Case analysis: The operation and promotion methods of "Lian Coffee"!

When I was doing a community survey on mini programs some time ago, I found a good case - the Lian Coffee mini program. Some of the gameplay involved in it was really amazing. Therefore, I wrote this article today, hoping to share it with you. If you have any ideas, please leave a message for discussion.

Note: This article mainly analyzes from the perspective of functions and gameplay, and therefore ignores background analysis, market analysis, and competitive product analysis.

Main functions

Here, we mainly sorted out the main gameplay and functional points of Lian Coffee (in the "My" module, because it does not involve too many gameplays, it is omitted here).

Lian Coffee Mini Program Function Review

Specific function sorting

The picture below is the homepage of Lian Coffee. After disassembling and analyzing the specific functional modules, we mainly analyze the four functions of Pocket Coffee House, Team Coffee, Red Envelope Opening and Group Buying.

Lian Coffee Mini Program Home Page

1. Pocket Cafe: Gamification

(1) Overall style

Pocket Café adopts the style of a dress-up game, and can open a store online in seconds, which greatly improves the efficiency of opening a store and allows everyone to become a coffee shop owner. In addition, users can decorate the coffee shop according to their own preferences, which caters to young people's desire for novelty and personalization (similar dressing apps such as Zepeto were also very popular some time ago).

The main interface is shown below:

My Cafe

(2) Store operations

Pocket Café also provides a menu function. All items on the menu are provided by Lian Coffee, and are sold authentically and delivered uniformly. It truly achieves the goal that everyone is the store owner, and every participant becomes a promoter and operator of Pocket Coffee, thus making it a daily operating plan rather than just a screen-sweeping H5.

And for every cup of coffee sold, the store owner will receive a reward of 0.1 cup of Growth Coffee, 10 points of Internet Celebrity Index and 2 yuan of coffee fund. Through interest points, we drive store owners to actively share their stores and promote their brands, thereby bringing in goods for Lian Coffee. Moreover, customers can interact with store owners by sending barrage messages, which can help increase the popularity of the store.

In addition, recommended coffee shops are displayed on the red envelope opening page, which also attracts and exposes the private coffee shop of Pocket Cafe.

(3) Content and user retention

Of course, Lian Coffee’s mini program also takes user retention into consideration after bringing in guests. The square on the homepage attracts user messages through daily topics, and provides the message leaver’s coffee shop below - this allows users to share their lives based on the topic and also drive traffic to their own store.

A square in a pocket cafe

(4) Social elements

The function of "Nearby Cafes" can also find nearby coffee friends based on geographic location, which can help expand social interaction from acquaintances to strangers, greatly expanding the coverage of the population.

(5) Actual operational results

According to the data found online, we can see that on the first day of the launch of this function, the PV exceeded 4.2 million, and more than 10% achieved real sales. The best-selling user sold more than 200 cups that day. As of September 9, 2018, 1,000,000 coffee shops have opened on Lian Coffee’s mini program (I did discover this mini program too late, more than three months later, and wrote this article four months later).

The speed and efficiency of store opening far exceed that of Suning, which has opened 10,000 stores, and JD.com, which has a plan to open one million convenience stores, but the cost is almost zero. The only drawback is that the delivery service is only available in some cities, and the corresponding supply chain has not kept up with the speed of fission.

(6) Brief summary

Lian Coffee attracts new customers and retains users through the combination of coffee + store scenes + social interaction, fully tapping the role of people in the entire chain and successfully building a suitable bridge between potential users and products. This idea also coincides with the empowerment of the human element in the so-called “people, goods and places” in new retail, and fully exploring people’s usage scenarios (in fact, the last sentence was something I suddenly thought of, and I don’t know if I understand it well, hahahaha).

2. Team up to draw coffee and open red envelopes

The left picture shows the team drawing coffee, and the right picture shows opening the red envelope

The comparison list between team-drawing coffee and opening red envelopes is as follows:

Comparison between team-drawing coffee and opening red envelopes

From the comparison in the figure, we can see that the applicable scenarios of drawing coffee in a team and opening red envelopes are not exactly the same. The former has a long cycle, high standards for forming a group, and is more difficult (you need to always bring in new members to be eligible to draw the first prize). However, the rewards are large and attractive enough, and organizers can obtain more benefits.

The latter forms teams quickly, has more sessions per day, and is carried out in a short, flat and fast manner, which is a good supplement to the former - filling the user gap caused by the long cycle of the former, and encouraging users to share spontaneously through activities, thereby maintaining user activity.

The combination of the two can effectively maintain the popularity of the product and user retention in both the short and long term, realizing the path of attracting new users - activation - conversion - dissemination. Moreover, the gross profit margin of coffee is very high (according to Baidu, it is around 70%-90%), and the subsequent user consumption can completely make up for the incentive policies adopted previously.

4. Group buying

In terms of group buying, Lian Coffee has adopted a very clever approach, mainly using two methods:

Two ways to buy coffee in a group

One is the traditional group buying method – two people join together and share the discount. However, the packaging is usually for 5 cups of hot drinks (normally, one person cannot drink 5 cups of coffee at a time, and hot drinks are not tasty after they cool down. So I personally speculate that Lian Coffee adopts this method to allow users to form teams offline first, and then place orders online, so that the brand can be promoted offline in a more direct way. Of course, if you have any ideas about this, please feel free to communicate in the comment area)

The second type is a group where old employees lead new employees . As the name suggests, it means old customers bring new customers so that they can enjoy low prices together. However, what distinguishes it from traditional group buying is that the number of people in a group must be 3-5 (at the time of the survey, there were only two types of groups: three and five), and the price is mostly 1 yuan, which triggers users' desire to buy and lays a good foreshadowing for its explosion.

According to the data on the Internet: On the day of its launch on April 10, 2018, the mini program created a record of 3 million PVs. Within 3 hours of the launch of the group buying mini program, nearly 100,000 people successfully completed the group buying, bringing huge traffic and good conversion. Taking into account the cold start problem of the project, we can find that the reason why old customers can bring in new customers is that Lian Coffee has a large number of accumulated users in its service account.

Therefore, the early maintenance of the community and the number of seed users during the cold start are also important factors that we cannot ignore when considering the fission plan.

Group summary:

As the current group-buying model has basically solidified (two people in a group share a discount), Lian Cafe provides a new model of multi-person groups with old customers bringing in new customers. It uses the mini program + group-buying method and the high gimmick of 1 yuan to successfully spark the topic and spread it quickly. The former is like Europe in 1914, and the latter is like the gunfire in Sarajevo. Once the two collide, the spark will instantly spread like wildfire.

Overall framework and function summary

In general, each module of Lian Coffee has a clear division of labor - some are responsible for attracting new users, some are responsible for user retention, some are responsible for conversion, and some are responsible for dissemination. The dissemination process in turn promotes the acquisition of new users and the activation of old users.

The various functions are summarized in the following figure:

The main functions of each module

Yes, a complete AARRR model is ready to emerge, a real case. I won’t introduce the model too much here (of course, if you have other ideas about the analysis of this model, you are welcome to communicate with us~)

Other things I want to say

After analyzing so much, we should not ignore the core item in Lian Coffee - coffee.

Just imagine, if it was other products instead of coffee, would the conversion effect be so high? If we simply copy this model, will it have such a good communication effect on general e-commerce products (such as 3C appliances, clothing, etc.)? I think it is somewhat difficult.

Take Pocket Coffee Shop as an example. Perhaps everyone has imagined owning a coffee shop. The logic behind it is that many people want to enjoy a slower-paced and more stylish life. However, if it is changed to an online clothing store, electrical appliance store, or grocery store, people may not be so willing, because the attributes of the goods determine that opening a similar store is indeed not very attractive to potential users.

In other words, coffee is a very good social product that embodies a life attitude in people's subconscious mind, which is why it can tap into a group of potential users. If you just apply it mechanically, the input-output ratio may not be as good as that of coffee. However, this "everyone is a shop owner" model is indeed worthy of our deeper exploration and thinking, because people are indeed willing to share things that make them feel comfortable and that they like subconsciously.

As I write this, I suddenly remember what a senior said before (I later searched on Baidu and found that it was said by Senior Liang Ning): A good salesperson is one who breaks down the user's defenses and persuades the user. A good product, on the other hand, does not allow users to activate defenses and caters to their subconscious minds.

Another key is the mini program. So far, Lian Coffee has not had an independent APP, only the WeChat mini program and Lian Coffee’s official service account. Because in the WeChat environment, mini programs are indeed a very good fission tool - they have higher sharing efficiency and a higher possibility of clicks, and the development, iteration and maintenance costs of mini programs are much lower than those of the APP.

Lightweight tools + WeChat traffic + official service account accumulation + giving users a meaning, maybe this contributed to the popularity of Lian Coffee~

Source: Uncle Zhang next door