3 new customer acquisition cases, 3 key logics for attracting new customers!

There are many ways to attract new customers , but which ones are low-cost and effective? How to choose? The author of this article shares operational ideas and case analysis for attracting new customers and retaining them.

The number of Alipay users worldwide has exceeded 1.2 billion, and the number of WeChat users worldwide is also close to 1.2 billion, but they have not stopped attracting new users. Alipay’s “Invite Friends to Earn Rewards” activity has existed all year round, and there are a large number of ground-based promotion teams who have been taking advantage of Alipay.

However, the vast majority of companies are not as "rich and willful" as Alipay, nor are they as tightly bound to identity information as Alipay, so this kind of brutal, direct and effective way of attracting new customers is ineffective for many companies.

So what kind of method of attracting new customers is low-cost and effective?

I believe that there are thousands of ways to attract new customers, and advertising is unavoidable. No matter which method you use, you need to apply the underlying principles of advertising: Who is your audience? Where to gather? What media can reach them? What kind of information can better attract and convert them into new users? Which loopholes should be plugged to prevent user loss?

If the product is a water tank and users are water, attracting new users means pouring water into it, and losing users means the water leaking out. The key to how many users are retained in the end lies in "sufficient water injection and plugging the leaking holes." This article mainly analyzes the "brothers" of attracting new users and retaining users from the perspective of advertising.

1. The essence of attracting new customers lies in "controlling quality", "controlling costs" and "controlling efficiency"

1. Quality control: improving delivery accuracy

Attracting new customers is not simply a matter of counting the number of people. It is about how many people are brought to the company's products, especially for non-paying products. It is not enough to just attract a bunch of people. The group of people must be sufficiently consistent with the user portrait of the product.

For example, Tencent recently launched a social software called "Friends" for acquaintance relationships. It is a product that expands social relationships based on relationships with classmates or colleagues. Based on the requirements of "corporate organization" and "school education" for the user group, the internal testing of this app was first initiated by Tencent employees, and then the circle of internal testing was expanded outward with the help of the classmates and partners of the first batch of Tencent employees. From an overall observation, the expansion of the population during the entire beta test phase was orderly and of a certain quality, which makes the "Friends" app different from the common "strangers" social apps on the market.

For example, some "part-time job" platforms target customers who are willing to do small tasks to earn some pocket money. Obviously, white-collar workers with a monthly salary of tens of thousands are not the target group. Moms, students, middle-aged and elderly people who want to earn some breakfast money through the Internet are more in line with the requirements.

Therefore, there is no absolute distinction in the quality of customer groups. It depends on what customer group your product is suitable for. The degree of matching is the most important thing, and quality is relative.

Controlling quality means controlling whether “the people you reach match your products and goals”, that is, the accuracy of your advertising.

In order to deliver accurate advertising, we must analyze who the users are, what labels they have, where they often appear, which advertising companies can reach them, which advertising companies have the most outstanding data capabilities among the advertising companies that can be reached, which ones have more accurate delivery precision, and which ones have a delivery plan model with lower costs and better results.

If the above problems are solved, the accuracy of advertising delivery will also be solved.

(1) Accurate positioning

Take a brand of children's English courses that we serve as an example. Its initial targeting was always to children aged 3 to 8. We immediately felt that this targeting was too broad as it was only targeting by age and specifically children. Children themselves are not the initial actors of the product. Children's English classes are not toys, nor are they something that children will want as soon as they see them. There must be a step in which parents communicate with their children, "Do you want to try an interesting and game-like children's English class?"

So for this brand, its target audience when it launches should be parents. So what kind of parents are more suitable?

First of all, we analyzed that the purpose of the campaign is "to allow parents to take their children to try out the courses online." We hope that more people will come to listen, and we also hope that the possibility of subsequent conversions will be higher.

Secondly, we break down the goal. Getting more people to attend classes is achieved by controlling the scale of delivery, while the conversion after class has a lot to do with user positioning and the choice of delivery channels.

Then we broke down the factors that influence whether users will make subsequent purchases, including "whether they have experienced similar competing products", "whether they are taking care of their children full-time or working normally", "whether they follow TV dramas and movies", "frequency of e-commerce shopping", "own education level" and many other factors.

Finally, after testing single factors, we found that "whether users have experienced and know about competing products" is the factor that most affects conversion. The more unfamiliar and inexperienced users are with competing products in the industry, the easier it is for them to be pulled into the game.

Therefore, when the plan was finally launched, the labels for the target groups were "people from third-tier cities and below", "mainly women", "people with college degree or above", and "people who pay attention to children's education content".

Some friends will definitely ask: "How do you find such a precise user group?" A good advertising campaign must be an effective advertising campaign that has been analyzed by data, which will test the data capabilities of the advertising service provider.

As far as I know, service providers that generally focus on performance-based advertising not only rely on data from channel platforms, but also label users as groups that match the characteristics of their products in each delivery. Take Getui, a more mainstream big data service provider on the market, as an example.

When serving K12 brands, Getui will go through an A/B testing process. During this test, it was discovered that users who were originally labeled "beauty" on the advertising platform also became interested in "education" ads and took further action. At this time, Getui will further enrich the labels for this group of people.

Of course, in real life, people’s exposure to information is multi-dimensional, and the degree of interest is also different. In long-term service, big data companies like Getui have accumulated rich data and also developed a rich and detailed labeling system, which is very helpful in attracting new products.

In actual operation, Getui can complete the user portrait dimensions based on the initial portrait provided by the client and its own data accumulation. Through the complete portrait of its target population, it can find the "quasi-target population" of the product. On the basis of ensuring accuracy, it can expand the fundamentals of the delivery and achieve both "quality" and "quantity" in attracting new customers. This type of algorithm is already available in Yunmeng Digital Intelligence, and is called look-alike algorithm. Regardless of the name, the essential logic of this type of algorithm is this.

(2) Find out where the located users gather

Continuing with the case analysis of children's English, the population labels we identified are "third-tier and below cities", "mainly women", "college degree or above", and "people who pay attention to children's education content".

Now that the desired user types have been circled, where can we find these users? We can see which of the various methods of attracting new customers are consistent with our target audience.

• Content marketing: Let’s not discuss the quality of the content first. If we only look at the channel selection, parenting education KOLs are definitely a red ocean for competitors. There is a high possibility that fans have been washed by competitors, so after basic testing, we give up on education KOLs and switch to small and medium-sized emotional accounts created by some mothers.
• Information flow advertising: The labels used by various advertising platforms are not very rich, and the so-called targeted promotions are not very different. The final result still depends on the landing page.
• Banner ad space: Almost every app and website has its own ad space. In addition to the splash screen ads, there are ad spaces distributed in multiple locations. There are many products whose ad spaces can be placed externally. Let’s go back to the topic of crowd targeting. Choosing which product and which advertising space is a slow and meticulous process.
• Media marketing: It is often the brand marketing department that deals with various media. Only when it comes to analyzing the effect of attracting new users, the operations team will cooperate to provide data results.
• Offline marketing: When online marketing is saturated, there are many opportunities offline. We also see that many children's English competitors focus on offline marketing visits and manual sales-oriented marketing around communities, kindergartens and other areas.
• Cross-border cooperation: Cooperation across industry boundaries is one of the key channels we have chosen. The industry we chose for cooperation is community group buying. The business of community group buying is based on social interaction among acquaintances. The group leaders happen to be small KOLs in the circle of mothers, and most of their fans are mothers. Facts have also proved that this channel has the highest conversion rate.
• Distribution agent: Course distribution was ruined last year and this year. Children’s English courses are also paid knowledge, but their applicability is not that high. They are not suitable for personal distribution and can only be distributed to authorized agents of institutions.
• Social group buying: I have seen competitors running an activity where “group of 3 people and pay 1 cent to grab a class”, and then the sales staff will call back, which is also an effective way to attract new customers.
• Social marketing: find the value of attracting new users from old users, have old users bring new users, new users get discounts, and old users get rewards. The effectiveness of this method depends on whether the subsequent service capabilities and reward intensity are higher than other channels.

(3) How to reach target users?

The first thing to solve is whether to do it yourself or hand it over to an advertising and marketing service company? For the operations department, most of the work is done by themselves, while for the business or brand marketing department, they basically look for service companies.

But no matter which one, the operating logic is the same. For example, the service provider we have contacted, Getui, their Yunmeng Digital Intelligent Advertising Business Service Process is roughly as follows:

Based on the service products, we analyze the portrait of the target population and establish a delivery portrait model. Then, we select delivery channels from the media channels they cooperate with, create multiple sets of corresponding delivery materials for testing, and form multiple sets of delivery models. Finally, based on the test results of the delivery model and after filtering out false traffic and low-conversion devices, we start the final delivery online.

Basically, any method of attracting new customers cannot be without the underlying logic in the process.

2. Cost control: average user cost should be lower than average user value

The average cost of attracting new users must not exceed the average user value. In fact, the user cost and value brought by each method and each channel are different. The essence of cost control lies in "converting click-through rate into conversion rate."

For the same cost of attracting new users, the more users who ultimately stay, the lower the single customer acquisition cost. And the key to retention lies in “getting new users to take action.”

I believe everyone has heard many retention stories. For example, if a new user of a social product follows more than 6 users, or chats with a user for more than 20 minutes, the probability of this user staying will greatly increase.

If new users of financial products invest in novice welfare products, they can at least be retained during the period when the novice products expire, giving them more time to make additional investments in ordinary products.

Let's continue with the example of children's English classes. The key to retaining new users actually lies in "whether they have completed the trial class completely and continuously and had very good interaction with the teaching assistants." Therefore, completing the class is the key, and then we designed a step of giving gifts by continuously checking in. But whether they will stay in the end depends on whether users really have a need.

3. Control efficiency: balance between user quantity, quality and team service capabilities

Do as much as you are capable of. A team without money should not envy the rich team's lavish spending. A small team should not envy the big team's division of labor and cooperation.

Taking children's English as an example, the service capacity of the team's teachers is that one person can only tutor 80 to 200 people in a single course. There are a total of 10 teachers responsible for the trial classes for new customers. The teachers' tutoring capacity for a single course is at most 2,000 people. If they try too hard and bring in 20,000 people, the entire team will become tense and disorderly, with holes everywhere.

The user growth rate must match the team's service capabilities, control the progress of delivery, and improve overall service efficiency so that the two reach a certain balance.

2. Explore new ideas of “low cost and high effect” through multiple cases

Case 1: Short video marketing

Douyin and Kuaishou are traffic giants in the short video field. Where there is traffic, there will inevitably be advertisements. Let’s take the education industry as an example to see how companies control the “accuracy” of Douyin content?

(1) Determine the goals and logic of advertising

By watching the video content of companies such as Xueersi, Yuanfudao, Tsinghua University and Peking University Online School, and NetEase Youdao, I found that their biggest common point is that "the goal is just to get a sales lead, rather than directly make a big class deal."

Children's classes attract parents to try paying through low-priced trial classes + high-quality picture books, thereby obtaining sales leads of certain value, while adult classes rely on sales consultation + leaving sales information, allowing large class sales to directly obtain sales leads.

Therefore, I judge that their delivery goal is to obtain sales leads and make efforts to convert paid courses for subsequent manual sales. The logic of obtaining leads is "to make videos that interest the target group, hit the pain points and itch points in one shot, let the other party take action, and achieve their delivery goals."

(2) Understand the pain points of the people behind the sales leads and design “leads” to attract them

Children's courses are basically divided into introductory courses and advanced courses. Introductory courses are mostly for children aged 3 to 6, while advanced courses are applicable up to 14 or even 16 years old.

Parents’ pain points about enlightenment classes are mostly “children are not interested and cannot persist” and “whether the children can really learn it”, but they are not so sensitive to price. Therefore, institutions often use low-priced trial classes + exquisite teaching materials as “enticements” to attract parents to participate in classes.

But improvement courses are different. They are like training classes. The high price is a pain point that many parents cannot afford. Whether the teachers are from real famous schools and whether the students can successfully pass the exams and improve their scores are what parents are most concerned about. Therefore, the videos produced by the agency are more diverse.

For example, a press conference was held to announce the launch of a course that solves parents’ problems, highlighting “cheap + taught by famous teachers”.

For example, from the user's perspective, parents brought their children to question the staff of the institution, asking why the institution can provide one-on-one tutoring by famous teachers at such a low price, and then the staff patiently answered their questions.

For example, from the perspective of office workers, they are so busy running around that their children's studies fall far behind and they have no time to teach their children. Fortunately, this course has greatly improved their children's studies.

The customer base for adult learning courses is mostly office workers, and their pain points are mostly "no time to study", "afraid of spending time and money but still not being able to learn", and "valuing the learning environment and learning methods".

Therefore, the video contents of adult improvement courses are mostly "model students". If it is an English class, the students who appear on the screen are not only fluent in English, but also handsome. They will take you to understand the learning environment and atmosphere of the institution, and give you a big discount.

The most important thing about the promotional content of adult improvement courses is "to make people who see it believe that it is talking about themselves and that they can also become so excellent." With this, the motivation for impulse consumption is achieved, and subsequent conversions may be just around the corner.

Regardless of the age group the course is aimed at, we first need to find the pain points of the target group and then design the corresponding content materials. Of course, the key is to push the content to the right people.

(3) Analyze user portrait tags and use them for targeted delivery

In Douyin, each user has different labels. You can briefly see the simplified version of Douyin labels through "Dou+", and you can see Douyin's classification of influencers from the star map screenshot. These user labels and classifications exist on every platform. When we make a delivery on a certain platform, the most important thing is to find out whether the characteristics of the person behind the label are consistent with the target population. If they are consistent, we can start the delivery.

Cost accounting, volume assessment, and material optimization before launch are all top priorities. User acceptance after launch and the full-chain rationality of subsequent conversion goals are even more important.

Case 2: Platform-based red envelope incentive marketing

The activity that I paid the most attention to and participated in the most in December was the Alipay: in-store payment activity. You can make in-store payments within 20 days within the month to share a prize pool of hundreds of millions of red envelopes. Alipay holds such an event once a year. Compared with last year, this year has added a low-threshold "buffer benefit", which means "you can share a prize pool of thousands of yuan and tens of thousands of yuan if you pay in the store within 10 days." This move will greatly increase the confidence of participants.

This type of platform activity inevitably requires attracting new users, and attracting new users is often one of the benefits with the highest rewards.

For Alipay, simply registering for real-name authentication to attract new users is no longer scalable, and there is no need to promote it on a large scale and in full quantity in China. According to my observation, this activity has two goals of attracting new customers. The first is to achieve performance at the end of the year and attract new customers for the in-store payment business. The second is to attract new customers for many other business platforms in the Alibaba system.

The logic of the entire activity is also simple, which is to use red envelopes to attract users to make in-store payments, and use the multiplier of doubling the red envelopes to encourage users to invite more people to participate in the activity, as well as visit other business platforms that can double the red envelopes, such as Ele.me, Taopiaopiao, and Fliggy.

That being said, if we want to imitate and learn this kind of activities, how should we start?

(1) Analyze platform resources and current business pain points

Taking the 2019 author selection activity currently being carried out by the Everyone is a Product Manager platform as an example, from my point of view, the platform's annual activity has two core purposes. The first is to take the lead and consolidate the industry-leading brand position; the second is to maintain and tap old authors and attract and recruit new authors.

The pain point of the platform is how to maintain the growth of high-quality authors and high-quality content, and how to allow more practitioners to discover and use their own content platform. In other words, both content and traffic are indispensable, and the lack of either will affect the other.

The reward resources provided by the platform for this event are divided into two categories: one is for the authors, which is also to accumulate power for the content; the other is for users who participate in the voting, which is for traffic. What authors need most is "voice" and "opportunity", and what users expect is "content value" and "physical value".

(2) Designing “benefits” and user behaviors that can solve business problems

Therefore, when designing driving interest points, for authors it means being able to obtain various online and offline resources on the platform. For users, there are authors they like and know, and they can also try their luck in a lottery, which is enough to motivate users to take action to support the authors.

(3) Grafting “additional goals” and value-added motivations

In addition to the most important goal, the event also aims to attract new customers and direct sales leads to its Qidian Academy.

You need to log in when voting for an author. Naturally, there will be a certain number of unregistered users around each author. They register a platform account by logging in. The whole process is no different from that of old users, except that an agreement is added to the page.

Among the prizes for the lucky draw, VIP membership of Qidian Academy, course coupons, and premium free courses will be used as rewards, which can also divert traffic to its products. Some of the users who receive the rewards will definitely generate actual paid course sales conversions.

At the same time, the high-quality annual content on the event page also endorses the platform, which is of great help in retaining target new users; the annual keyword H5 of old users interacts with old friends again, and their forwarding and cheering in the circle of friends will definitely bring brand effect to the platform, and even add new target users, especially for those fresh meat who are about to leave campus and prepare to enter the Internet industry.

Case 3: Marketing “transformation” of used car platforms such as Guazi and Youxin

Before the first half of 2019, the used car industry had always maintained a model of "burning money for growth" in terms of operational acquisition of customers. However, due to the lack of focus on accuracy in the delivery strategy and excessive and wasteful "blind investment", no amount of funding could help.

Take Uxin Used Cars as an example: According to Uxin's prospectus, the average monthly expenditure on sales and marketing activities from 2016 to 2018 was 135 million yuan. It successively invested in "The Voice of China" and invited Hollywood superstar Leonardo DiCaprio to endorse it, and spent huge amounts of money on everything from traffic marketing to brand marketing.

From Qimai data, we can find out the download volume of Youxin Used Car’s iOS and Android channels. The iOS download volume peaked at the end of October 2018, and then showed an overall downward trend except for the secondary peak in May 2019.

Judging from the Baidu Index, the popularity of the keyword "Youxin Used Cars" reached its peak in 2017, and then fell back without any significant fluctuations.

Judging from the number of downloads and the volume of brand keywords, Uxin Used Cars has not maintained the advantage it had in 2017. The hype has not led to a clear brand positioning, and the huge amount of traffic generated by the investment has not been well retained and converted.

This is a typical example of rough investment. Fortunately, in the second half of 2019, the investment strategy of used car dealers began to change.

According to market data, Uxin and Guazi used car platforms began to invest heavily in Autohome and started to do precise placement. Users who read reviews and learn car knowledge on Autohome are definitely interested in cars. This is the most precise traffic. Used car platforms that are in urgent need of recovery also need to spend their budgets wisely and follow the logic of precise placement, cost control, and low-cost effective new customer acquisition.

In the cold winter of the Internet industry, companies have begun to streamline unimportant businesses and must spend money carefully on core businesses. The used car industry is just a microcosm of the Internet industry.

Overall. When placing advertisements, you need to analyze the target audience of your products, find good distribution channels, seek detailed population portrait analysis from advertising service providers, circle out the target audience that can be reached through the distribution channels, prepare the lead content and targeted and quantitative distribution, control costs, ensure service efficiency, and attract new customers while not forgetting to retain existing customers. This is the basic logic that should be followed.

Author: Wang Liang

Source: Wang Liang