Operational strategies for low-cost customer acquisition in the education industry!

During the epidemic, after experiencing low conversion rates from free at-home learning traffic, education companies began to rethink the success and failure of acquiring customers through free learning. Low conversion means low revenue, low revenue means low cash flow, and low cash flow means low marketing expenses. On the other side of the market, due to the epidemic, countless offline education companies have begun to expand online. The online market, which already had high costs, has further increased its market entry costs.

For online education, which already has low gross margins, how to acquire customers at a lower cost becomes an important issue. Since the beginning of 2019, private domain traffic operations have begun to rise, and the distribution fission of existing users in private domain traffic has become a very important part of private domain traffic operations in 2020. Today we will talk about the pitfalls and opportunities of distribution fission of education private domain traffic.

1. The pros and cons of private domain traffic distribution fission

In the current mainstream cases of private domain traffic distribution and fission, mainstream online education companies including Yuanfudao and Xueersi have launched some similar distribution or fission courses. Traditional distribution fission focuses more on courses with unit prices, such as 19.9, 29.9, and 39.9 yuan. Now distribution fission has evolved into 0 yuan trial classes.

From the perspective of links, it includes the students' trial period and the formal student period, and the recommended products and tools include full-cycle products and short-cycle products.

As the fission customer acquisition effect in the current circle of friends continues to decline, the fission sharing process of each company is still mainly based on poster content. Such content currently has low exposure to general users and the conversion rate continues to decline. According to Yifan’s recent test data, the rate of posters converting to orders is only 20%-35%. How to improve the distribution fission capability before, during and after learning? It is a very critical link in achieving distribution fission. When it comes to distribution fission, there are three main issues to focus on: user willingness to participate, the product form used by users to acquire customers, and the ease of using tools.

The user's willingness to participate focuses on two aspects: the benefits obtained by the user and the user's sense of honor. Judging from the current distribution fission designs of several companies, more effort is put into the user's benefits and less into the user's sense of honor. This is relatively easy to understand, because after all, through distribution and customer acquisition activities, the number of potential users that each person can influence is limited, and it is difficult to establish learning medals and certificates like in the learning process.

The product form for user acquisition focuses on two core issues: the convenience of user operation and the scarcity and richness of content. As for the fission distribution customer acquisition currently done by various companies, more forms are still marketing posters. VIPKID has innovated the experience poster customer acquisition that records the learning process. Some institutions have also innovated articles, learning process reports, big V lectures, check-ins for red envelopes and other rich customer acquisition product forms, with low fan damage, such as Banyu Picture Books, and high customer acquisition efficiency.

The ease of use of a tool focuses more on the user experience during the user participation phase. There are not many special differences among the companies in the design of the distribution fission page. Vipkid will display the learning details of the invitation, Banyu will pay more attention to the virtual currency reminder after the invitation, and Zebra will make more detailed optimizations on the reward types.

From the perspective of the student cycle covered by distribution fission, long-cycle coverage will definitely have better coverage and impact than short-cycle coverage. The long-cycle design is also more in line with the LTV digital assessment in the distribution fission design. For the operation growth team, they can seize every user's aha moment to bring users to the education company. So, what are the pros and cons of short distribution and long distribution, and what should we pay attention to in the design?

2. Short-term distribution: a powerful tool for explosive growth

A common application case of short-term distribution is that an institution launches an invitation-gift activity based on a trial course or a small course package, inviting users to purchase courses to generate rewards. The reward behavior ends within a certain product or activity or within a certain time period. It is generally common before the start of a short-term trial class and at the end of a short-term trial class. It is a short-term behavior to stimulate users. A typical case is the invitation-gift activity of the Zebra AI class.

The short-term distribution customer acquisition form is generally carried out among trial students and old students by educational institutions. The path is also very simple, mainly the following two types:

• Experience students: students can experience the class - purchase successful recommendation invitation - invitation poster - invitation reward
• Old students: Old students personal center - Recommendation gift - Invitation poster - Invitation reward

The referral path is based more on a separate page and has nothing to do with the core learning process of the students. It is more of a short-term and fast activity to invite new users. If the invitation is designed to accumulate long-term redemption, the cost of acquiring customers can be controlled. It can be used as a form of distribution when there is a large amount of traffic from potential and old students.

In Yifan’s distribution fission practice, there are also some problems with short-term distribution activities:

1. After the benefits of short-term distribution are revealed, old students will be disgusted with the rebate for course purchases, and the participation rate will generally drop below 30%;
2. The design of priceless short-term distribution will bring a relatively large proportion of non-precise users, which will have a relatively large impact on the conversion rate. It is necessary to make restrictions on the issuance of rewards, such as VIPKid's course completion restrictions;
3. The users are purely personal pushers, there are no critical time nodes, and the push volume is unstable.

3. Fission growth and long-term distribution

The long-term distribution of private domain traffic breaks the short-term participation stimulation of one-time distribution and establishes stimulation for the long life cycle of users. The reward products and reward rules can be continuously iterated as the user's recommended behavior changes over time.

It is conducive to educating users to make recommendations during the long period of education and learning, and takes into account the user's willingness to make word-of-mouth recommendations under favorable learning conditions. Establish the recommendation process based on the students' learning process, focus on motivating students in their exciting moments, and enhance students' referral and distribution. A typical case is: Vipkid.

Long-term distribution focuses more on old students. Unfortunately, the current sharing design of Zebra is still relatively simple and crude. It is simple and crude for novice users, but for a user, there is only one recommended product, and there are generally three paths:

• Before learning: Successful order placement - Invitation gift recommendation - Invitation poster - Invitation reward
• Experiential learning: Learning process - Sharing learning records - Invitation rewards
• After formal learning: During the learning process - Share learning records - Invite rewards

The recommendation path requires more of a points design that connects the user's learning process and requires more technical support. It is more of a long-term referral-type fission activity. The activity format is more favorable to users, can increase user participation, and provide an experience of obtaining additional learning rewards.

In Yifan's distribution fission practice, there are also some problems with long-term distribution activities:

1. In the long distribution process, the participating users are served by the class teacher team and need to work closely with the coach or design KPIs for the coach separately;
2. Long-term distribution content needs to be more diverse, such as learning reports, lectures by experts, training or red envelope opening activities, etc.
3. The operation of the recommendation process is uncontrollable and requires strong cooperation between the channel student service team and operations.

From the front-line practice of the above two types of distribution, assuming that 10,000 people of the same type participate in short-term distribution and long-term distribution, the short-term distribution volume can generally reach a referral rate of 1:1, which means an increase of about 10,000 people. If we look at it from the perspective of long-term distribution, the referral rate can reach 1.5, which generally means it can reach about 15,000 people in about 2 months.

There are also some small and medium-sized enterprises, such as the small and medium-sized projects where Yifan is located, which will also build a special service team and a long-term distribution operation team. They will operate and drive independently based on the logic of everyone's distribution, and can also make a relatively high revenue contribution to the project.

However, for medium and large projects, compared with a distribution fission design framework, the value contribution of the Renren Distribution project in medium and large companies is limited, and the bottleneck is obvious. However, how Renren Distribution educational institutions can build their own business is a very important growth issue, which requires exploration and layout by major educational institutions.

Through the study of the distribution fission gameplay of the above-mentioned well-known institutions, we can see that in today's refined growth operations, the operation of long distribution activities is an important issue that all online education institutions must pay attention to. It is also a very effective means to reduce customer acquisition costs when the cost of acquiring customers is currently high. It is worthy of the attention and layout of all employees to open up the entire chain of private domain growth.

Author: Yifan

Source: Yifan