit for distribution projects.
• Primary school products: Most people think that primary school products are difficult to make, but Xiaoxuebao uses this model very well and has a high monthly revenue.
• Junior high school and high school products: Among junior high school and high school products, Yunshu wrote a product based on Chinese classic reading, and became a reading promoter;
• University subject education: University subject education, such as College CET-4 and CET-6 Kaochong and Light Course English, have also deeply developed the model of light course promoters and campus spokespersons, and their current revenue scale is very high;
• Vocational education: Tanzhou Education, a vocational education company, has also achieved considerable success by using the online entrepreneurship college to assist in the sales of other subjects.
• Adult learning: The Changtou Academy, a financial education center in adult learning, maximizes the effectiveness of class representatives and opens up a crazy development path for part-time sales;

From the above cases, we can see that although there are many difficulties in building distribution, as long as you find the special distributor gameplay in your field, you can still get good results.

But everyone needs to pay attention to the fact that although they all seem to be distributors, they are actually very different.

3. What are the types of self-operated education distribution companies?

When I first learned little about self-operated educational distributors, my understanding of distributors was the same as most people's, that is, they generate profits by selling products to educational companies; in fact, it is not the same, and each educational institution has different stages of recruiting promoters.

1. Volume distributor model

As the name suggests, the distributor’s job is mainly to bring in volume, and they are not responsible for sales conversion. This is the main model derived from the later stage of the WeChat ecosystem fission dividend, which is 2019.

One advantage of this model is that it can scale up quickly and is relatively simple to manage; however, once the volume starts to grow, we will need to make careful arrangements for our back-end sales team to take over.

Because this model can quickly grow in volume and brush up users’ social networks and friend circles, resources will be consumed quickly.

The distributor operation team has relatively high requirements in the design of continuous customer acquisition activities and content fission.

2. Sales distributor model

As the name suggests, the distributor's job is mainly sales-oriented, and he is not responsible for volume work.

This is because many companies discovered when designing their entire business model that the education industry is a labor-intensive industry, and the expansion and amplification of the sales team is a must.

However, once the volume starts to increase, we will need to make careful arrangements for our back-end sales team to take over.

Because this model can quickly grow in volume and brush up users’ social networks and friend circles, resources will be consumed quickly.

The distributor operation team has relatively high requirements in the design of continuous customer acquisition activities and content fission.

3. Distributor model that brings in volume and sells

The core work of a distributor who brings in volume and sells is both sales and bringing in volume, but conversion is the core work and it depends on the sales results.

The requirement for the company internally is that the company must have a relatively strong sales coordination and supervision system.

Distributors will have to deal with many sales issues in the long term, and this places extremely high demands on the iteration capabilities of the sales training system.

In addition to different models, each company also has different identities of promoters.

For an ordinary user to become a student, he needs to go through:

1. Channels understand products;
2. The consultant teacher introduces the course to the students to experience the course;
3. Sign up to become a student;
4. Experience the official service;
5. Students graduate;

At least 5 stages, and the identities of the main distributors are as follows:

• Paying students: those who pay for the regular courses;
• Students in low-price classes: students who pay one-tenth of the price of regular-price classes, informal students;
• Free fan students: students who have not paid but love our products.

In terms of the matching of each company, the distributor model implemented by students of different identities is also different. Yifan mainly introduces several types to you:

• Paid students: volume-based model, sales distributor model, and volume-based and sales distributor model;
• Students of low-price courses: volume-based model, sales distributor model;
• Free fan students: volume model.

This is not difficult to understand. Paid students must be the ones who know the product best. The sales behavior model is more suitable for this part of users. Now that we know the difference in the models, let’s take a look at how to take the first step.

4. How to take the first step in educating self-operated distribution?

This article takes the volume distributor model, which is more commonly used by everyone, as the research object to carry out the discussion in the following article.

Once you have determined that the main job of a distributor is to bring in volume, the two most important tasks before starting work as a distributor are tool selection and establishment of distributor organizational model rules.

Good tools and good organizational models are very basic and core contents for the future development of distributors. Any changes made later will cause a lot of trouble.

In view of the fact that different companies may choose between self-development and selection of tools, I mainly consider small and medium-sized enterprises, purchase ready-made tools as the research direction, and explain the required tools and functional content; for some large companies that are planning education distribution, it is strongly recommended to conduct self-development.

We mainly compare some major distribution fission tools on the market. There are many on the market. I have selected some products recommended by everyone and compared them from 8 dimensions including relationship binding, operation promotion, effect data analysis, performance settlement, operation convenience, hierarchical management, knowledge payment support, and customer adding process.

1. Relationship Binding

It mainly manages the basic data of distributors, such as: joining time, invitation data, transaction data, superior and subordinate data, which customers were invited respectively, etc. It also provides specific queries on the distributors' personal data and binding relationship status, making it easy to understand the situation of all promoters.

Judging from the products I have experienced so far, Diandianke is the best and most user-friendly, followed by Weimeng and Youzan; Xiaoetong and Duanshu basically have this function, but the granularity is not fine enough.

I didn’t expect it to be a fission activity tool, the lightest and simplest.

2. Operation and promotion

It is mainly to stimulate the promoter's operational vitality in the process of managing promoters, such as task rewards, rankings, special rewards, etc.

It can be used for daily management and activation of promoters, making it convenient to provide new stimulating activities to promoters at different periods and stages of operations. This function is best performed by Diandianke and Youzan.

3. Effect data analysis

It mainly analyzes the order data generated by distributors as a whole and the order data generated by individual distributors, which can accurately understand the recent progress based on orders, and facilitate the grasp of our sales orders and the situation of individual distributors.

4. Performance Settlement

How to issue it after the main performance is generated?

An explanation of the issuance rules, which can be flexibly adjusted according to monthly circumstances.

5. Hierarchical management

It is mainly used to manage the data of distributors at their level. More data may include the total performance of the distributor team.

6. Knowledge payment support

Support for knowledge payment is a standard feature of online education, which can greatly facilitate educational companies to carry out diversified management of education and content.

7. Customer Addition Process

E-commerce distribution systems generally focus on application scenarios where customers need to leave their addresses when placing an order. The general process for educational companies is: place an order—add a teacher on WeChat—join a group to study. Youzan is the only two-way system that supports both e-commerce and education ordering processes.

One thing that must be said here is that in the distributor project, transaction data and distributor data are in the same system to achieve consistency in the referral relationship and reward issuance; this is also the reason why Yifan chose Youzan when establishing the distributor project in the early days.

According to my analysis of nearly 50 education distribution companies on the market, more than 80% of the companies specializing in education distribution use this system.

8. Distributor Mode and Model

After choosing the system, let’s continue to talk about the second step of starting a distributor project, which is the distributor’s mode and model.

We will explain it one by one from three dimensions: distributor personal entry standards, distributor upgrade standards, and distributor organizational management.

Distributor personal entry criteria:

Because the entry of self-operated distributors of educational projects is generally mostly students or users who are interested in our own products, generally fewer people choose the method of individual distribution.

That is to say, there is a certain threshold for general users to join. Since they are fan users, it is difficult for educational projects to be distributed to everyone on a large scale.

If we are targeting a Chinese language enlightenment project, perhaps 10% of 100 people who have enlightenment needs will choose to try our product.

Distributor upgrade criteria:

The distributor upgrade standard means that when a user reaches one or more of the following three indicators, such as the transaction amount of invited users, the number of experienced users, and the number of subordinate distributors, his or her corresponding treatment or whether he or she will receive subordinate invitation rewards will be upgraded.

Generally speaking, there are two options for upgrading:

• The simplest: if the transaction volume is greater than 10,000, the commission will be increased by 20% after upgrading;
• It is beneficial to grouping: if the transaction volume is greater than 10,000 and the number of invited experience participants is greater than 20, the commission will increase by 20%.

Distributor Organization Management:

Distributor organization management is the core of the later management of distributor projects. If distributors cannot form a team, it will put great pressure on the operation and maintenance of the later promotion team.

And because there are fewer topics for management of self-operated distributors and co-promotion with distributors, it will be more difficult to promote promoters in the later stage.

With the selection of basic tools and the construction of organizational structure, we will now enter the most core stage of the distributor, which is the establishment and implementation of the distributor project team.

5. How did the self-operated Renren Distribution of Education grow from 0 to 1 million?

When an education project initially starts working with self-operated distributors, the first step is to build a service team of distributor promoters.

For an educational project that is just starting out or if you treat promoters as a project testing project, you will need a growth manager and a partner who can specifically provide promoter services.

The specific job responsibilities are as follows:

1. Basic training and services for distributors;
2. Distributor's recommended products and process planning;
3. Event planning and service Q&A for distributors;
4. The connection between distributors’ traffic and other departments;
5. The sedimentation of distributor’s service SOP.

That is, an operations partner leads a group of non-professional operations or non-professional sales trainees from scratch, and familiarizes them with the basic promotion principles, the use of promotion tools, and promotion methods.

Take a volume promoter as an example: a distributor uses official communication content based on existing social resources to lock in customers, and brings users into the official community to make sales. The distributor system settles the first order revenue, and subsequent customers become the distributor's subordinates. The distributor receives sales invitation rewards. Some systems may have large team rewards and small group rewards.

1. Communication channels

In the distributor projects of most current education companies, more suggestions on promotion channels for users are: building a professional image in the circle of friends, insisting on posting in the circle of friends, community segmentation, etc.

From the perspective of basic operational thinking, there is no problem, but there are also essential differences.

For example: Does Moments necessarily involve advertising? Today's users are already very smart and are basically sensitive to advertisements in their Moments. How to conduct group marketing in a social network? Does it have to end with just posting advertisements?

• How to leverage personal social relationship chains based on communities and break through the limitations of personal WeChat accounts;
• How to break through the limitation of the upper limit of users that can be influenced by a single WeChat account based on relationship transmission based on personal accounts.

The above are the key points that need to be considered in communication channels.

2. Dissemination content

The most important thing for communication is the medium, or social business card. At a time when 0 yuan posters are everywhere, it is crucial to create valuable content.

Finding things that users are willing to participate in and bringing users into the service experience of the education company is a crucial step.

For the distributor's operating system, the communication content, which seems to be the least critical, is actually a very important part in my operation process.

In some projects, the company has incorporated the entire process of user learning into the promoter’s materials, allowing the learning content to lead users.

3. Relationship lock-in and sales reception

​After a user is locked in because of a certain content, the user is received by the salesperson, and then the promoter acts as a peripheral group to assist sales and boost the entire learning process.

After the sales is completed and the user places an order, the user enters the learning system. At the same time, the user also enters the promoter system. The upper-level trainees help the new trainees learn promotion methods, and continue to become promoters and participate in the promotion process.

4. Long-term value

In addition to becoming our students, users also become team managers of our recommendation system. Some students even become part-time promotion partners of the company after a round of development and training. They can enjoy the long-term dividends of the project and may become partners in the on-site distribution project in the future, witnessing the growth of their baby while also witnessing the growth of their own career.

After entering into daily distribution operations, as the team develops, education distributors will enter different operational priorities and monitor data. Once there are channels, it is necessary to carry out corresponding data monitoring and corresponding services according to people at different levels.

5. Beginner Distributor Stage

​Mothers at this stage have just joined the distribution mother system, and operations need to focus on the number of distribution mothers participating in the recommendation and the amount of recommendations.

Through early communication with new mothers, background research is conducted on mothers participating in the promotion, key users are discovered, and core maintenance and promotion of key users are carried out to ensure that a sufficient recommendation ratio is achieved for new users.

Growth stage distributor stage:

​Mothers in the growth stage mainly recommend distributors who have successfully placed orders and distributors who have had experience with the recommenders. At this stage, the two types of distributors have different focuses.

For mothers who have recommended products during the growth period, we mainly focus on the reasons why the recommended people did not make orders, help the enlightenment mothers solve the problem of converting the first order, and build confidence in continuous recommendation.

For distributors who have experienced placing orders during the growth stage, the main focus is on the issue of continuous recommendations. They identify mothers who have the motivation to make continuous recommendations, find out the reasons, and precipitate methods to copy to other promoting mothers to form a common experience.

This experience can be reused in all the Enlightenment Mothers groups after being processed with technology.

Mature distributors:

​Mature distributors have reached a certain amount of recommendations and successful orders. For this type of distributor, more attention is paid to the team building of distributors, which is a stage of establishing passive income for mature distributor mothers.

This stage is crucial for the development of the promoter's long-term project and is also a key part of the entire distributor cap. The project I am responsible for currently has many operational problems in the mature distributor stage.

In 365 days of practice, the promoter's monthly revenue can be calculated according to the following model:

Distributor monthly revenue = qualified distributors * distributor activity rate * number of distributor recommendations * distributor recommendation conversion rate * distributor average customer price

Let me briefly introduce the definitions of these indexes, which are particularly critical for distributor operations.

• Distributor monthly revenue: As the name suggests, it is the total revenue that the distributor brings to the team project;
• Qualified distributor: generally defined as a distributor who has successfully made recommendations;
• Distributor activity rate: the active proportion of distributors who recommend successful experiences every month;
• Number of recommendations by a distributor: the average number of people recommended by each active recommender in a month;
• Distributor recommendation conversion rate: the average conversion rate of customers recommended by distributors;
• Distributor average order value: the average order value of each distributor's order.

Based on this formula, we can do a simple calculation and deduce that the number of qualified distributors, activity level, and transaction rate are constant:

We use 1,000 people as constant promoters, 40% activity, and 15% transaction rate as standard values ​​for calculation, and we can see:

• If each person recommends 2 people, the monthly revenue will be 310,000;
• If each person recommends 5 people, the monthly revenue will be 770,000;
• If each person recommends 7 people, the monthly revenue will be 1.09 million;

The distributor operations seem to be very profitable, but in fact the results are just numbers. Behind the same model, there will be many personalized problems.

This is also the original intention of writing this article. I hope that all colleagues in education operations can forget about results and methodology, find the key value G-spot behind each operation system, and maximize the value.

6. What should a company do at different stages of self-operated education distribution?

In the process of operating the distributor program and communicating with various companies, I found that the problems and understandings of the education distributor program by various companies were still somewhat one-sided.

Based on my communication with various companies and my own practical experience, I would like to give some suggestions to education companies’ distributor projects at different stages.

1. Start-up

​The distributor project is actually quite risky at the start-up stage. As mentioned earlier: the core of the distributor's operation is to get users who trust the product to recommend users.

It is recommended to use third-party tools as the main tool when starting out. In the early stage, you should be restrained in the profit-sharing design to leave enough room for the development of later promoters. It is advisable to have 1-2 people.

2. Series A

After having a certain base of paying students, the product has a good start-up volume of distributors.

At this stage, it depends on the support of different companies for the project. At this stage, it is still recommended to use third-party tools as the main tool.

When it comes to the A round, the distributor’s profit sharing will form a non-positive correlation with the channel’s profit sharing.

If there are large-scale mature users, it is necessary to focus on the user training system and operating procedures after the entry of large-scale distributors. This will require an operation team of about 3 people, and the monthly revenue target should be between 2 million and 4 million.

3. Round B

It is necessary to re-experience the user service scale experience in the start-up and Series A stages and build up a stable operation and service team.

At this stage, we need to focus on the establishment of distributor groups under large-scale user services, ensure that the achievement of monthly tasks is related to the core group, and reduce the operation and maintenance pressure of the distributor team itself.

• It seems that educating self-operated distributors has many benefits, but in 365 days of practice, many problems have also been discovered. I need to discuss the following points with my colleagues in operations growth:
• Because the design of the distributor's profit-sharing model may result in inconsistencies with channel policies, internal distributors may be unwilling to participate in the education company's internal distributor plan.
• When distributors face abnormalities in internal product and service operations, it will have a relatively large correlation impact on the promotion enthusiasm of the entire distributors.
• Education distributors are mainly paying students. Since each student has a limited number of influence, the number of participating distributors decreases successively. Once the number of new students fails to increase, the revenue of education distributors will fluctuate greatly.
• Because of the existence of distribution traffic, the internal sales team of education companies will have a false illusion of high conversion rate, while other channels cannot achieve the same conversion rate.
• If education distributors are embedded in all aspects of formal student services in small projects, it will be a great boost to the projects. However, if you are in a large and mature operating system, the education distributor project will have resource imbalance and insufficient support. After communicating with many educational institutions with monthly revenue of 1 million, this department was eventually cut off because of its slow revenue growth and impact on many mature departments.
• The operational service that seems to be very important is the key for distributors, but the actual user stickiness lies with the distributor’s service teachers, and it is difficult for distributor service staff to establish key service barriers.

Of course, although there are many problems with the education distributor project, it is also worthy of the core attention of small and medium-sized education companies. It is a very critical link in lowering the overall customer acquisition cost and establishing a sustained high ROI.

Author: Yifan

Source: Operation Hunter