Online education customer acquisition and community operation!

With the development of the Internet, the maturity of mobile payments and the improvement of broadband infrastructure, online education has become possible. Back in 2020, the sudden outbreak of the epidemic accelerated the development of online education, and more and more offline education practitioners and non-education practitioners joined the online education industry.

On the one hand, various capitals favor the education industry, which has accelerated its development; on the other hand, more and more people are joining the online education entrepreneurship, which will also accelerate the competition in the industry. But no one expected that in 2021, due to the impact of the country's double reduction policy, the ship of online education collapsed, and countless teachers and trainers were laid off and unemployed.

This article records the development process of my company from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 100 through online education logic, channel acquisition, community conversion, service renewal and core data . Although K12 online education has suffered a heavy blow, it still has reference value for vocational education and adult education.

1. The Logic of Online Education

In China's online education, there are three key links to complete the business cycle: customer acquisition, conversion, and maintenance and renewal .

The way to complete conversion in the online education industry is generally for users to participate in free or low-cost training camp courses, then add a dedicated class teacher and enter an exclusive learning community. After 3, 5 or 7 days of study, the students will be converted into full-price course users through the class teacher. Users who sign up for full-priced courses will enter an exclusive learning group that will operate for one year, and then complete renewals, referrals, and other actions through the full-priced course learning group.

Therefore, projects that have just entered the angel round, especially online education projects, are generally in the most primitive stage where technology is just beginning to be built, products are just beginning to be developed, traffic is just beginning to be explored, sales are just beginning to be verified, and services are just beginning to be built. Essentially, the minimum an online education startup should do before it starts acquiring customers is to have trial courses, formal courses of a certain duration, suitable sales staff, and basic learning service personnel before it can get started.

Online education monetization products will have two lines: horizontal and vertical .

The horizontal aspect is based on the follow-up reports of different age groups. For example, a 3-year-old child has completed the L3 course after one year of study. If the child has learned well and gained something, he or she can sign up for the 4-year-old L4 course.

The vertical direction is the expansion of subjects based on different disciplines. For example, if a three-year-old child has studied a Chinese reading enlightenment course, should he try a thinking enlightenment course? If you are not interested, there are also quality courses such as music and art.

In contrast, the most impressive thing my company did when building the entire operating system was to first focus on optimizing conversion and renewal, and then focus on customer acquisition. The advantage of doing this is that there will be no waste of traffic. No matter how much traffic there is, the downstream team will complete the handling action in the most efficient way.

2. Different stages of channel acquisition

1. Find a low-cost, stable and continuous traffic form

In 2018 and 2019, the most profitable way for WeChat ecosystem to acquire customers is WeChat fission. In essence, it is about achieving fission and attracting new users based on the social value of users. Many online education companies are very addicted to this fission and new user acquisition method within the WeChat ecosystem.

At that time, we started with the fission of WeChat service accounts. The theme of fission was to invite several friends to follow the public account to get certain physical rewards. These physical rewards can be books, toys, stationery, electronic materials, etc. Although this method is efficient, it reduces the user's accuracy to a certain extent. However, no matter what the efficiency and conversion are, for early-stage projects, there is no problem in having continuous traffic and ensuring the basic flow of the project.

2. Integrate resources and amplify fission to create value

Through the attempts in the previous stage, the fission group was able to obtain stable users and help the sales team train. With basic traffic, the product model is basically verified, the sales model is basically confirmed, and the sales team begins to expand. The traffic we provided could no longer meet the needs of our business, so we started to deliver business within the WeChat ecosystem, starting with the information flow of WeChat public accounts.

The fission team also began to integrate the platform's resources, including internal and external resources to amplify the value generated by fission . Internal resources include public account resources, APP and community resources; external resources include public account delivery resources.

3. Supplement group fission and reduce customer acquisition costs

As mentioned earlier, we entered the WeChat ecological growth system from the fission of public accounts. As the traffic pool expands, the self-fission effect of WeChat begins to increase.

In actual business, we have found that users not only have a demand for physical rewards, such as books, stationery and toys, but also have a demand for learning some virtual courses, such as literacy, pinyin and other courses. Therefore, we added growth methods such as community fission and check-in fission, which are based on the rapid digestion of social relationships through sharing in users’ circle of friends.

This method uses virtual course rewards and can be reused, so the cost is almost zero. This approach also lowers the overall customer acquisition cost. Through the back-end course attendance, course completion and conversion data, we found that the quality of users acquired by using videos and other learning materials as bait is relatively high, so we established a community fission group to be solely responsible for the planning and execution of community fission activities.

4. Enterprise WeChat fission efforts to build enterprise WeChat traffic pool

2020 is the first year of WeChat for Enterprises, and the development of the epidemic has strengthened the determination of all companies to build private domain traffic. The user growth in the online education industry has an extremely keen sense of traffic. During this stage, we also began to try to acquire customers through WeChat for Business. At that time, we were probably the first online education team on the market to try WeChat for Business!

There are three ways to increase customer acquisition through WeChat for Enterprise: fission of personal WeChat accounts, fission of WeChat for Enterprise groups, and fission of personal WeChat accounts + service accounts. We will start with the first phase of the fission of personal accounts on corporate WeChat. The fission form is similar to the fission of service accounts. Users can get corresponding rewards by inviting several friends to add corporate WeChat.

Later, we tried the fission of enterprise WeChat groups and the fission of enterprise WeChat personal accounts + service accounts.

5. Product-driven fission, the second curve of customer acquisition

As we enter 2020, more and more peers and even large companies have begun to lay out the enlightenment track for the transition from preschool to primary school. The competition for acquiring customers for public accounts has become transparent. Players entering the market with capital have begun to raise the prices of public accounts and adopt buyout or exclusive forms to compete in the market. It seems that the project, which has just entered the stage of ROI calculation and long-term operation, is facing even worse situation. On the other hand, the fission effects of public accounts, community groups and enterprise WeChat have declined, and the conversion effect on the back end is getting worse and worse.

These are the two difficult problems facing us, and we began to look for the second curve of customer acquisition. After investigation, it was found that a large number of online education companies on the market have begun to try product-driven fission methods, including one-yuan unlocking, group buying, and assistance.

It just so happens that we have convenient resources in this regard and began to try the above fission forms. It includes user path setting, course editing, small MVP testing and data analysis. After about half a month, we finally completed the data of each funnel link and found the second curve of the company's customer acquisition growth.

6. Focus on core users and increase distribution and referrals

In the early stages of the Enlightenment online education project, the founding team can adopt two strategies for traffic acquisition: one is to be capital-oriented, do a good job of basic ROI, and continue to increase investment. Another way is to continue to look at the product + service model, optimize the learning service experience, improve the satisfaction of students in full-priced courses, and increase student referrals.

In fact, there is no fixed time period for student distribution and referrals. In the survival stage, the customer acquisition channel will remain mainly public accounts, with a basic fission-assisted model, and strong referrals from users (distributors) will be the most effective way to continuously lower customer acquisition costs.

Therefore, after the project is successfully implemented, you can embed distribution and referral user growth methods. We have two legs to walk in traffic acquisition, focusing on both front-end delivery and fission, as well as back-end renewal and service. Only when these two models interact with each other can the business maintain stable development.

3. Social Conversion

In the early stages of the enlightenment phase of a product, the common channel conversion rates are generally around 6%-10%, and the labor efficiency ratio is 1 person serving 400-600 people each time. Calculated based on an average conversion rate of 8%, the transaction price is 1,800, the labor efficiency is 600 people, and the monthly output of one person is 108,000. About 2-3 issues can be handled in a month, so the monthly output can reach 200,000-300,000.

Generally speaking, the methods of social conversion are mainly divided into social sales and telephone sales, and the focus of these two methods is also different. Community sales focuses on community content and informing users of the necessity of learning. It emphasizes the guidance and interaction of online salespeople, and assists in the conversion process by assisting in the order chain to complete user conversion. Telemarketing, on the other hand, stratifies users according to user portraits, learning participation rates, group speeches, etc., prioritizes community conversion, and then assists telephone sales to complete the conversion one by one.

Generally, we look at community conversion by looking at the community’s SOP, but the essence of community conversion is to provide users with a longer period for audition and trial, just like the offline lectures of educational institutions, but it is more about the course experience itself. The key role of community SOP is to guide how community sales operate on a daily basis. The core customer reception, customer demand exploration, customer service, and customer conversion all rely on the quality of the community operators themselves.

As online education becomes more mature, the basic product experience and services are basically in line. The remaining core of the competition is the competition between the product itself and sales capabilities, or more accurately, the competition between product strength and customer acquisition capabilities.

In the long run, community sales will exist in a way that emphasizes strong execution, attention to details, emphasis on service, and emphasis on marketing. Therefore, under the logic of conventional community conversion and SOP execution, it is more of an exploration and satisfaction based on the needs of users themselves.

After the conversion, the community can still be handed over to the fission team to continue exploring the social value of users.

IV. Service Renewal

Regardless of whether educational products in the enlightenment stage have quantifiable learning effects, the core issue is to allow users to enjoy the learning experience of the service. For the company, it is an important step to keep users in the pond and "raise fish". Through the long-term operation of this link, we can do a good job in user renewal, subject expansion and referrals, which will reduce the cost of acquiring customers in the long run.

Maintaining a large number of regular-price course users requires considerable personnel expenses. Many teams have also considered using part-time workers for maintenance, that is, selecting some parents from the students who have the time and willingness to complete the basic operations of the community. However, in the long run, it is difficult to require part-time workers to achieve very detailed tracking. The enlightenment process itself has many professional and specific problems. As a parent who is also a student, it is even more difficult to give parents good learning suggestions.

Our company employs full-time staff to maintain full-price course users, but we optimize costs in the following two aspects.

First, leverage the power of technology to design more in-depth and refined service links to reduce the service pressure on class teachers.

Second, reduce the pressure of personnel costs by setting up remote services.

5. Close the loop of online education and focus on core data

As mentioned above, the logic of online education is customer acquisition - conversion - maintenance and renewal . Generally speaking, the various business departments have a cooperative relationship that is closer to upstream and downstream.

In the short term, it is revenue; in the long term, it must be a test of the core data of all business links. These key data are the responsibility of different teams working together. It includes the cost of trial classes, attendance rate, completion rate, conversion rate, refund rate, renewal rate and referral rate.

• Cost of trial classes: It tests the market operation and growth team on how to find their own unique way of acquiring customers through common channels such as official accounts, information flows, distribution channels, and fission growth, so as to lower the overall cost (of course, user accuracy is also an aspect).
• Attendance rate + completion rate: This tests the product, technology and the ability of the class teacher. Users take a trial class, and only if they attend and complete the class can the conversion be completed.
• Conversion rate: The core test is the sales conversion team, how to ensure stability, how to promote better user conversion, and lower the first-order customer acquisition cost.
• Refund rate: tests the stability of service, teaching and research, and technical team services to ensure long-term achievement and satisfaction of users.
• Renewal rate: This tests the capabilities of the service team, and also indirectly tests the course design capabilities and technical implementation capabilities.
• Referral rate: It tests the service team, market operation growth team, and technical team on how to implement good strategies, technology, and promotion of the service team.

Author: Private Domain Deep Operation

Source: Private Domain In-depth Operation