Private domain operation strategy for beauty brands!

Preface

As the vanguard of the new brand wave, the beauty industry has always been a focus of entrepreneurs. Growth Black Box has also been tracking and researching various new cosmetics and skincare brands over the long term. I believe many of you paid attention to us because of our report last year that deeply dissected Perfect Diary[1].

It is not difficult to find that the rise of beauty brands in 2016 is actually the result of the superposition of two major dividends:

1. As the younger generation of women reach the age of wearing makeup, the demand for low-priced substitutes for big brands has exploded, while there is a gap in the price range of traditional brands;

2. New users are eager to learn about makeup and skin care, and new content platforms such as Xiaohongshu and official accounts provide an educational venue, where the cost of gaining brand exposure through seeding is extremely low.

This means that in the past, the growth of new beauty brands almost all came from new users brought by new products, but today, five years later, there are no longer so many new users, and the products are becoming more and more homogenized. Whether it is differentiation at the brand level or innovation in the product itself, there is not much room left for new brands. The declining compound annual growth rate of China's cosmetics category illustrates this point.

According to data provided by Yimian Data, in the first quarter of 2021, the number of beauty and skin care stores on the Taobao platform increased by 31.08% and 38.45% year-on-year, while in the second quarter it dropped to 16.61% and 20.94%. This indirectly shows that the speed at which new brands are created is actually declining.

Clues can also be seen from the number of SKUs. Data show that in the first quarter of 2021, the number of SKUs of beauty and skin care products increased by 76.08% and 45.71% year-on-year, but in the second quarter of 2021, the growth rate dropped to 11.83% and 16.61%. This also shows that the speed of product innovation is slowing down.

After the dividend explosion, relying solely on brand positioning and product differentiation as in the past is far from enough to drive growth. We believe that new growth drivers in the future will be reflected in: using services to create brand differentiation, continuously improving consumer experience, and narrowing the distance between brands and consumers. This will form a solid foundation for the trinity of brand + product + service.

So, how can beauty and skincare brands differentiate their services? What are the cases on the market that are worth learning?

Growth Black Box chose the perspective of "WeChat private domain user operation" and analyzed the private domain operation strategies of nearly 30 beauty brands. Based on the distance between the brand and the user, it summarized three different user operation models for beauty companies in the private domain: companionship, subscription, and product promotion.

Next, we will analyze five brand cases in depth to reveal the secrets behind growth, corresponding to different user operation models:

Lan Xili: How do thousands of online beauty consultants generate hundreds of millions of yuan in revenue?

HFP: With an annual revenue of 2.7 billion across all channels, how is the former pride of domestic products doing today?

Zhikami: Is it still possible to achieve a brand from 0 to 1 in the private domain today?

Blank Me: Surpassed Huaxizi on the first day of Double Eleven pre-sale, and then what?

Guanxia: How can a niche brand achieve a revenue of 100 million yuan through private domain?

1. Near-field benchmark: companion user operation

Growth Black Box had met Mr. Zhong and Mr. Zhang at a dinner party before. They co-founded the skin care brand "Lan Xili". The bosses have a very unique vision. When other companies just started to develop private domains in 2017 and 2018, he used QQ as a base as early as 2012 to accumulate users in large quantities and sell products to them through chat, thus starting this initial form of "private domain user operation."

Not only did he enter the market early, his approach to private domain play was also very different from others.

For example, brands such as Perfect Diary adopt the strategy of "attacking high and advancing rapidly". This type of brand usually adopts the "human wave tactic", organizing customer service teams to regularly promote products, issue discounts, promote new products, carpet-bombard information, and promote large-scale single product promotions.

However, he did not view users as one-time "traffic", but instead dug deep into the long-term value of individual users. He arranged for customer service to have in-depth 1-on-1 private chats with users, discovered user needs from the chats, and then promoted products.

At an offline get out of class held by Growth Black Box, Mr. Zhong shared their private domain operation methods. In his opinion, the most important thing in the private domain is to form an "intimate" relationship with users - knowing what users need and solving their difficulties. Once trust is formed, I will buy whatever you recommend. Their philosophy is "not to sell one product to 1,000 people, but to sell 1,000 products to one person."

This model, which relies on long-term companionship and high-frequency communication, pays attention to user needs, and almost responds to every request, is called the "companionship economy" by Growth Black Box. Behind the "companionship economy" is the ultimate user trust brought about by high stickiness and high interaction.

Lan Xili has 1 million private domain users, who are around 18-45 years old. They contribute more than 60 million in sales to Lan Xili each year, which is a very high number in the cosmetics industry. Lan Xili has a "skin care consultant team" of thousands of people. After the purchase behavior in the public domain is completed, some users are directed to the brand's own private traffic pool. Skin care consultants will conduct in-depth one-on-one operations for these users who enter the private traffic pool. By providing users with professional skin care knowledge and extremely considerate services, they will maintain stickiness with users and promote their continued repurchase.

In order to better serve users and reflect the brand's "sense of companionship" at all times, Lan Xili designed a set of standardized user operation SOPs, breaking down the user operation process into 8 links, including proactive care, skin problem analysis, and introduction of improvement plans. Each link is further subdivided into specific actions such as "asking basic questions" and "shaping skin care promotion values", and specific direction guidance and solutions are given one by one.

In fact, from Lan Xili’s starting point, we can see that this is a brand that attaches great importance to social relationships and user operations.

From 2012 to 2017, Lan Xili used QQ to accumulate a large number of users, and after the WeChat ecosystem matured in 2017, he imported users into the WeChat private domain. After two years of private domain operations on WeChat, Lan Xili adopted a more refined strategy in 2019, conducting private domain operations through the "add and chat now" method. This method greatly improves the accuracy of fans in the private domain and also saves a lot of time and energy for customer service staff.

In the era of WeChat private domains, Lan Xili's skin care consultants have one-on-one private chats with dozens of customers every day to introduce customers to the latest products, preferential policies and skin solutions. At present, Lan Xili’s customer response rate is about 30%, the order opening rate is 20%, and the average customer unit price exceeds 1,000 yuan. In addition to one-on-one private chats, Moments and communities are also important platforms for Lan Xili to output content.

During specific time periods every day, Lan Xili's skin care consultants will post skin care knowledge, daily life sharing and other content in their circle of friends to shape their personal IP and warm up the atmosphere for events held from time to time; in addition, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, skin care consultants will also share women-related topics in WeChat groups to guide community users to participate in discussions.

It can be said that through a multi-touchpoint private domain layout, Lan Xili has formed a user-centered service network and realized "companion operation" for private domain users. This deep companionship operation model has also brought extremely high labor efficiency to Lan Xili: At present, each customer of Lan Xili can bring 3,600 yuan in sales to the brand each year, and each customer service representative can achieve a monthly sales of 40,000 to 50,000 yuan on a daily basis. The monthly sales during activities can even reach 100,000 to 500,000 yuan.

Lan Xili is just one example of companion user operation. Regarding the methodology of more companion user operations, Growth Black Box summarizes it as follows:

2. Midfield benchmark: subscription-based and community-based user operations

Growth Black Box once pointed out in the “2021 Consumer Brand Private Domain Research Report” [2] that “the foreign e-commerce ecosystem uses websites and apps as DTC transaction scenarios, conducts user operations through CRM, and finally interacts with users through emails and text messages.”

However, the communication scenarios of domestic consumers mainly take place on WeChat, the largest social tool. In China, mini programs and H5 are equivalent to independent sites, and private chat, group chat and other interactive methods are equivalent to email. SCRM based on WeChat is the real SCRM.

Almost all foreign private-domain e-commerce companies maintain relationships with old customers by "establishing private contacts with users and recalling users through push." ​​Therefore, email and telephone marketing have always been popular. In China, this method has evolved into regular article push and community services on WeChat public accounts, which is the second model we want to introduce - subscription-based, community-based user operations.

Subscription user operation

I wonder if you still remember a brand called HomeFacialPro (HFP). In 2016, HFP started to grow with the help of official accounts, and grew rapidly in the following years of 2017-2019. It was often on the screen of WeChat Moments, and its sales on Taobao sites also continued to rise. Euromonitor data shows that from 2016 to 2020, HFP's retail sales increased from 278 million yuan to 2.282 billion yuan, with a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 101.92%.

HFP seems to have returned to silence after a burst of growth, and there seems to be little related marketing information on the market. But in fact, HFP has already vigorously developed offline and WeChat private channels, and does not just rely on e-commerce alone. Especially in the private domain, people are making money in silence.

Through research, Growth Black Box learned that in 2020, HFP's GMV in the private domain was 300 million yuan, and it is expected to reach 500 million yuan in 2021. Generally speaking, a 10% share of private domain GMV in a brand’s total GMV is considered high. HFP’s private domain GMV is close to 11%.

On the other hand, HFP's other data indicators in the private domain are also very impressive:

Effect: The recall rate of public account tweets reached 60%;

Investment side: In 2021, the average monthly investment in official accounts was 10 million yuan, and the average annual investment in information flows was 50 million yuan.

Number of fans: more than 1.5 million fans;

Reading volume: Almost every article has over 100,000 views, and over a thousand likes and views;

Video account: The live broadcast frequency is relatively high, and the sales volume of high-order products in the shopping cart is 2k+.

How did HFP evolve to today’s global model?

Let’s first review the development history of this brand.

HFP was founded in 2016. Its predecessor was a lifestyle beauty O2O service platform “Meiyanjia” founded in 2014. Perhaps due to the fierce competition in the O2O beauty platform, founder Lü Bo did not continue to run the business. Instead, he founded HFP two years later, which focused on "original liquid skin care". This was closely related to the popular "ingredient party" trend at the time [3]:

After 2008, a wave of “ingredient parties” emerged on portal websites, forums and blogs, discussing the ingredients of skin care products and citing foreign skin-related literature to analyze and disseminate knowledge. With the development of social media, this trend shifted to Weibo after 2009, and then to WeChat public accounts after 2016.

In the view of Growth Black Box, descriptions of "ingredients" require longer text and pictures than ordinary content dissemination - ingredient science education, main ingredients/origins of products, user experience and efficacy, professional evaluations by KOLs, etc., are all very detailed content, and all of them require a larger space to carry. At this time, long pictures on Weibo and WeChat public accounts just provide suitable soil.

At the beginning of its establishment, HFP adopted the strategy of "parallel public and private domains and large-scale traffic delivery" and placed a large number of advertisements on platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and Taobao. According to statistics from the self-media “Marketing Lao Wang” [4], HFP placed advertisements on three platforms at the beginning:

WeChat (core delivery platform): In just 9 months of 2016, about 700 KOL ads were delivered, and in 2017, the number reached an astonishing 3,000+

Weibo (focus on delivery platform): a total of 100+ KOLs with more than one million followers were deployed, making full use of the convenience of Weibo/Taobao traffic conversion to drive Tmall sales.

Taobao system (supplementary delivery platform): mainly uses soft article promotion such as Taobao headlines to increase user interaction, and the content is related to buyer shows and celebrities.

In April 2016, HFP published their first article on the WeChat official account. According to statistics from Shengxia Media[5], HFP spent 6 million yuan on trial and error advertising in its own media from April to August 2016. In August 2016, its public account advertising broke even, and in October 2016, it achieved positive profits. At this time, HFP's marketing expenses had exceeded 8 million yuan.

HFP divides all self-media accounts on the entire network into four levels. Growth Black Box studied the basic situation of HFP's public account launch in the past 180 days and found that in terms of public account attributes, emotional, entertainment, and fashion public accounts accounted for the highest proportion, reaching 21.89%, 15.85%, and 12.83% respectively, which together accounted for half of the 24 types of public accounts. In terms of the size of public accounts, HFP tends to target public accounts with 100,000 to 500,000 followers, which together account for more than 80% of all public accounts.

In addition to preferring small and medium-sized accounts oriented towards women in the fields of emotion, fashion, entertainment, etc., HFP also likes to make large-scale and intensive deliveries in a short period of time. According to Xinbang data, there are 1,659 historical records of HFP tweets in the last 30 days.

HFP’s copywriting is famous for its extremely high conversion rate. After studying dozens of HFP’s tweets, Growth Black Box found that HFP’s tweets basically followed the five-step method of “clickbait + topic introduction + pointing out pain points + solutions + price boost”, and are a model of public account sales articles.

HFP generally uses topics that cater to women's psychology as titles, such as: Men love beautiful women, how women can live a high-class life, celebrities' whitening secrets, beautiful women's lives are smoother, etc., using women's common psychology of beauty and comparison to attract users to click and read;

At the beginning of the main text, HFP will introduce the topic in line with the tone and gradually bring it into the product scene;

Next, HFP pointed out the user's pain points, such as not washing the face properly and acne scars being difficult to recover from, to stimulate user needs from a professional perspective;

Subsequently, solutions represented by ingredients were proposed, such as amino acids with high cleaning ability, oligopeptides with strong healing ability, and astaxanthin with excellent antioxidant ability;

Finally, release a low-price, discounted purchase link to boost the price and complete the transaction.

Following this copywriting strategy of eye-catching titles - topic introduction - pain point analysis - solutions - price boost, HFP achieved efficient content conversion on WeChat. The transaction volume generated through the mini program in 2020 more than doubled year-on-year.

In addition to attracting traffic through official accounts, HFP also simultaneously launched WeChat advertisements and content on other public platforms such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu. The three links run in parallel to gradually expand its own private traffic pool.

If HFP rose to prominence by seizing the dividend of the WeChat official account era, then after the WeChat official account dividend period has passed, will the strategy of "crazy planting and large-scale investment" still work?

We found that there are actually new brands that can replicate this strategy.

Growth Black Box observed that in 2018, a brand called "Facial Joy" was mentioned in a large number of public account articles. This brand is similar to HFP. It has been doing a lot of promotion and investment in public accounts since its inception. In just three years, its private domain GMV has reached nearly 100 million yuan.

Zhikamei is a brand founded by Tsinghua graduates in 2018. Its slogan is "big brand quality, affordable price" and its main focus is on anti-aging effects. Although both started from WeChat official accounts, Zhikamei and HFP have significant differences in the way they are launched on official accounts. Different from HFP’s multi-link and private domain drainage method within WeChat, Zhikami only uses the “official account delivery” link, which attracts users to the mini program to place orders directly through the official account.

Different from the "multi-style" articles in the HFP official account, which are both brand-oriented and effect-oriented, the articles in the Zhikamei official account are mostly simple and direct product introductions, with a transaction-oriented approach. The content of the articles is more about introducing product selling points, ingredient explanations, patent background, celebrity endorsements, user experience, before-and-after comparisons, etc. The main reason for this difference is the length of brand history:

As a brand that has been established for a long time, HFP has accumulated a certain brand influence through many years of public account advertising. Whether it is the accumulation of content methodology or the refinement of its graphics and text polishing, it is greater than Zhikami, which was established only 3 years ago.

Based on this, users are willing to click in to read the content produced by the HFP brand’s own public account. HFP’s official public account can also play a positive role in promoting sales and building brand awareness. However, Zhikamei was established relatively recently, and brand awareness has not yet been fully established. Whether it is article placement or content produced by the brand itself in the official account, a "sales-oriented" approach is undoubtedly a safer choice.

Zhikami’s public account advertising is mainly carried out in the form of “grass-planting articles”. Almost every one of Zhikaimei's grass-seeking articles revolves around the idea of ​​"skin problems - patented ingredients - ingredient explanation - texture description - user feedback - preferential prices". Whether it is the "Little Bottle Essence" with the main bifida yeast ingredient, or the "Ice Cream Cream" with the main peptide ingredient, the in-depth and easy-to-understand explanation of the principles of the ingredients, user feedback from real-life pictures, and the temptation of low prices of "if you are slow, you will miss it", the Zhikaimei brand has completely occupied the minds of consumers and achieved effective grass-seeking and conversion.

After statistics from Growth Black Box, it was found that Zhikami spends at least 5-7 million yuan per month on public account promotion costs, and sometimes even up to 10 million yuan. From January to October 2021, Zhikami's private domain GMV reached 9.49 million in total, and it is expected that the overall private domain GMV will exceed 100 million in 2021. In October alone, Zhikami Private Domain achieved a GMV of 1.3254 million, a year-on-year increase of 314.7%.

After directing users to the private domain, Zhikami mainly establishes long-term connections with users through customer service. The customer service’s circle of friends is the main platform for daily content output, covering promotional events, user feedback, skin care knowledge and other content; in addition, the video account, as an important operating segment in the private domain, is used as an output port for brand promotional videos, celebrity endorsements, KOL recommendations and other content.

In the most important conversion link, Zhikami mainly relies on service account + customer service. Zhikami's service account will push promotion-themed articles from time to time, and attract users to click into the mini program to buy by setting up different group benefits such as "hot-selling combination packs", "single item mix and match", "stock up packages", and "limited-time discounts for new product launches". In addition, Zhikami's customer service will also regularly send welfare links and customer service-exclusive coupons to users, using low prices to stimulate users to place orders.

Although both HFP and Zhikamei use WeChat as their main platform for private domain operations, there are still differences between the two:

In terms of size, HFP, as a brand that has been operating for many years, has a larger size; while Zhikamei has only been established for three years, and its user scale and GMV are not as large as HFP;

In terms of the link, HFP uses three paths to attract private domain traffic: public account promotion, WeChat advertising, and public domain, while Zhikami only has one path: "public account promotion to attract users to purchase on the mini program";

In terms of distance from users, since Zhikami is more promotion-oriented and has stronger interaction with users, Zhikami is closer to users. On the "Private Domain User Operation Map" line, Zhikami's position should be further to the left of HFP.

Therefore, brands that want to start their private domain business on WeChat can learn from Zhikami’s approach, moving forward in “small and fast steps”, first running through a link, and then driving the growth of private domain users through scientific investment.

Social user operation

If you paid attention to this year’s Tmall Double Eleven, you must have noticed a brand called “Blank ME”. On the first day of Tmall's Double Eleven pre-sale, this brand ranked third on the makeup list with its two star air cushion products, surpassing Perfect Diary and Hua Xizi, and stood out in the list full of big brands.

In the cosmetics category, Blank ME is unique - first of all, Blank ME specializes in foundation makeup, a category that domestic cosmetics brands rarely focus on; secondly, Blank Me's price range is as high as 250-450 yuan, which is close to that of international brands, and is a range that domestic cosmetics, known for their cost-effectiveness, have never entered.

Growth Black Box found that in recent years, the proportion of merchants in the high-price range in Tmall's cosmetics category has been rising year by year:

Data from Yimian shows that in Q4 2019, the number of merchants with a price range of less than 100 yuan accounted for 73.33% of the total merchants. By Q2 2021, this figure dropped to 68.67%;

In Q4 2019, the number of merchants in the price range of RMB 200-500 accounted for 10.23%; by Q2 2021, this figure had risen to 13.6% - among them, the number of merchants in the price range of RMB 200-300 increased from 5.26% to 6.88%.

Blank ME is a brand that has grown up under this trend of high-end domestic beauty products. In addition to relying on strong product power and brand building to create a "mid-to-high-end" brand image for themselves and gathering a wave of loyal fans with purchasing power, the efforts made by these domestic beauty brands in user operations should not be underestimated: not only do they actively promote private domain layout, strive to maintain old customers through official accounts and mini-programs, but they also connect users through communities, thereby tapping into users' deeper needs.

This brings us to the second method we will introduce in the "midfield benchmark" - community-based user operations.

Taking Blank ME as an example, the community is an important platform for this brand to interact with users. Blank ME is not only good at combining the product itself and brand-related topics to create topics, but also pays attention to listening to the voice of users. Blank ME will recruit users in the community, conduct user interviews and surveys, and obtain more accurate user needs from the surveys.

Specifically in terms of the way of asking questions, Blank ME divides the questions into two dimensions: the level of satisfaction when provided and the level of satisfaction when not provided. Therefore, they designed both positive and negative questions in the user rights interviews. Take the demand for “exclusive unboxing gifts” as an example:

If you are given an exclusive unboxing gift, how would you feel? A. I like it very much B. It's what I deserve C. It doesn't matter D. I accept it reluctantly E. I don't like it at all

If you are not provided with exclusive unboxing gifts, how would you feel: A. I like it very much B. It is what you deserve C. It doesn’t matter D. I accept it reluctantly E. I don’t like it at all

The reason for using this question method comes from the [KANO] user needs analysis model used by Blank ME. The KANO model is a tool for classifying and prioritizing user needs. It divides products and services into five types: essential attributes, desired attributes, attractive attributes, indifferent attributes, and reverse attributes:

Attractive attribute: If this demand is not provided, user satisfaction will not decrease, but when this demand is provided, user satisfaction will be greatly improved;

Expected attribute: When this demand is met, user satisfaction will increase; when this demand is not met, user satisfaction will decrease;

Necessary attribute: When this requirement is optimized, user satisfaction will not increase; when this requirement is not provided, user satisfaction will be greatly reduced;

No difference factor: Whether this requirement is provided or not, user satisfaction will not change, and users don’t care at all;

Reverse attribute: Users do not have this demand at all, and user satisfaction will decrease after providing it

By asking positive and negative questions, analyzing all the data collected in the questionnaire, and counting the frequency of occurrence of each indicator in different needs, Blank ME can find out the needs with the highest attractive attributes, expected attributes, and essential attributes, cut off the needs with indifferent attributes and reverse attributes, and then determine the needs that ultimately need to be retained to maintain the iterative upgrade of products and services.

From "Do you need exclusive product packaging design" to "What kind of peripherals are needed", from "Do you want to have a Q&A with the founder" to "Do you want to participate in the brand's annual meeting"... There are more than 20 questions in Blank ME's user rights interview, covering all aspects of the interaction between the brand and users. Blank ME even plans to launch a "Life Moment Makeup Companion Plan", which will send makeup artists to do makeup for users at important moments in their lives (such as weddings, graduation ceremonies, coming-of-age ceremonies, etc.) and provide photographers to record the entire process. After the interview is completed, Blank ME will also send small gifts to the interviewed users, caring for the users in every detail.

In addition to its extreme attentiveness in user operations, Blank ME is also one of the few brands with a "sense of technology" in the private domain operations of domestic beauty products.

Blank ME has launched a "skin quality detection" function in the mini program. Customer service staff will regularly post messages in the community to guide users to click on the mini program to participate in skin quality detection. This method can help Blank ME accumulate the skin data of private domain users and provide assistance for subsequent product development.

3. Far-field benchmark: product promotion-style user operation

In addition to material needs, consumers are increasingly pursuing "spiritual needs". Some "lifestyle" brands with their own values ​​and unique tones are often sought after by high-spending groups - even if they are small and beautiful, they have good growth potential.

However, there is often a paradox with these brands: since prices are generally not low and they rarely use promotional traffic strategies, the tone has improved but sales have gone down. Few brands can maintain elegance while increasing sales.

Through research, we actually discovered a new fragrance brand that can take both into account - Guanxia. It does not have a Tmall store, but only operates on WeChat private domain. The GMV of the mini program mall alone is expected to reach 143 million yuan in 2021.

Regarding Guanxia’s brand building and copywriting capabilities, major media have already conducted quite in-depth analysis, so I will not go into details about the growth black box here. What we want to study is Guanxia’s actual sales performance in the private domain over the past few months. Based on this, we studied Guanxia’s sales on the mini program from February to November 2021.

Data shows that Guanxia basically maintained a trend of monthly sales growth in 2021, with the highest sales in September at approximately 17.6593 million yuan; the cumulative sales from February to October were approximately 119 million yuan. According to this estimate, Guanxia's sales for the whole year of 2021 were approximately 143 million yuan, a significant increase from the tens of millions of yuan in 2020. (Since discounts and full-price discounts are not taken into account, the data is not guaranteed to be accurate)

How did Guanxia achieve such rapid growth?

The first reason may be that it tapped into the right trend and seized the opportunity of the rise of China's perfume e-commerce.

Euromonitor data shows that between 2015 and 2020, the proportion of department store sales channels for perfumes fell from 65% to 55%, while the proportion of e-commerce platform channels increased from 11% to 26%. Online channels are being favored by more and more perfume brands;

In addition to channel selection, the rise of China's perfume market also contributed to Guanxia's growth.

Euromonitor data shows that the compound growth rate of China's perfume market reached 14.9% between 2015 and 2020, and is expected to reach 22.5% in the next five years. By 2025, the sales of China's perfume market are expected to reach 30 billion yuan. The growth rate of the Chinese market is about three times that of the global market. Among them, the growth rate of emerging domestic perfume brands was about 40%, exceeding the growth rate of the overall perfume market.

The second reason why Guanxia can achieve rapid growth is closely related to their private domain brand building.

Guanxia’s brand and content building have always been praised. Dissecting content about beauty may not be what Black Box straight men are good at. But we can still find the patterns. With the idea of ​​"finding commonalities", we analyzed the content published by Guanxia on the service account from August to November.

We found that from August to November, Guanxia published a total of 17 articles, and at the end of 7 of them, there was a [Producer List] as shown in the figure below. The three producers written on the first line, Elvis, Li and Khoon, are the three founders of Guanxia. Therefore, we speculate that all articles with a [Producer List] attached are carefully polished by Guanxia after spending a lot of time.

How much does it cost to write an article like this? After consulting relevant friends in the creative industry, we learned that it costs Guanxia 300,000 to 450,000 yuan to produce each brand-themed content. So, according to this calculation, in the past four months, Guanxia has invested more than 3 million yuan in the production of brand content for official accounts alone.

At the same time, we also found some patterns between Guanxia’s content and sales every month.

For example, in September, there were big-budget articles published and the "Yihe Golden Osmanthus | Golden Autumn Osmanthus Rabbit" limited gift box was released, and sales became the highest in the past few months; in October, since there was no [Producer List] at the end of each article, more new copy was written for the new product "Body Lotion", and the sales in October showed a significant decline compared with the previous months; and in November, not only was every article a "big production", but also the release of heavyweight new products "Black Pine Ink" and "Tiger Year Limited Gift Box", its sales rebounded sharply and became the second place after September.

So, among Guanxia’s many products, which ones are the best-selling ones? We also analyzed the sales data of Guanxia’s two new product launch days, November 10 and November 17.

After analyzing the data, we found that:

On November 10, sales were approximately $243,900;

On November 17, sales were approximately $262,100;

The total of the two amounts is 506,000 yuan.

In terms of sales, the sales on the two new product launch days were 712 and 736 pieces respectively; among them, the sales of "Kunlun Boiling Snow-Quiet Fragrance" was the largest, usually selling about 200-300 pieces;

From the perspective of product categories, the cumulative sales of the two new product launch days showed that fragrance products had the highest sales, reaching 364,700 yuan; followed by aromatherapy, with sales of 101,300 yuan.

In addition, Guanxia has some "limited edition" products that can only be sold once, which account for a small proportion of its total sales from February to November, only 5%.

It can be seen that Guanxia’s main sales performance is still driven by the two main categories of fragrance and aromatherapy. Although Guanxia has been working hard to expand its product categories, and has launched products such as balms, incense pendants, shower gels, body lotions, hand creams, etc. after the hot sales of fragrances and aromatherapy, but reflected in the sales performance, these attempts to expand product categories do not seem to be successful, and it seems that it is still a bit far from the "lifestyle brand" that Guanxia claims to want to be.

Different from Lan Xili's 1V1 companionship operation that serves users, and different from HFP and Zhikami's subscription operation that deploys various touch points in the private domain, Guanxia has no community, no customer service team of hundreds of people, and no marketing activities such as giving out benefits and discounts to promote orders. It only relies on one official account and four times a week of stylish and beautiful content output to achieve nearly one million subscribers and annual sales of around 100 million yuan. Although Guanxia still has problems with weak production capacity and unsuccessful expansion of product categories, it is still a successful brand from the perspective of private domain user operations alone.

Guanxia’s private domain gameplay, the growth black box summary table is as follows:

At this point, the three user operation models and the growth black box have been completely dismantled.

Returning to the model we proposed at the beginning, faced with three different user operation models, how should brands choose the model that suits them according to their needs? We believe that brands can make judgments based on several dimensions: product, content, organization, marketing and user reach.

Companion user operation: suitable for brands with high product unit price, strong emotional orientation of private domain content, the main operation body is the customer service team, the marketing method is mainly 1V1 solution, and the user reach rate is high. If you have more specific questions, you can refer to "Beauty King: The First Book on Beauty and Cosmetics Sales", which selects 88 very representative beauty and cosmetics sales scenarios. These are problems that sales staff encounter every day but find difficult to deal with. They can provide a reference for brands when communicating with users.

Subscription-based and community-based user operations: suitable for brands with low to medium customer unit prices, private domain content oriented towards "resources + services", the operating entity is a marketing team, "daily marketing + node promotions" are the main marketing means, and the user reach frequency is medium. Growth Black Box once used Perfect Diary as an example to analyze this type of brand in "12,000-word interpretation of Perfect Diary: from organizational structure to growth strategy". Please click to read the details.

Product promotion-style user operation: suitable for brands with medium to high average order value, whose private domain content is more of an output at the "culture and values" level, whose operating entity is a marketing team, and which conduct daily marketing in the private domain. As for how to do a good job in user operations for this type of brand, Growth Black Box recommends that you read the two books "Vision and Taste" and "Consumer Forest: Brand Regeneration". Although they both cost more than 100 yuan, bosses will probably feel that they are worth the money after reading them.

Conclusion: User Operations - Service and Experience First, From Traffic to Community

In the chapter “Growth Strategy” of the new book “Beauty Insight” by Wang Zhuo, former managing director of Shanghai Jahwa[6], the term “customer intimacy strategy” is mentioned. Different from the "managing products" that businesses previously focused on, this strategy is now also described as "managing users", which focuses more on establishing deep relationships with users based on trust, and then providing systematic products, services and solutions around this group of users who know each other. Regarding the difference between "operating products" and "operating users", Growth Black Box explains it in the table below:

Similar to Wang Zhuo’s thinking, product expert Liang Ning has also analyzed user relationships. She believes that a person will only form relationships with people or organizations that they feel connected to. The relationship between brands and users can be divided into four levels: "traffic", "users", "members" and "community":

If brands only regard users as traffic, users will also only regard brands as resources. The relationship between traffic and resources is a simple exchange, and the depth of the relationship is very shallow.

The brand regards users as users and members and provides regular care and discounts. The users' stickiness to the brand will become stronger, but it is still not enough to allow users to firmly choose the brand when making every shopping decision;

When a brand truly understands the user and what the user gets from the brand is not only the resources but also the feelings, then a "community" symbiotic relationship is achieved between the brand and the user.

This is how the depth of user relationships progresses. To understand and change users' behavior, a brand needs to understand several feelings of users. Liang Ning believes that there are several most typical keywords in user experience, namely "sense of inferiority", "sense of superiority", and "sense of accomplishment".

Among the brands analyzed in this article, whether it is Lan Xili, which is a companion user operation, or HFP, Zhikamei, Blank ME, which is a subscription-based and social user operation, or Guanxia, ​​which is a product-based user operation, they all understand the user's "feelings" and form a symbiotic relationship between users within the WeChat private domain:

Through 1-to-1 subtle care, Lan Xili makes users feel unneglected and eliminates inferiority complex;

HFP, Zhikamei and Blank ME have given users a sense of accomplishment through articles and community explanations and benefits distribution;

Through the creation of its own brand tone, Guanxia gives users a yearning for exquisite life and a sense of beauty, satisfying the user's sense of superiority of "I am me, fireworks of different colors".

Growth Black Box believes that with the continuous increase in the size of private domain users, the private domain strategy of consumer goods companies is changing from "operating products" to "operating user relationships", and WeChat is also evolving from a "social platform" to a "social + transaction + publicity" platform.

In the future, under the general trend of public-private domain linkage and omni-channel integration, more and more companies will enter the private domain, and Tencent’s private domain service ecosystem will also provide enterprises with more choices in terms of data capabilities improvement, business process optimization, and online and offline integration.

As Steven Van Belegum said in "The Essence of Users: The Law of Precision Operations in the Digital Age", "Computers have all the capabilities of personalizing user relationships, but only people can make user relationships truly personal." Technology has never really changed business. After technology has turned people into digital, it is time to return digital to adults. ”

Author: Growthbox

Source: Growthbox