Four user growth strategies for online education institutions!

How to achieve growth in the field of online education ? This article summarizes four combined growth strategies and analyzes them with case studies. Interested friends are welcome to read this.

Growth has always been a topic of concern for all industries and companies, and the same is true for online education. Generally speaking, growth includes user growth and revenue growth. If you have to make a trade-off between the two, user growth is often the primary development issue, because in order to generate revenue, you need to have a certain scale of users as a basis. Therefore, we see that many articles, books or courses that explain how to achieve growth are aimed at user growth.

Of course, with the development of online education, user growth strategies are becoming increasingly diverse, from single sales to combination marketing, from just spending money to focusing on brand and effect integration. Next, we will summarize four relatively effective combination growth strategies in the current online education field.

01 Low-price course delivery + private domain operation

The core product of online education is training courses. The traditional method is to directly sell long-term courses. Because education is a rigid demand, users will definitely buy educational products, but the decision of which one to buy depends on the effect and brand. In order to compete for users, leading online education companies have begun to adopt an experiential marketing strategy, and low-priced courses are a direct reflection of this strategy.

By purchasing low-priced courses, users can initially experience the content quality and service level, and thus make decisions on online education brand selection. Low-priced courses, as a natural traffic-generating product, will be placed on major channels, especially emerging channels such as information feeds, short videos, and self-media. This actually promotes the improvement of the quality of online education marketing. Of course, due to fierce competition, the customer acquisition cost of low-priced courses has risen sharply.

The operation of low-priced courses is mainly based on the WeChat private domain ecosystem, which is a combination of "personal account + community". After users purchase a course through the drainage channel, they will be guided to add a WeChat account. After adding friends, they will be pulled into a WeChat group that has both service and conversion attributes. Through refined operations, user doubts will be gradually dispelled and they will be guided to pay.

Case: Changtou Academy

Financial education is a relatively hot track in online education in 2019. Changtou Academy is a company that has been relatively successful in acquiring customers in this track using the "low-price delivery + private domain operation" model. Its launched product is the 9-yuan novice financial management training camp. The price and positioning of this product cover most of the intended groups, that is, users who want to manage their finances but do not understand and are sensitive to prices.

Let’s take a look at the operating model of the 9 yuan training camp:

First, guide users to follow the official account to participate in the evaluation, and then guide them to enter the QQ group. The QQ group will be operated in a cooperative manner by the class teacher, supervisor, seniors, etc., including timely answering of questions, knowledge guidance, learning reminders, etc. The specific operation details are devilish. At the same time, attention is paid to script marketing and character building, which ensures that the QQ group of Changtou Academy has a high level of activity and conversion rate. This whole set of private domain operation actions is worthy of learning from peers.

02 Short video traffic diversion + monetization

Short videos have been the biggest channel dividend in recent years, mainly due to the rise of the two major short video platforms, Tik Tok and Kuaishou. Both have hundreds of millions of active users, making "traditional" new media channels such as WeChat and Weibo tremble, especially Tik Tok, which has made "two Weibo and one Tik Tok" the standard for corporate new media marketing and made short video operation a new skill that new media personnel must master.

For the online education investment war in 2019, short video channels, especially Douyin, are the focus. Online education institutions in emerging fields such as children's English, children's programming, mathematical thinking, and Chinese language attach great importance to the operation of Douyin channels, whether it is content push or paid investment. This shows that short videos have become a battleground for online education to obtain traffic.

In addition, Kuaishou announced in 2019 that it would invest billions to support educational short videos and build "new infrastructure" in the education field. Many online education companies have already settled in Kuaishou and hope to obtain traffic on Kuaishou just as they did with Douyin's dividends. However, with the gradual popularization of short video formats, high-quality content and matrix operations are increasingly becoming the core of short video operations.

Case: Zhuge Academy

Zhuge Academy is an educational institution focusing on the Chinese language track. It has dozens of accounts on Douyin, with a cumulative fan base of more than 12 million. Most of the accounts are named "Zhuge Academy-A Certain Teacher".

In these accounts, most of the content consists of clips of teachers’ offline classes, such as talking about Lu You’s poems, metaphorical sentence structure, etc. The number of views and likes is generally very high. Of course, this is not the case for all accounts. It depends on the quality of the content and the teacher’s expressiveness.

Of course, high-quality content will bring higher response interactions. Zhuge Academy will guide users to the "product showcase" below the account in the comments to purchase low-priced video courses, thereby completing the conversion. For example, the highest-rated content in the account "Teacher Yang of Zhuge Academy" is "Tell Children to Learn to Share." The comment area will be pinned to guide users to forward the video and remind them to "click on the product showcase to get the full version of the composition class." There are many comments below asking for advice on the courses.

03 Public account matrix + live broadcast conversion

Any online education company has more than one official account. Operating multiple official accounts at the same time has become a basic traffic standard and a very effective means of obtaining traffic.

There are generally two strategies for operating the public account matrix:

The first is to position separately, relying on the characteristics of vertical fields to attract traffic through content, activities and other means, which is the same logic as the vertical operation strategy in full-network marketing.

The second is the mutual traffic diversion between official accounts. There are also two forms of traffic diversion. One is direct traffic diversion, and the other is to initiate activities on the official account and then guide the traffic to the new official account through a series of operations. This is a relatively simple and effective way.

For educational public accounts, there are many ways to retain and convert fans. Open classes are a relatively effective means because they are similar to low-priced classes and can also play a role in experiential marketing. For example, many online education companies adopt the product model of live classes, which means that open classes will also be broadcast live, so that the live broadcast effect and teacher level can be experienced in advance, thereby affecting the audience's behavioral decisions.

Case: Who to learn from

GSX is a highly anticipated online education listed company in 2019. It has over 100 public accounts with over one million followers, and these public accounts achieve overall growth by directing traffic to each other.

In terms of the specific routine, activities are first frequently released on some larger accounts, and multiple entrances such as tweets, messages, menu bars, etc. will be promoted. Then the traffic is guided into the group. There are a large number of robots lurking in the group. The robots will identify users and guide them to follow other public accounts to obtain information, activities, open courses and other entrances. The new public accounts will also promote other similar content, forming a closed traffic loop.

While forming a closed loop of traffic on the official account, Getuixue uses live open classes to conduct marketing conversions. The instructors of Who’s Teaching’s open classes will first introduce their outstanding personal resumes, teach the knowledge modules they are good at, and demonstrate their personal abilities. Then, they will highlight strong interactivity during the entire live broadcast process, such as live connection, screen-swiping and quick answering, etc.

The later sales stages will also be very detailed, such as conducting case demonstrations, using Q&A to promote sales, etc., to ensure that the overall conversion rate can be very high.

04 Referral fission + distribution

How to make every possible effort to utilize existing users to acquire new traffic is a question that every online education company is thinking about. For educational and training products, users need to make very high-level decisions when purchasing. If we can use word-of-mouth communication from users, the cost of acquiring customers will be greatly reduced.

Therefore, it is not surprising that social marketing methods with strong dissemination capabilities, such as community fission, recommendation rewards, and personalized posters, can be used by most online education companies.

However, the effect of pure social fission marketing has begun to decline, and fission methods based on carriers such as communities, official accounts, and mini-programs have gradually been controlled or even eliminated by WeChat. The best proof of this is that WeChat took two actions in 2019 to crack down on check-ins in Moments and price-cutting external links.

However, the method of using old users as the core to invite new forces still exists, and it has become a trend to upgrade the products and reorganize the systems through means such as assistance, unlocking, and group buying, which makes the sharing method gradually have a good user experience.

In addition to referral fission, distribution is also gradually being used by online education companies. The basic logic is to recruit promotion personnel from existing users to distribute and acquire customers. In essence, it is also to use the channels of existing users to attract new users, but it requires a certain cost of interest. As long as it can be properly controlled, it is a good method. Of course, whether it is referral or distribution, the product needs to be polished well enough. This is the prerequisite for ensuring the operation of old customers bringing in new customers, otherwise the reputation will be lost.

Case: Zebra English

Online education companies in the children's English track attach great importance to the establishment of referral systems. The most well-known one is VIPKID. It is said that more than 60% of its users are recruited through referrals, which shows its power.

In addition to some children's English companies such as VIPKID that mainly provide one-on-one online teaching, some children's English companies that use AI classes as their main teaching model have also emerged in recent years. A typical example is Zebra English under Yuanfudao.

One of Zebra English’s core growth methods is to build a customer acquisition system of “referral + distribution + fission”.

First, distribution. The core carrier is a trial class for 9.9 yuan (recently changed to 1 yuan, and allows active sharing). If the invited friends successfully purchase the trial class, they can get a 30% commission and other tiered rewards.

The second is the referral activity using diamonds as virtual tokens. The main way to play is that old users can get diamonds by recommending friends to purchase the 89 yuan first month course or the 49 yuan thinking experience course. The more diamonds you invite, the more you get, with no upper limit, and you can redeem prizes in the mall.

Finally, there are activities and mini-programs aimed at fission and traffic generation. For example, it has developed a mini-program "Zebra English Planet" that imitates the Ant Forest gameplay of Alipay. It has also launched some free courses based on community fission and physical redemption activities based on public account fission.

Summarize

We have summarized the three major monetization models and four combined growth strategies of online education in two articles:

The three major monetization models of online education include the one-to-one model, the training camp model, and the live class model. Among them, the training camp model and the live class model are close to being implemented, and the operating models are relatively mature and replicable, but still need to be observed.

The four combined growth strategies of online education are "low-priced course delivery + private domain operation", "short video traffic + monetization", "public account matrix + live broadcast conversion", and "referral fission + distribution". These four strategies are further combined into a more complete customer acquisition system.

In general, online education is a long-term trend that is very worthy of investment. Both investors and latecomers need to understand the basic logic of the industry, and managers and operators currently engaged in this field must also conduct more in-depth analysis of industry development trends and business improvement directions. I hope this article can bring some inspiration to you. If there are any shortcomings, you are welcome to criticize and correct me.

Related reading:

1. Three major monetization models of online education!

12.How do K12 online education products achieve user growth?

3. Tips for online education growth: Share 6 paid fission techniques!

4. How does online education attract new customers, retain customers, and convert them?

5. Online education conversion traffic operation guide!

Author: Wild Solitary Fungus

Source: Wild Sophora japonica