"Tencent Classroom" product operation analysis!

Due to the epidemic in the first half of this year, online classes occupied our study for a while. Tencent Classroom also jumped up during this epidemic. The training content of Tencent Classroom is very extensive, ranging from preschool to adults. This article is a detailed analysis of Tencent Classroom, let’s take a look together.

In April 2020, Tencent Classroom jumped to the first place in the education and learning industry in terms of average daily active users in China's mobile Internet dark horse list, sparking heated discussions.

According to public reports: Tencent Classroom online education platform was officially launched in April 2014. As of June 2020, the total number of institutions that have joined Tencent Classroom has exceeded 72,000, and the number of users who have learned online through Tencent Classroom has exceeded 10 million.

Why has Tencent Classroom risen so rapidly in less than ten years? What is the development status of the entire industry?

This article will analyze the perspective of Tencent Classroom to give you an in-depth understanding of the operating logic of this APP and online education platform.

This article will analyze from the following aspects:

1. Industry Analysis
2. Competitive product analysis
3. User Value Analysis
4. Business value analysis
5. Product Iteration Analysis
6. Product structure analysis
7. Operational Analysis
8. SWOT Analysis
9. Optimization suggestions
10. Summarize

1. Industry Analysis

The online education industry is an Internet training industry that conducts online teaching and learning through the Internet, relying on cloud computing, big data mining, multimedia technology and other information technologies.

Around the 1990s, domestic online education was just starting out. By 2020, online education has entered the 4.0 era. After just 20 years, my country's online education has grown from its infancy to its current booming development. It can be said that the development speed is jaw-dropping.

So, what is the reason for the explosive growth in the online education industry?

1. Politics

First, since the Labor Law of 1995 established professional skill standards for specified occupations and implemented a professional qualification certificate system, various professional certificate examinations have become increasingly popular in recent years - this has created a large gap in demand for vocational training.

Secondly, in 2017, a new enrollment model was added for master's degrees. Part-time and full-time graduate students began to be enrolled on the same track. The number of newly enrolled graduate students increased significantly each year, and the demand for educational resources in the field of higher education entrance examinations also increased accordingly.

2. Economy

In recent years, the proportion of per capita cultural, educational and entertainment expenditure in total consumption has continued to grow.

According to data analysis by the National Bureau of Statistics: In 2019, the per capita education, culture and entertainment expenditure of the national residents continued to increase, accounting for 9.9% of consumer expenditure, an increase of 20.6% year-on-year; this also shows that more and more people are willing to invest more money in self-improvement or their children's education.

3. Society and culture

In recent years, the Internet industry has forced traditional industries to undergo major changes with its unprecedented penetration, and the demand for Internet technology talents in all walks of life has continued to increase.

Although some programming courses have been added to the compulsory education curriculum to adapt to the Internet era, they are far from meeting current learning needs, which makes children's courses such as "Children's Programming" extremely popular.

On the other hand, the transformation and upgrading of China's economy has also changed the structure of talent demand. The number and structure of high-level technical and skilled talents are far from meeting market demand; especially vocational non-academic education, such as finance, accounting, justice, IT and other fields, which has grown extremely rapidly and is the main force driving the growth of the vocational education market.

4. Technology

The development of Internet technology has provided more possibilities for online education.

With the rapid development of Internet technology, paper and venues have been eliminated, making online courses lower in cost than offline courses; at the same time, Internet technology can bring together a large amount of educational resources and provide personalized courses for different users based on their individual needs.

The improvement in hardware performance of mobile phones, iPads and other devices has enabled faster and more diverse teaching methods such as video, live broadcast and audio.

In addition, video and audio courses have the feature of being able to be replayed, which is an advantage that offline courses do not have. It allows users to effectively make use of fragmented time.

In recent years, big data and AI technologies have gradually been applied to the online education industry, allowing teachers to understand students' learning status more accurately and adjust courses based on feedback.

Factors at four levels: policy, economy, social culture, and technology have jointly led to the current popularity of the online education industry.

But does the online education industry still have potential for development in the future? What will be the future development trend of the industry?

According to iResearch data: China's online education market was valued at approximately 400.38 billion yuan in 2020, a year-on-year increase of 24.1%; and it is expected to continue to grow at a rate of around 20%. By 2022, the total market size is expected to be close to 403.31 billion yuan.

Therefore, it can be foreseen that the market still has a lot of room for growth and a bright future.

2. Competitive Product Analysis

The popularity of the online education industry has brought a large number of competitors into this industry; the industry is mainly divided into several categories: higher education, vocational training, K12 basic education, preschool education, and skills teaching; online education platform apps also belong to this category, and its apps include Tencent Classroom, NetEase Cloud Classroom, Baidu Classroom, CCtalk, Sohu Classroom, Youdao Premium Courses, etc.

According to iResearch data, platform players can be roughly divided into two categories. One is BAT, NetEase, Sohu and other comprehensive Internet service companies. This type of company has advantages such as high parent brand awareness and large traffic; but there may also be disadvantages such as mismatch between original traffic and educational traffic; the other type of company is online education companies that are vertical to the education field. This type of company has rich educational experience and relatively sufficient educational resources, but has problems such as insufficient traffic.

Tencent Classroom is a comprehensive Internet service company.

Since Tencent Classroom and NetEase Cloud Classroom are direct competitors with similar user scales, we will use the two companies' growth paths and business models as a starting point to gain a deeper understanding of the differences between the two.

1. Tencent Classroom

In 2014, Tencent Classroom online education platform was launched, realizing a complete closed-loop experience of "finding courses + live classes + reminders".

In 2015, Tencent Classroom released a mobile app and H5 page, supporting learning capabilities such as recording/live broadcast/materials.

In 2016, the Excellent Course Plan was launched to provide cash rewards to high-quality institutions and encourage the production of high-quality content; key categories of operations include: IT, vocational training, IELTS, etc.

On January 19, 2019, the "101 Plan" was launched, investing resources worth 1 billion to provide all-round support to 101 educational institutions.

On January 12, 2020, the "Excellent Course Plan" and "Strict Selection Plan" were launched to implement stricter quality control on the courses on the online platform.

Tencent Classroom’s core business model is to provide an online platform that integrates various educational resources. Users can use the search mode to find the course resources they need on the platform.

Course source: Tencent Classroom ensures the quality of courses by cooperating with third-party institutions and strictly reviewing the qualifications of third-party institutions and course content, as well as a series of reward and punishment systems, such as "Excellent Course Plan" and "Violation Penalty". In addition, the platform also provides an O2O teaching model.

Target user groups: Tencent Classroom currently has seven major learning sections, including IT Internet, Design Creation, Professional Certification, Further Education Marketing, Language Study Abroad, and Interest Life, covering almost all users from preschool to adult stages; however, judging from the course content, the core users of Tencent Classroom are still mainly college students over 18 years old and working people.

Operation and promotion strategy: Tencent Classroom encourages institutions and individuals to join by providing traffic to new institutions; at the same time, it is deeply integrated with the QQ client to carry out a series of user management, such as learning plans, course reminders, and student incentives, in order to ensure user stickiness.

In general, Tencent Classroom prefers to utilize the traffic of QQ and WeChat to build a multi-dimensional, high-resource aggregation e-commerce education platform.

2. NetEase Cloud Classroom

NetEase Cloud Classroom was launched in 2012.

In 2013, NetEase Cloud Classroom launched a study plan function to support the organization and sharing of learning content.

In November 2014, NetEase Cloud Classroom transformed from a simple online course platform to an attempt to launch university computer professional courses online, and achieved success.

In February 2015, NetEase Cloud Classroom officially entered the field of online vocational education and launched the "Micro-major" project.

In 2017, NetEase Cloud Classroom launched the IP cultivation program "Expert Plan" to provide stronger support for online teaching staff.

Similar to Tencent Classroom, NetEase Cloud's core business model is to provide an online platform that integrates various educational resources, allowing users to find the course resources they need on the platform through search mode.

Course sources: In addition to cooperating with third-party institutions, NetEase Cloud Courses also obtains more educational resources by cooperating with universities. The launch of China University MOOC in 2014 brought resource import and strategic synergy advantages to NetEase Cloud Classroom. In addition, NetEase Cloud Courses has also added some self-operated courses to create high-quality courses.

Target user groups: Similar to Tencent Classroom, NetEase Cloud Classroom has seven learning sections: office efficiency, career development, programming development, product and design, lifestyle, parent-child education, and language learning. However, the main users are still college students over 18 years old and working professionals.

Operation and promotion strategy: Unlike Tencent Classroom, NetEase Cloud Classroom's operational ideas focus more on word of mouth. Before NetEase Cloud Classroom, NetEase had launched the NetEase Open Class APP, and its good reputation left a large number of potential users for NetEase Cloud Classroom. At the same time, NetEase Cloud Classroom has continued to innovate in course recommendations and diversified learning formats in recent years, retaining core users with better courses and spreading through word of mouth.

Summary: From the above analysis, it can be seen that Tencent Classroom and NetEase Cloud Classroom were launched at almost the same time, and their initial core businesses were both online education platforms, making them direct competitors.

However, their operational ideas are different. NetEase Cloud Classroom focuses on creating high-quality courses and constantly innovates in course recommendations and classroom diversity. At the same time, in terms of course sources, NetEase Cloud Classroom has better educational resources than Tencent Classroom. The disadvantage is that user interactivity is weak and there is a lack of user services.

In comparison, Tencent Classroom focuses more on improving user experience by creating learning communities for different courses and using the cohesiveness of QQ groups to allow learning users of the same type to discuss and think, and stimulate user motivation to learn through perfect incentives. In terms of user management, Tencent Classroom's service is better than NetEase Cloud Classroom. The disadvantage is that the recommended categories of Tencent Classroom courses are general and inconvenient to find; at the same time, improvement measures should be taken for software problems such as some live classes cannot be replayed.

Compared with Tencent Classroom and NetEase Cloud Classroom, it can be said that each has its own strengths. However, who will be more successful in the field of online education platforms in the future will depend on the decisions and operations of the two products in the future.

3. User Value Analysis

There are three main participants in the online education platform market: students, institutions and teachers, and platforms.

The business logic diagram of Tencent Classroom is as follows:

If the platform wants to achieve rapid growth, it must take into account the demands of students, institutions and teachers at the same time.

Next, let’s explore the needs of both parties and how Tencent Classroom, as a platform, can better meet their needs.

1. Students

Although the course content covers a wide range, Tencent Classroom's core consumers are mainly concentrated in those born after 1985, 1990 and 1995.

According to iResearch’s research, among the actual consumers of Tencent Classroom, those born after 1985s, 1990s and 1995s accounted for 16%, 28% and 28% respectively, and their combined share reached 70%.

These people are young and middle-aged in society and have a lot of room for career development. They have more or less started to get involved in the workplace and hope to find a good job through training and get promotion in the workplace, which is their main purpose of learning.

In order to achieve self-value-added and gain stronger competitiveness, there are generally three ways:

• Use your spare time to study and improve your professional skills.
• Obtain relevant professional qualification certificates.
• Learn a language and study abroad to improve your academic qualifications.

Regardless of the approach, users will have a strong need to learn. After analysis by the author, users currently mainly improve themselves through the following methods:

1) Self-study through books

Purchasing books online or in bookstores and studying on your own is a very common method of self-study nowadays. The advantage of this method is that you can arrange courses according to your own study time and grasp your learning progress. And this method usually only costs the price of a book, which is very cheap.

However, there are also prominent problems with this approach.

The analysis is as follows:

• Lack of teacher guidance makes learning difficult: Due to the lack of teacher guidance, it is difficult for students to study the contents of the book thoroughly if they do not have strong understanding and learning abilities; at the same time, an unsystematic learning method will also lead to reduced learning efficiency.
• Self-study lacks a learning atmosphere and is prone to slacking off: Buying books to study on your own lacks a learning atmosphere, and due to the lack of supervision and reminders, it is difficult to ensure that users have the perseverance to complete the study plan and achieve the goal.
• It is difficult to get accurate learning feedback: due to the lack of reasonable homework arrangements and the absence of teachers to correct and comment on homework, after students have studied for a period of time, it is difficult to know whether their learning effect is good or bad, which aspects have been learned well, and which aspects are insufficient; and these are necessary to achieve good learning results.

2) Purchase video courses to learn on your own

Purchasing video courses online solves the problem of insufficiently systematic learning; at the same time, this learning method retains the advantage of being very flexible in terms of time.

However, this approach still has many problems that cannot be solved, as analyzed below:

a. Lack of personalized service

In real life, every student has different abilities to comprehend knowledge and different foundations; however, the content of video courses purchased online is the same, which may cause students with poor comprehension and learning abilities to feel that they cannot keep up with the course, and students with a good foundation to feel that the course is too simple; during the course, students often have weak knowledge points in their studies, but video courses with fixed content make it difficult to review and explain students' different weaknesses.

b. Insufficient learning atmosphere

Compared with self-study through books, video courses are more systematic in learning knowledge; but they also lack a learning atmosphere. Students only passively accept knowledge and are unable to interact with teachers during class and strengthen their memory of knowledge in the process.

c. High prices and varying quality

There are so many different types of video courses on the market that consumers are dazzled; but these courses are often expensive and of varying quality; it is difficult for consumers to compare prices and choose the best quality and most reasonably priced courses.

3) Participate in offline training institutions

Participating in offline training institutions is currently one of the most popular ways among users. The main reason is that users believe that training institutions are more professional and authoritative. At the same time, the offline learning atmosphere is good and the learning interactivity is strong.

Although offline training institutions have obvious advantages, they also have shortcomings.

The analysis is as follows:

a. Due to geographical influence, it is difficult to allocate resources reasonably

Offline training institutions are distributed in various cities. Generally speaking, there is a surplus of teachers in prosperous areas, but it is difficult to find good teachers in remote areas; resources are affected by the region and the distribution is unreasonable.

b. Need to study on-site, insufficient use of fragmented time

Since studying requires going to a fixed place, not to mention the time wasted going back and forth. It is even more impossible to effectively use the fragmented time during commuting to study.

c. Consumers lack channels to learn about the teaching information of training institutions, have few choices, and it is easy to spend money but not get good services.

There are often only two or three offline training institutions for the same type of courses in a city, leaving consumers with little choice. Consumers can often only learn about course information and teaching staff through the training institutions’ own introductions; but the information consumers learn in this way is often not objective enough. It is easy to waste money; at the same time, the quality of teachers in offline institutions also varies greatly.

From the above content, it can be seen that although users can improve themselves by buying books, buying video courses, and studying on their own, or attending offline training institutions; these methods all have problems and are difficult to truly meet user needs.

2. Training institutions

The quality of courses is one of the core concerns of users in brand selection and one of the core competitive advantages of online education. Tencent Classroom’s courses are mainly provided by third-party training institutions.

As training institutions, they also have pain points.

The analysis is as follows:

1) There are geographical limitations and lack of technical capabilities, making it difficult to expand enrollment

The physical classes of offline training institutions are limited by region. If they want to promote the courses to other cities, they must rely on live broadcasts. However, offline training institutions lack relevant technology and equipment, and it is difficult for them to achieve clear and smooth live broadcast effects on their own. This severely limits the enrollment scale of offline training institutions.

2) Lack of marketing capabilities and promotion channels

For training institutions, what they need most is to sell courses to users in need. However, they are not proficient in how to find users; promotion in the K12 field can still rely on primary schools, junior high schools, and high schools; but for adult non-academic education and college entrance examinations, it is difficult to identify who their potential users are.

Many offline training institutions have tried to post small advertisements in subway stations and stairwells, but such publicity is expensive and ineffective. At the same time, when communicating with users, due to the lack of steps such as trial classes, it is difficult for users to truly understand the course content and trust the institution, which has also led to the loss of many users.

3) High customer acquisition costs

According to the survey results, when choosing educational products, current users pay great attention to factors such as course content, course and their own needs, course experience, and price; in other words, users hope to buy the highest quality courses that best meet their own needs with the least amount of money.

Although training institutions can meet users' demands for course content, due to their lack of operational capabilities and high customer acquisition costs, it is difficult for them to meet users' demands for course prices.

From the above three points, it can be seen that training institutions are not satisfied with offline training courses.

3. Platform

From the above analysis, we can find that in the matter of vocational training, the main problems with users' solutions are:

• The learning method is not systematic enough;
• There is no teacher to guide;
• Lack of learning atmosphere;
• There are few course options, and you cannot choose your teacher, so it is difficult to find a course that suits you;
• High price;
• Lack of personalized teaching;
• The quality of courses varies.

The training institutions’ demand is to expand the scale of enrollment, save as much money as possible on publicity and enrollment, save costs, and focus their energy on creating high-quality courses.

1) Classroom quality control

In order to ensure the quality of courses on Tencent Classroom, Tencent Classroom has adopted two sets of rules: excellent course plans and penalties for violations.

The Youke Plan specifies the reward and punishment rules for institutions based on user attendance rate, completion rate and praise rate, which helps to improve the content quality and service quality of platform institutions. The penalty for violations is to record violation scores for violations, and impose corresponding penalties when the scores reach a certain level. The use of the two sets of rules can effectively improve the quality of the platform, improve the service system, enable users to experience high-quality courses, and learn relevant knowledge relatively systematically.

2) Convenience, selectivity, and cost-effectiveness of the course

Online education platforms take into account both convenience and selectivity. As an education platform, Tencent Classroom has integrated a large number of educational resources. Users can quickly find courses of interest by searching keywords. The prices of courses are transparent, and each course platform provides user reviews and scoring functions. In this way, users can easily select cheap, high-quality, and cost-effective courses based on reviews, ratings, and price comparisons.

At the same time, the course progress is very flexible. Whether it is a video course or a live course, users can watch and participate in the course according to their own learning situation and make use of their fragmented time.

3) Personalized and interactive courses

Originally, compared with traditional education, online education had shortcomings such as poor immersion, poor interactivity, and lack of learning atmosphere; but with the improvement of technology and the application of AI and big data; now online education can fully cover a complete set of teaching activities including teaching, learning, practicing, testing, and evaluating; live courses and barrages enhance users' learning immersion and improve the classroom experience and effect.

In addition, Tencent Classroom has created a forum for each course, providing users with space for learning and communication, which improves the learning atmosphere; it is connected with the QQ client for course management, which greatly enhances user interactivity.

4) The platform brings its own traffic, increasing exposure

For offline training institutions, high customer acquisition costs and low conversion rates have always been a major obstacle to the expansion of their scale; as an online education platform, Tencent Classroom relies on a large number of QQ users and naturally has a huge advantage in traffic, which can increase the exposure of institutions; the precise push of big data allows relevant educational institutions and courses to be accurately pushed to relevant users.

At the same time, for high-quality institutions that have settled on the platform and whose scores meet certain standards, Tencent Classroom provides a "10,000 yuan Guangdiantong Fund" and arranges professional personnel to provide promotion guidance so that the institutions can obtain the first batch of students at zero cost as soon as possible.

These measures allow training institutions to focus on improving teaching quality and providing better courses, while reducing expenses on promotion and operations, reducing costs and increasing profits.

5) Tencent Classroom has shortcomings in recommending courses

Working people who want to get promoted in the workplace can be divided into two groups: those office workers who already know the direction of improvement. Tencent Classroom can meet their needs very well; but for those potential users who want to improve themselves but have no clear direction, Tencent Classroom still has shortcomings in course recommendations.

Currently, when users come into contact with Tencent Classroom for the first time, they can only search for course content. Without understanding the user information, we can plan career advancement paths and arrange courses for those customers who do not have a clear learning direction. In this regard, I think we can add manual customer service or AI to recommend relevant courses after understanding the user information, thereby improving user conversion rate.

Summary: Although there are still some shortcomings, the above reasons still make Tencent Classroom stand out among online education platforms.

4. Commercial Value Analysis

Tencent Classroom's current core business is to provide a course platform, allocate course resources reasonably according to user needs, and charge course fees. An important indicator for judging whether a business can develop healthily is revenue. Here we use GMV, the most commonly used data indicator in e-commerce, to analyze whether Tencent Classroom's core business is healthy.

GMV = number of users * conversion rate * average order value

Any improvement in any of the indicators, such as the number of users, conversion rate, and average order value, will have a positive impact on the growth of overall revenue, so next we will focus on analyzing the means by which Tencent Classroom improves these three key indicators.

1. Increase the number of platform users

In order to achieve sustained growth in revenue, a steady stream of new registered users is the most basic guarantee. So how does Tencent Classroom attract new users?

There are mainly two ways: paid channels and free channels.

First, large-scale advertising investment (paid channels).

• Method 1: On Weibo and Tik Tok, use popular bloggers or up-voters in the education field to recommend and promote. For example, Luo Yonghao recommended Tencent Classroom on Weibo.
• Method 2: Insert Tencent Classroom promotional videos on major video websites such as Youku.
• Method 3: Support public welfare, such as funding the "Xingou Primary School" for poor villages, holding public welfare activities such as "Let's Learn Together 99 Charity Day", etc. Public welfare activities can greatly enhance brand awareness.

Secondly, the connection with QQ user group and excellent product reputation (free channel).

In addition to promotion through paid channels, Tencent Classroom also uses free channels to promote its products.

• Method 1: Take advantage of the acquaintance effect of QQ groups. According to iResearch data, 70% of Tencent Classroom users access the platform through QQ; and the learning courses of these users can also be displayed to their friends and colleagues through QQ, which effectively utilizes the herd effect to create a learning circle of acquaintances.
• Method 2: Excellent product reputation. Product word-of-mouth promotion is a very important means of attracting new users for any educational product. Tencent Classroom achieves a promotion effect by encouraging users to post their homework on QQ and WeChat Moments, or share it.

Through both paid and free channels, it is not difficult to see that Tencent Classroom has effectively increased the number of platform users.

2. Improve conversion rate

After guiding users to the platform through various means, as long as users generate purchasing behavior, that is, convert into paying users of the platform, the platform will be valuable. So how does Tencent Classroom improve its conversion rate?

The author will analyze this issue from four aspects: Tencent Classroom's course selection interface, course interface, payment interface and other interfaces.

1) Course selection interface

When users open Tencent Classroom to search for courses, they will find that the homepage consists of four main parts: splash screen ads, courses of interest, carefully selected courses, and a search box.

Splash screen ads: Splash screen ads are located at the top of the Tencent Classroom homepage, recommending institution courses to users, increasing the exposure of high-quality institution courses, and attracting users to purchase.

Courses of interest:

When a user downloads the Tencent Classroom APP for the first time, the platform will ask the user to set three courses of interest. Once the setup is successful, Tencent Classroom will recommend courses based on the course categories selected by the user and update them regularly.

Some users may not have decided what courses they want to take or which teacher to take them. Tencent Classroom recommends courses that interest users, which increases the range of choices and the possibility of users purchasing courses.

However, I think that a special coupon discount module can be designed here to facilitate those price-sensitive users to purchase courses.

Carefully selected courses:

In the lower right corner of the course selection page, there is an entrance to the carefully selected courses. After clicking to enter, you will enter the "strictly selected courses" specially selected by Tencent Classroom; this type of course is characterized by good quality and good service, but the price is relatively high.

Tencent Classroom has specially organized this content to facilitate users who want to get high-quality courses and services and facilitate their purchase.

From the course selection interface, it is not difficult to see that Tencent Classroom has maximized the exposure of various courses through different classification methods.

2) Course interface

In the course selection interface, users may be interested in a certain course. Then click in, and you will be brought to the course interface; the course interface mainly increases the conversion rate from aspects such as the course, teacher introduction, what needs the course can solve for users, course evaluation and free trial, number of purchases, post-class evaluation, coupons, and collections.

Detailed courses, teacher introductions and what needs the courses can meet:

Each course on Tencent Classroom has a detailed introduction to the course and teachers, which allows users to better understand the course content and the teacher's level. At the same time, the course also explains in detail which aspects of the user's abilities the course can improve and what the effects will be after successful learning, which allows users to more clearly understand whether the course can meet their needs - which increases the user's impulse to buy.

Free trial:

In order to allow users to experience the courses firsthand and increase their trust in the platform, Tencent Classroom's paid courses are generally divided into two parts: one is a free trial class, and the other is a paid class. When users finish listening to a high-quality trial class, they will have the desire to purchase subsequent courses.

Number of purchases, favorable ratings and post-class evaluations:

In addition to course content introductions and trial classes, Tencent Classroom also lists the number of people who have purchased each course, the rate of favorable comments, and post-class evaluations on the course page; this allows users to further understand the courses they are interested in from the data. If a course has a large number of purchasers and good reviews, users are more likely to have the urge to buy due to the herd effect.

Coupons, group purchases, limited time offers:

Tencent Classroom is an online education platform that regularly launches coupons, group buying activities and limited-time discounted courses; these activities use price cuts as an attraction to increase user conversion rates.

collect:

For users who are interested in certain courses but do not have time in the near future, Tencent Classroom has launched a collection function and pushes limited-time discounts to increase the possibility of users purchasing courses.

Different from the course selection interface, the course interface mainly attracts users to purchase by offering high-quality course content and course discounts.

3) Payment interface

Purchases of Tencent Classroom are divided into online and offline. Offline purchases are not analyzed in this section.

When purchasing online, when the user is interested in a course and decides to purchase it after learning about it, he or she then clicks to purchase the course and enters the payment page. Tencent Classroom's payment system is very simple and easy to operate. There is a payment button in the lower right corner of each course. Click it to enter the recharge page. Once the recharge is completed, the payment is successful. Recharge supports Huabei, which further promotes consumption.

The simple steps save users from having to spend energy on the payment process and there is no time to hesitate whether to buy.

Secondly, Tencent Classroom uses recharge purchases, so there is a high probability that there will be some change left after buying a course, which also sets the stage for the next purchase.

4) Others

In addition to the course selection interface, course interface, and payment interface, Tencent Classroom has also set up two modules specifically to improve conversion rates:

Buy One Get One Free:

Tencent Classroom has specially set up a buy-one-get-one-free module to attract users by means of small profits but quick turnover; in this module, as long as two people buy, the price can be halved, which has attracted some users who want to buy courses at a low price.

Points redemption:

In addition to buy-one-get-one-free courses, Tencent Classroom has also launched a points redemption function; when users' listening time reaches a certain standard, they can redeem points, and when purchasing new courses, the points can be used to offset part of the cost.

On the one hand, this promotes the effect of users listening to lectures; but more importantly, when a regular customer has a lot of points on the platform, he may continue to consume on the platform. Increased stickiness of old users.

In general, from the course selection interface, course interface, payment interface and other interfaces, Tencent Classroom has provided certain guidance for user conversion. These guidances are also one of the reasons why Tencent Classroom has become bigger and stronger.

3. Increase average order value

In addition to the number of user registrations and conversion rate, average order value is also an important indicator affecting GMV.

The average order value is affected by two factors: the single purchase amount and the purchase frequency; both factors will affect the average order value.

So what methods has Tencent Classroom adopted for these two factors?

1) Single purchase amount

As a platform-based online education platform, Tencent Classroom mainly adopts the following methods to increase the single purchase amount of users:

• Push combination/subsequent courses When a user clicks on a course on Tencent Classroom, the platform will recommend combinations or courses related to the course at appropriately discounted prices, stimulating the user's desire to buy and increasing the user's one-time purchase amount.
• In addition to pushing combined courses, Tencent Classroom will also recommend relevant learning materials before users place an order, or push grading services for some courses that do not include homework grading, such as recommending word dictation services in English classes.

This will increase the user's single purchase amount.

2) Purchase frequency

In terms of purchase frequency, how does Tencent Classroom increase the number of user purchases?

Three main steps were taken:

a. Improve teaching quality

If the quality of the course is good and students can achieve good learning results through the course, then they will definitely be willing to continue to sign up for courses on the platform.

In order to improve the quality of courses on the platform, Tencent Classroom has adopted the Youke Plan and the Punishment Plan - rewarding high-quality courses, punishing institutions that publish courses that do not meet quality standards, and encouraging third-party institutions to provide high-quality teaching services.

In this way, the quality of the course can be effectively improved and old users can be encouraged to sign up again.

b. Improve the class experience

Tencent Classroom has created very good services for users through QQ, such as course planning, course reminders, homework grading, course community building, etc.; especially for the completeness of user courses, Tencent Classroom has specially set up an "incentive plan" to encourage users to complete courses on time; in this way, users not only learn knowledge but also get rewards, and they are very likely to sign up for the platform's courses again next time.

c. Convenience

As an online education platform, Tencent Classroom's biggest advantage is that it brings together a vast amount of educational resources. Users do not have to look for information specifically to take a course, or find out which education APP provides better services or higher-quality courses. Nor do they have to download multiple APPs in order to learn a skill, and only use part of the functions of each APP.

The pace of today's society is very fast, and convenience and time saving are very attractive to working people who need to improve their personal abilities. Convenient purchasing and hassle-free course selection will increase the possibility of old users purchasing courses again.

To sum up, whether it is to increase the number of users, improve conversion rate, or increase average order value, Tencent Classroom has taken certain measures - this is also one of the reasons why Tencent Classroom can stand out among related products.

5. Product Iteration Analysis

In order to deeply analyze the version iteration rhythm of Tencent Classroom and explore the product iteration logic, the author summarizes all the core version iterations of Tencent Classroom from V1.0.0 to V5.0.0 as follows:

According to the above figure, Tencent Classroom is divided into two stages for analysis according to the different directions of functional iteration:

Phase 1: Complete basic functions, verify user needs, and meet basic user experience.

Before November 2015, versions V1.0.0-V1.1.1 were the cold start phase of Tencent Classroom’s mobile product. The main goal of this phase was to verify user needs and polish the user experience.

The main operation is to show the basic functions of the PC side through the mobile side. All functions are tool-oriented, such as supporting live courses, purchases and viewing of paid courses; and in order to prevent users from missing courses and listening to the classes on time and efficiently, Tencent Classroom launched the "Learning Plan" function to help users complete the courses they have registered.

From this stage, the APP rankings have steadily increased, with downloads exceeding 8 million from 0. Although Tencent Classroom's cold start time is only nearly half a year; because Tencent Classroom relies on QQ, it does not lack traffic and the PC side has laid a foundation for a good reputation - these two reasons have allowed Tencent Classroom mobile to reach its growth stage from its startup period in a very fast time.

The second phase: Build operation tools and explore and add learning scenarios.

From November 2015 to August 2020, the version from V2.0.0 to V5.0.0 is the rapid growth period of Tencent Classroom, and expanding the number of users has become the focus of product iteration.

In order to expand the number of users, Tencent Classroom has taken measures from three aspects:

1. Improve user service experience

In v2.1.0, Tencent Classroom supports offline downloads, allowing users to freely use their spare time to and from get off work to and from, and listening to classes is more convenient; in v2.2.0, a study group is established to give users a more learning atmosphere.

In v3.6.0, the "Paid Course Listening" function was launched, allowing users to find required courses more accurately and understand the course content more directly.

In v3.8.0, a user evaluation function was introduced to allow users to give comments on purchasing courses and understand the quality of the course based on other people's evaluations before purchasing.

In v4.4.0, course check-in is launched to make the progress of the learning plan clearer...

The launch of this series of functions has improved the user experience step by step; it also allows users to use Tencent Classroom product more conveniently and more reassuringly.

2. Operation promotion

In addition to improving user service experience, Tencent Classroom has also taken measures to attract new operations.

In the v3.3.0 version, Tencent Classroom has added the "high-quality course push" function to increase the exposure of courses; in the v3.7.0 version, v3.10.0 version, v3.22.0 version, and v4.2.0 version, they have proposed functions such as "adding new user balance rewards", "receiving new red envelopes for the first download", "receiving points and redemption rewards for class duration", "online bargaining", "coupons" and other functions - the launch of these functions has further increased users' desire to purchase courses and promoted consumption.

3. Improve classroom quality and increase the diversity of classroom scenarios

The fundamental purpose of users using Tencent Classroom is to learn knowledge through courses, so the quality of courses in Tencent Classroom is also crucial.

In this regard, Tencent Classroom launched classroom chat and live class interactive functions in versions v2.0.0 and v3.7.4, respectively, to enhance the user's sense of immersion in class; in version v3.9.0, the question bank function was launched; in version v4.9.0, the homework function was launched - allowing students to practice after class and achieve the effect of reviewing the past and learning the new; and in the "Strict Selection Course" plan launched in version v4.11.0, certain improvements have been made in terms of the quality of the course itself.

However, compared with similar competitors and specialized vertical education APPs, such as NetEase Cloud Project, Fluent Say, and Fengbian Programming, Tencent Classroom still has shortcomings in terms of course quality and classroom scenario diversity.

I think in the future, Tencent Classroom can consider strengthening classroom diversity in version optimization (such as recording a few minutes of high-quality short video learning classes to make users more efficient and inefficient in using fragmented time), and it can launch interactive programming courses to enhance user understanding, launch self-created high-quality courses, and use AI and other technologies to create more personalized courses, and further expand the user base through these means.

6. Product structure analysis:

In the iterative analysis, we analyzed the iterative steps of Tencent Classroom's product functions. Next, let's take a look at what users' needs meet and how they are distributed throughout the app.

This is mainly analyzed through product structure. The following figure is the product structure brain diagram of Tencent Classroom V5.0.0:

For the sake of analysis, the author re-examines the product structure of Tencent Classroom according to users, scenarios, needs and functions and obtains the following table:

Overall analysis:

Because the main goal of mobile terminal is to clarify users whose learning needs are clear, Tencent Classroom mainly needs to meet their needs.

When users use Tencent Classroom, there are three scenarios:

• Before buying a class, learn about what you care about through the APP;
• Buying courses;
• After buying classes, operate the courses on the platform.

Scenario 1: What needs do users have before buying classes and what functions does Tencent Classroom meet this needs?

Before buying a class, users mainly have a certain learning need and want to understand the courses on the platform. They can search for relevant courses directly by searching for keywords, or by searching for relevant courses in the course category.

After searching for the course, the second requirement of users is to understand the content, faculty, quality and price of the course, and select the most suitable courses for you and the most cost-effective among similar products. In the face of this demand, Tencent Classroom lists course sales, number of positive reviews, course evaluations, prices and other data. These data are very intuitive and can be used for users' reference and help users effectively select courses that are more suitable for them in front of the dazzling course resources. This is something that vertical online education apps cannot do.

At the same time, in order to enhance the intuitive experience, paid courses usually have audition classes, so that users can experience the experience brought to themselves more intuitively.

All the functions mentioned above can be easily found on the product homepage, so this design is quite reasonable. Because as a brand new user who has not bought a course, after registering, you can directly enter the homepage. All the content users want to know can be found quickly, and the operating cost is very low.

Scenario 2: What are the needs of buying classes and how does the platform meet it?

There are two types of courses in Tencent Classroom Purchase. One is offline QQ Purchase, which will not be analyzed here; the other is online Purchase. When purchasing classes online, users will have psychological needs and feel that the time to purchase classes is worth it and cost-effective.

In this regard, Tencent Classroom has launched discounted coupon systems, limited-time discount courses, and group buying activities to reduce users' concerns when purchasing.

It also specially launched a "buy one get one" course promotion module to attract price-sensitive users.

For those users who have plans to buy classes but don’t have time to attend classes, Tencent Classroom has launched a collection function to prevent users from missing their favorite courses. Favorite courses can be easily found in my collection.

In addition, if the payment process is cumbersome, users may cancel the idea of ​​purchasing classes. Therefore, Tencent Classroom adopts a one-click recharge function. The recharge process is very simple and supports Huabei payment to promote user consumption. As long as you click on the relevant course, a payment button will appear; after recharge, the teacher will automatically contact the group to send learning materials, which is very convenient. Moreover, since it is a recharge mode, there may be a fraction of the rest after paying the course fee, leaving a foreshadowing for users to purchase classes again next time.

However, in order to meet users' price needs, I think that you can also provide recharge benefits such as "get 20 for every 300 yuan" during recharge.

Scenario 3: What are the needs after buying a class and how does the platform meet it?

After buying the class, users need the platform to urge themselves to complete their studies. Tencent Classroom has specially designed a module for users, providing functions such as my class schedule and class reminders, which fulfills this need.

After the class is completed, users need a learning atmosphere and a platform for communication and discussion. Tencent Classroom considers the needs of users and designs modules such as community, study group, homework, and clock in; because the subsequent series of discussions and reviews can be carried out after the class, these modules are not arranged on the homepage and designed as a first-level function, but appear when clicking on the relevant course, which is in line with logic and user habits.

From the above analysis, we can find that Tencent Classroom's functional design can well meet the needs of users in the three scenarios of buying before, during and after class; at the same time, the high-frequency functions required by different users have a prominent focus and reasonable distribution in product structure, which can be considered a product with relatively excellent design.

7. Operational Path Analysis

The saying "Products are responsible for giving birth, and operations are responsible for raising them" also indirectly reflects the close relationship between products and operations.

So how did Tencent Classroom promote this product so that it can grow rapidly in a short period of time?

The author has sorted out the main operating activities since the establishment of Tencent Classroom as follows, mainly divided into four categories:

1. Content Operation

As a content operator, Tencent Classroom mainly relies on WeChat public accounts to publish course recommendations and other content. However, 70% of Tencent Class’s users come from QQ and there are few WeChat users. According to the data of WeChat official account, the effect is average.

2. Event Operation

In order to increase the number of users, Tencent Classroom once promoted products from the perspective of event operations.

There are mainly two ways:

Method 1: Celebrity endorsement

In April 2019, Yang Chaoyue hosted the "Surprise Cup" programming competition hosted by Baidu Tieba and co-organized by Yang Chaoyue's Codec Support Association. Tencent Classroom, as the only official voting and final live broadcast platform for the competition, played its own IT Internet training advantages throughout the competition, cooperated with Yang Chaoyue's fan club to jointly help output its advantageous works.

Method 2: Helping public welfare

On September 10, 2018, Tencent Classroom and Tencent 99 Charity Day jointly launched the "Yiqi Learning" Charity Activity.

3. User Operation

Compared with content operation and event operation, Tencent Classroom has spent more time on user operation; it is mainly divided into attracting new products, promoting activity, etc.

1) Attract new customers

Tencent Classroom will give users who download the new client a gift package worth 1,000 yuan to promote their consumption on the platform and encourage users to download the Tengxu Classroom APP and use the APP.

2) Promote activity

There are a large number of trial classes on the homepage of Tencent Classroom, and users can listen to classes according to their needs. The course is the same as the current paid novels. The first half is free and is used to give users a class experience and attract users' interests; the second half is paid courses. When users have the desire to buy courses, Tencent Classroom will further promote users to purchase courses in the form of discounted coupons, group buying, etc.

3) Retention

For old users, Tencent Classroom attracts users to continue to use the platform through regular push courses and other forms; at the same time, Tencent Classroom has launched free redemption courses for listening to the class and points to maintain customers' activity on the platform.

Overall, Tencent Classroom has not taken too many operating measures because it has a lot of traffic.

8. SWOT analysis

Swot analysis method is a method that comprehensively considers various factors in the internal conditions and external environment of the enterprise, conducts systematic analysis, and thus selects the best business strategy.

Here, the author will use this method to analyze Tencent Classroom from four aspects: advantages, disadvantages, opportunities and threats:

1. Advantages

Tencent Classroom is mainly targeted at college students and working people over 18 years old, creating an online education platform to provide users with courses in career, language and other aspects.

Its main advantages are three:

1) There are many types of courses and low prices

As an online education platform, Tencent Classroom has rich course categories and high user choice; at the same time, because the platform brings together a lot of resources of the same type, it has a lot of discounts compared to vertical APPs in terms of price.

2) Good user experience

Tencent Classroom focuses on creating a high-quality user experience. After registering for the platform course, the reminder class, class schedule arrangement, homework Q&A check and other services are very complete; and the APP specially creates a community for the course to improve user experience.

3) Live courses, strong interactiveness; online courses, rational use of fragmented time

As an online education platform, Tencent Classroom uses live broadcast to solve the problem of "no immersion" in watching video classes; at the same time, as an online course, users do not need to spend their time on the way to class, but can watch and listen to classes on their mobile phones at any time.

2. Disadvantages

The disadvantage of Tencent Classroom is mainly lies in the quality of the course itself.

There are two main problems:

1) Lack of high-quality self-operated classes

All the courses in Tencent Classroom are provided by third-party institutions, and the platform itself does not have high-quality self-operated classes - this also leads to the overall inferior platform courses to vertical education APPs and offline institutions in the same field; it is also slightly inferior to NetEase APPs that have self-operated classes.

2) There is a stuttering in the APP live broadcast

According to user feedback, Tencent Classroom Live will sometimes have lag; for an online education APP, it is very important to ensure the experience during viewing. If the lag occurs during viewing, it will greatly affect the user's learning effect.

3. Opportunities

In recent years, the demand for talents in the tertiary industry has increased, the lack of talent demand for talents in emerging industries and policy dividends have promoted the development of the online education industry.

According to iResearch data, the scale of the vocational education industry exceeded 268.85 billion in 2019, and the scale of the online vocational education industry exceeded 39.33 billion; and it is expected that the scale of the online education industry will continue to grow at a rate of about 20%.

Due to social development, whether it is college students or professionals, the demand for learning is increasing; at the same time, due to the accelerated pace of society, learning efficiency is also more important; compared with offline institutions, online education has the advantage of saving time and not being affected by regional influence. Compared with video classes, online education has the advantages of being more interactive and more immersive.

As a platform APP, Tencent Classroom can give users more choices and cheaper prices than vertical online education APP.

In April 2020, Tencent Classroom ranked first in the education and learning industry with its average daily active user base in China's mobile Internet dark horse list, which also shows that Tencent Classroom has a gratifying development.

4. Threats

In Tencent Classroom Vocational Training Courses, courses with better sales are concentrated in computer program courses such as programming and PS; these courses have direct vertical online education APPs, such as Fengbian Programming; these APPs only need to specialize in creating one course, and in terms of course quality, Tencent Classroom courses. I left the big piece of cake from Tencent Classroom.

At the same time, as an online education platform APP, NetEase Cloud Classroom has also created a good reputation through high-quality self-operated classes, posing a significant threat to Tencent Classroom.

5. Conclusion

Through the above analysis, we can find that the most important problem of Tencent Classroom is to solve the quality of courses.

Although Tencent Classroom has natural advantages in terms of capital and traffic convenience, the purpose of users using Tencent Classroom is to improve their abilities through learning courses, and the quality of the course itself plays a crucial role in this process.

Only by solving the quality of courses can Tencent Classroom take a step further in its future development.

9. Optimization suggestions

1. Improve the quality of the course

For Tencent Classroom, improving classroom quality is the current focus.

The author believes that the quality of the classroom can be improved from the following aspects:

1) Create high-quality self-operated courses

If you want to improve the quality of the platform's courses, creating high-quality self-operated courses is undoubtedly the easiest way.

2) Increase the exposure of high-quality courses

The courses in Tencent Classroom are basically a model of listening first and then paying; if the algorithm can be added, the ratio of the audition courses will be counted to find out the high-quality courses; and then increase the exposure rate for the high-quality courses.

Then, good courses will be given more exposure opportunities and the purpose of screening good courses on the platform will be achieved.

3) Add good student class list

On NetEase Cloud Music, users can share good songs by adding song lists; Tencent Classroom relies on QQ group users, and compared with NetEase Cloud Music, it can allow users to create "course lists" to achieve the purpose of sharing good courses; and if they can share lesson lists, it will also be conducive to stimulating users' desire to learn.

4) Create a variety of courses

Many people are busy at work now and only study time is to go to and from get off work. However, the time on the way to and from get off work is relatively fragmented and cannot support long-term learning; so Tencent Classroom can create some easy lecture videos with only a few minutes for this group of users, so that users can use the fragmented time to learn some fragmented knowledge points; accumulate little to make up for the fragmented time and make good use of fragmented time.

5) Improve technology and enhance user interaction

Tencent Classroom should strengthen technical research and development to solve the problem of live broadcast lag; at the same time, for courses such as programming, you can consider learning from Fenghua programming to improve technology so that users can watch and explain in class and complete some small programming hands-on. Strengthen interactivity.

2. Optimize sector design

On the homepage of Tencent Classroom APP, all course recommendations are provided.

But some course recommendation types are repetitive. It looks a bit confusing and is not easy for users to use; in terms of sector design, different sectors should be placed separately through different functions; for example, discounted courses, you can specifically divide a section to make it more convenient for users to use.

3. Add customer service

Some users who use Tencent Classroom know what classes they want to take, and these users can filter and search for selected courses.

However, some users are not sure what classes they want to take. The author believes that Tencent Classroom can consider adding manual customer service to recommend what classes should be taken for this part of users and what courses are on the platform.

10. Conclusion

Through the overall analysis of the online education market and Tencent Classroom, we can draw the following conclusions:

1) Common factors of policy, economy, social culture, technology and other factors have promoted the great development of the online education industry in recent years, and will continue to maintain a certain high growth rate in the next few years.

2) In this industry, Tencent Classroom has obvious advantages in corporate revenue and user scale, and its main competitor is NetEase Cloud Classroom; through competitive product analysis, Tencent Classroom and NetEase Cloud Classroom each have their own advantages and disadvantages. Tencent Classroom's advantage lies in its good user service and experience, and its disadvantage lies in the quality of the course itself needs to be further improved.

3) In the online education platform, there are three main participants: users, institutions, and platforms; if the platform wants to develop well, it needs to integrate the needs of both users and institutions to meet a series of learning needs of users, and at the same time give the institutions enough exposure so that they can concentrate on creating high-quality courses without spending time on publicity and operation.

4) Tencent Classroom’s current core business is the course platform: for a course platform, the advantage is that it gathers a large number of educational resources, which is more convenient to allocate resources and has more user choices; Tencent Classroom itself has its own traffic, which has a natural advantage in the number of users. Tencent Classroom has also taken many measures to increase the average customer price and achieved good results; but in terms of conversion rate, I think there should be further improvements; according to user evaluation, there are lags in the APP during the live broadcast process and the course itself is still not good enough. I think this is a fatal disadvantage for a mature course platform.

5) Overall, the development of VIPKID since its establishment is divided into two stages: one is the initial stage of launch, which mainly meets the basic needs of users and checks the market; the other is the development stage, which mainly expands the number of users; Tencent Classroom first polishes the products, then waits for the APP to have a good reputation, and then carries out a series of operational activities.

6) The target users of Tencent Classroom mobile terminal are mainly college students over 18 years old and professional people, and all functional designs are centered around meeting these needs; there are two main scenarios for users to use APP: before, during and after buying classes; through the sorting of Tencent Classroom functions, we can actually find that most of the needs of parents can be well met; a good user experience is the vitality of a product. However, in terms of page design, although it does not affect the use at present, the discount coupon system and group buying courses can be designed specifically on the homepage for easy viewing by users.

The above is the author’s analysis report for the purpose of being familiar with the online education industry, and the optimization suggestions given to several problems in the use of the product, as well as the expected outlook for the future development trend of the fresh food e-commerce industry.

Due to personal abilities, if there are any shortcomings, you are welcome to criticize and correct me. Thank you!

Author: sue

Source: sue