Operational case: The growth path behind "Zebra English" monthly revenue exceeding 100 million

What growth paths did Zebra English take to achieve monthly revenue of over 100 million just two years after its founding? The author of this article analyzes and discusses the operating methods of Zebra English from three aspects: channel operation, curriculum design and Internet thinking. I hope the content of this article will inspire you.

"Zebra English" is a children's English learning product under Yuanfudao Company. It was founded in September 2017 and the courses were officially launched in November. We provide systematic introductory English courses from L0 to L6 for children aged 2 to 8 in the form of foreign teacher video lessons + picture books + gamified quizzes.

"AI teacher" is the barrier that distinguishes Zebra from similar English enlightenment products. It adopts the teaching model of "AI teacher + real teaching assistant" to help children learn English and let parents see: "The children take the initiative to learn English lessons."

In just two years, from its establishment to the second half of 2019, "Zebra English" has achieved monthly revenue of over 100 million yuan, with a renewal rate of up to 56%. Breakthrough and become a dark horse in the field of enlightenment English.

Behind the rapid growth of "Zebra English" and its revenue of over 100 million yuan, we found that "Zebra English" boldly tried the Internet model to build its own private domain traffic, and the upgrades in customer acquisition, communication design and content teaching services have always revolved around the user's lifetime value.

1. From attracting new users to converting them into new users, Zebra English has used all channels to attract new users and has been integrated into the WeChat ecosystem

1. Multi-channel delivery - traffic diversion on TikTok and service conversion on WeChat

"Zebra English" began to lay out the new media matrix system of the entire Internet ecosystem in the early days to build its own private domain traffic.

At present, the number of fans of "Zebra English" on major platforms is as follows: WeChat public account is estimated to be around 140,000, official Weibo fans: 70,000, and the rest plus the number of fans on Baijiahao, Zhihu platform, and WeChat group, the approximate number of its own fans is around 230,000.

I will focus on analyzing the series of actions of "Zebra English" from the two most popular platforms (Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin), WeChat and Douyin.

1.1 Douyin channel diversion

"Zebra English" has been deployed on the Douyin platform. After two years of operation, the number of Douyin fans is: 980,000. Usually, it mainly uses good-looking foreign teachers to teach, and its positioning is mainly parent-child English and spoken English in daily life scenarios.

As we all know, the scenes of Douyin are more entertaining, and many students and parents also play Douyin with an entertaining mentality. Therefore, it is not suitable to publish overly serious content, otherwise there will be a lack of traffic and exposure.

"Zebra English" mainly does two things on the Douyin platform:

1. Place ads in the information flow.
2. Produce a lot of interesting content to increase activity among users.

Delivery part: "Zebra English" uses the method of "impulse" + "sunk cost" to make users pay in one go.

After payment, due to the sunk cost effect, most users will be converted to the WeChat platform, which is more suitable for the students' learning environment and ecology. After all, the Douyin ecosystem lacks a complete supervision ecology such as WeChat groups and message notifications. The Douyin mini program, which is already supported by the Short Book platform, can also help small and medium-sized educational institutions to achieve Douyin’s course traffic and sales closed loop.

To improve user activity: In order to cater to the platform's tone, I created two collections, "Life" and "Parent-child English", focusing on learning interesting content, guiding potential users to pay attention and increase exposure. Every 10 works will include an entertaining video such as dancing. Each video is less than 15 seconds long and is created frequently, with basically one update every day.

(Zebra English’s Douyin content)

Personally, I suggest that the operational positioning of the Douyin platform should focus on brand exposure and content display. Compared with WeChat, Douyin's scenarios are more inclined towards leisure and entertainment. When we operate Douyin, we need to consider more core scenarios.

If it is a larger organization, you can try to place advertisements on Douyin. For small and medium-sized organizations, it is still better to focus on exposure + brand interaction on the Douyin platform. Douyin is more suitable for brand exposure, display of interesting content, and increasing activity among users.

1.2 WeChat Ecosystem Traffic

Start from the information flow ads in the circle of friends to the service account. After following the service account, you will find that there are four entrances to the course: the menu bar of the official account, the automatic reply of the newly followed official account, and the exclusive posters of the event shared by mothers in the circle of friends and WeChat groups.

When a user follows a service account for the first time:

1. First, attract users to sign up with a super low price of 9.9 yuan: 5 AI interactive classes + luxurious supporting teaching materials + cash back for persistent learning;
2. Then, users are stimulated through distribution methods to motivate them to share and spread the word for the second time: if one person shares, 30% rebate will be given;
3. Finally, use the distribution function to invite 10 people and get a 30% rebate. Continue to fission and expand your own private traffic pool.

(Zebra English service account interface)

There is a key action in the entire path process: adding a teacher assistant.

Adding assistants to a community has become a standard action in building private domain traffic. On the one hand, for students, assistants are needed to pull them into the class group for supervision and service feedback. On the other hand, for institutions, WeChat needs to be added to maintain "contact" with users to build trust, which facilitates subsequent renewals, secondary transactions, and other in-depth exploration of user lifetime value.

2. Dig deep into user value and promote secondary dissemination and fission as much as possible

The 9.9 yuan drainage course of "Zebra English" attracts users to continue with the full-price course after completing their studies. What is more important is to promote secondary dissemination, secondary conversion, deeply tap user value, and maximize user value.

After purchasing the 9.9 yuan course, the interface will display: If you complete all the courses from the 1st to the 4th day before 24:00 on the fifth day of the course, the 9.9 yuan tuition fee will be refunded. It’s like learning for free.

After users have experienced the free course of 9.9 yuan, "Zebra English" will immediately launch its own full-priced course for secondary dissemination and in-depth exploration of user value.

From 9.9 yuan trial class (traffic diversion class) to 89 yuan system class (trial class - original price 289, new user class coupons 200 off) to 2800 yuan annual class (large class profit class - free reading pen growth gift box and vocabulary book)

It should be noted here: after attracting users through the induction class, the discount for the trial class can accept a moderate loss, because the purpose of switching from the induction class to the trial class is to increase the stickiness with users. When the course content is recognized and the stickiness is high enough, the subsequent large and profitable courses can completely recover the previous profits.

Institutions do not want users to come to classes for a one-time deal and leave after the class. When institutions are designing course content, I suggest that they set up the courses to have a step-by-step progression: tapping into user value step by step.

There is no need to package all the contents of a course together, which is likely to result in a course system that is too complicated, teaching and research costs that are too high, and the price that is too expensive.

The courses of the institution can refer to the step-by-step design: 8.9 yuan for 4 classes of phonetic symbol learning, to 19.9 yuan for a word shorthand course. Taking this as an example, some training camps can be split into the system basis of the course. This not only saves time for teaching and research, but also makes their courses more attractive, allowing students to better understand the entire systematic course.

About referrals:

"Zebra English" has a referral section on the course interface. For every person you invite, you can get a cash rebate of 2.97 yuan, which is a 30% rebate. In addition, for every person you invite, you can receive a lucky red envelope, with a maximum amount of 88 yuan for a single red envelope. If you invite 10 people, you will also receive a painting gift package worth 99 yuan.

The benefits also clearly introduce the "money-making strategy": generate an invitation poster - share it with friends - friends successfully purchase courses - cash back is received (you can withdraw cash when you spend more than 1 yuan). Special emphasis is placed on the data of this fission: sharing the poster to three mothers’ groups achieved a success rate of 98% (according to statistics from a group owner interviewed by Deep Web).

The well-known pirate model: AARRR, the funnel should be large at the top and narrow at the bottom. Focusing on fission, in actual operation, many ideas are not broad enough. The highlights of Zebra English are:

• In addition to developing the market through fission distribution, the funnel even uses offline (materials) to attract traffic, thereby improving conversion and exposure at the second level.
• For the 9.9 trial classes, on the one hand, it helped to increase the sales conversion (Revenue) of the full-priced classes, and also greatly promoted sharing (Refer). Both points are worth referring to and learning from.

Secondary transmission:

In fact, many users who try the course initially try it for 9.9 yuan with the mentality of getting a bargain. However, when they receive exquisite teaching aids, including textbooks, exercise books, and word cards for their children to learn, parents will feel that it is good value for money, which increases their favorability towards the brand. They can’t help but take photos and post them on WeChat Moments to show it to their friends and recommend it to others.

At the same time, "Zebra English" has also set up a points system. Children can earn some Zebra coins through learning time, and these Zebra coins can be exchanged for physical objects.

The longer the time, the better the things you can replace them with. Children are more willing to spend time when they get good things. The sense of accomplishment and the sense of obtaining exquisite items through redemption brought by this closed-loop point growth system will easily encourage users to spread the message again and help organizations penetrate social media.

(Offline materials of Zebra English)

The power of word-of-mouth from parents can directly bring in new experience users, directly reducing the institution’s customer acquisition costs.

When organizations build their own private traffic on the WeChat platform, the fission method is worthy of in-depth research and learning for every organization. In terms of cost: through refined operations, it is completely feasible to control the overall customer acquisition cost at around 100-200.

A slight reminder here is: when building your own private domain traffic, you must direct it to one end (official account/APP/mini program) and gather all the traffic together to achieve the effect of quantitative change to qualitative change.

In general, the successful fission of "Zebra English" by adopting the Internet model as a whole is not only due to the design of a correct fission path, but also many details of the fission that cannot be ignored: the 9.9 yuan trial class, the price gradient setting of the full-price class, the course content selection of 5 AI classes, and the threshold and path planning for cash withdrawal when the distribution of "money-making guide" reaches 1 yuan. These are all things that should be carefully thought about and studied.

2. Zebra English’s course service design continuously improves learning outcomes

1. The core of online course design: interactive and interesting learning

According to statistics, younger children have poorer self-control and require higher intensity interactions. Therefore, for enlightenment and early childhood education, if you want students to learn effectively, you must increase interaction and fun to keep students focused.

Guo Changxun, vice president of Yuanfudao and head of Zebra English, said: "Zebra English's design is centered around de-gamification. Repeated practice is the most effective way and does not require overly complex scenarios. All gamification designs of Zebra English are aimed at repetitive practice-style mini-games." Similar to the concept of de-gamification in course design, Zebra English believes that what parents are buying is “learning”, teaching and results.

The entire "Zebra English" learning process is designed as follows:

(1) Teaching: De-gamification of fun interactive methods + AI adaptive learning

(2) Learning: Foreign teacher videos + word recognition + picture book stories + oral practice + word spelling + AI pseudo-foreign teacher video calls

(3) Supervisor

(4) Evaluation: Corresponding learning reports are generated every day, and teachers provide one-on-one voice guidance.

In terms of the design of children's learning sessions, "Zebra English" has spent a lot of time to polish it, control the time just right, and cultivate children's micro-habits step by step: foreign teacher video (5min) + word recognition (2min) + picture book story (2min) + oral practice (2min) + word spelling (2min) + Zebra call (AI pseudo foreign teacher video call, about 2min)

Unlike most of the "fun" English enlightenment learning products on the market, if parents report that their children particularly like the gamification of a certain part of the course, Zebra will weaken the game feel of this part and allow children to focus more on the learning content itself.

In terms of educating and cultivating user habits, "Zebra English" has invested a lot of teaching and research energy and costs in time control and content polishing.

（Zebra English content interface）

The interactive and fun learning content of "Zebra English" makes the completion rate of "Zebra English" far exceed that of its peers in English institutions. In addition to the content, part of the credit should be attributed to the "Zebra English" community SOP refined process service, which creates a good environment: learning environment, competitive environment, and companionship environment.

2. Supervision and service of online courses: satisfy parents and prepare for the continuation of courses

The teaching content alone is far from enough. The essence of education is service . Only by helping students learn effectively will parents be willing to continue to renew their subscriptions and make additional purchases.

Therefore, the links and services of supervisors are indispensable. For enlightenment and early childhood education, service is particularly important. It is not only about serving students and parents, but also about providing warm companionship.

In the management of WeChat groups, "Zebra English" has done a very complete and refined operation, and the class teachers can receive messages from the parent group in a timely manner almost throughout the day . Share a Zebra operation process chart:

The above service process may seem simple, but actually implementing the service is a great test of the team operator’s copywriting skills, ability to understand user needs, and ability to respond in a timely manner.

Compared with offline education, online education lacks the sense of ritual. Institutions need to make up for this shortcoming and create a sense of ritual for students. This can be achieved through opening and closing ceremonies.

Secondly, it is the personalized management of students. Users can be labeled through some simple user surveys and some learning feedback from users during the course. This will facilitate the formulation of precise private chat scripts and personalized operations in the future. Improve the sense of participation through some small activities, such as daily knowledge snacks, chain games, etc.

Due to limited space, I will analyze several very representative phenomena:

Service element 1: Timeliness, putting the spotlight on users

Parents are the final decision makers and care about issues such as the price of courses and the format of classes. For community operators, this may be a workload that is repeated N times, but for parents who make the decision to pay, it is a key issue. Therefore, prepare questions that parents may ask in advance, respond promptly, and increase the activity of more parents in the community.

Usually, more than 60% of the parents in the community will not speak in the group until the end of the course and when they want to place an order, they will vote. The atmosphere and activity of the community will directly affect the final conversion rate.

There are many similar trial classes on the market. Because the operators did not answer parents' questions in a timely manner and spoke like robots, the atmosphere of the community was very poor. By the last day of the trial class, the screen was full of parents' complaints and negative feedback. It is conceivable that the conversion rate of such a community is not likely to be very high.

Service element 2: Interactivity, eliminating the sense of distance between you and your children

The entire course serves children. When parents see that their children are interested in the course and actively request to attend the course, that is the greatest value of the trial course. As teaching assistants, community operators bear the heavy responsibility of winning the love and trust of children. In addition to appearing in person to introduce the course to children, it is also crucial to guide and accompany children to participate in the entire trial course.

"Zebra English" did a good job in this part: personal introduction at the opening ceremony, inviting students to record videos to participate in the online opening class self-introduction session.

After the class starts, the teaching assistant guides parents to share the learning report poster containing the recorded works to the group, and guides them to publish the works on the app. The teachers will actively comment on the works by voice, and the activity of the entire group will be greatly improved. At the same time, many parents will share the videos, which will play a role in secondary dissemination.

When children try to speak English and are praised by the teacher, such positive feedback will make them feel a sense of accomplishment and more interested in learning. Online teaching may have problems with lack of intimacy and sense of supervision, and "Zebra English" has perfected this service.

In addition, some service details include: reminding parents before class, communicating with parents regularly, encouraging parents to persist, reminding them to redeem points for gifts, etc.

When providing online services, institutions must clarify the nature of educational products: what parents buy is not just a product course, but a set of solutions for their children's future. When providing services, you must have a strong sense of empathy and think from the user's perspective. You must interact more with users from the user's perspective and think more about how to make users feel convenient and comfortable. On the basis of such foundation and goal, we will continue to optimize our service methods and processes, and gradually form our own service system.

It is worth mentioning that the renewal rate of "Zebra English" is also very good. According to "Shenwang" report, after a month of Zebra English trial class, a parent named Xiao Li counted the renewal situation of her study group: among the 50 parents in her study group, 28 parents chose to renew the one-year course after one month - the renewal rate was 56%.

If the service is good, the renewal rate will naturally rise. For enlightenment education, the significance and value of renewal lies not only in the revenue from "full-price courses", the most important thing is to cultivate the trust between students and parents and establish a strong connection with students and parents. As students grow, they will continue to pay attention to and use the services provided by the product.

For example, many courses offered for senior high school and junior high school students may be unprofitable in terms of profits, but if they gain the trust of the students, they can make back the profits in the first and second year of high school, university certification exams, and postgraduate entrance exams. This is also a good way to seize the market.

3. Zebra English, the direction of strategic profit is also very clear

Step 1: From a strategic perspective, "Zebra English" is Yuanfudao's layout for the enlightenment track for children aged 3-6 years old. The life cycle of people in this track is about one year.

Step 2: After establishing good stickiness, it is recommended to join the small class live classes for 5-10 years old.

Step 3: Enter large classes after the age of 11.

3. Zebra English’s bold attempt to use Internet thinking to deeply explore the lifetime value of users

"Zebra English" is different from the traditional practice model in the entire process from attracting new customers to retention and repeat purchases. It adopts the Internet customer acquisition thinking and carefully plans and designs each step. Design specifically around the user's lifetime value system. Step by step, you will build your own private traffic pool.

Once users pay for the course experience for the first time, the subsequent series of reactions such as word-of-mouth, sharing, distribution, and repeat purchases will keep the user consumption path of "Zebra English" flowing.

When the accumulated amount is large enough and the traffic pool is solid enough, "Zebra English" can bring brand effects based on private domain traffic and make many horizontal attempts in other fields. For example: "Zebra English" has now been officially renamed "Zebra AI", and the content covered in its APP has been expanded to "thinking" enlightenment education.

Internet thinking is not a vague thing. It can be applied throughout a platform’s business model and organizational structure. As long as we learn Internet thinking well, we will pay attention and think about every step of the activity. From course quality, feedback paths and forms, supervisory services, etc., think about the optimization of each real scenario, and extract the action method that suits you, then you can establish a growth model that suits you.

Author: Jiawei Oscar

Source: Jiawei Oscar