“Won the customer” is the ultimate battle
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “DoNews” (ID: ilovedonews), Author: Chen Shaoliang.
Before 2020, the single financing amount invested by the primary capital market for online education rarely exceeds RMB 1 billion. This field is at most only a supplement to the Internet venture capital investment market. But by 2020, the Tier 1 capital market has shown a completely different attitude towards online education. According to statistics, this year’s primary capital market invested as much as 50 billion in online education.
Online education for both ice and fire
In March of this year, when many companies were still working from home, Yuandaodao created the largest single-billion-dollar financing record in the industry at that time. It didn’t take long. In October of this year, Yuandao Zhidao broke the record again, completing the financing of 2.2 billion US dollars. Not to be outdone, it also completed 750 million and just completed two rounds of financing of 1.6 billion US dollars this year. There are also non-educational companies such as Bytedance that recruit up to 10,000 employees on education projects this year alone. The fierce market has far exceeded the situation that ordinary entrepreneurs can preset. If they are the most in the industry in 2020 If the lucky person succeeds, the story of the unfortunate is much more tragic.
There are not many news about the bankruptcy of some small and medium-sized online education brands. In November, Puxin Education closed the online online school. Recently, Xuebajun has also been rumored to run away and has been in the traditional education and training market for many years. This year, there have been many tragic stories of running away, closing schools, and transferring students.
This kind of online education market structure is incomprehensible by many people. The most reasonable explanation is that the market has begun to reshuffle. But I want to say that the market is far from when it starts to reshuffle. Why did tutoring and homework help raise funds on such a large scale in the past year? Do they really need this much capital?
In fact, it is not the appearance seen by the outside world. The epidemic has indeed accelerated the development of online education, but the two leaders in the online education market, Ape Guidance and Homework Help, have been kidnapped by capital. Large-scale financing is not what you need for your own funds. , But in order not to let the funds fall into the other party’s pockets, so this kind of financing far exceeding their own needs is actually a defensive offense.
For venture capital, due to the gradual end of the trend dividend of the Internet, the speed of capital gains is greatly reduced. In order to obtain more relative benefits, once opportunities appear in this small field in the past, Spending money crazily, so no matter whether an online education platform is needed or not, after the outbreak of the epidemic, the amount of investment of this magnitude has been determined, and all that has been done this year is how to allocate it. For those players who have not been allocated with capital, they have become the martyrs in the history of the online education industry.
“Getting a customer” is the ultimate battle
On the tuyere, pigs can fly, and when the tuyere is over, it is clear who is swimming naked.
With the blessing of capital, acquiring customers regardless of cost will not cause much problem. Once you start to compete for endurance, the ability to acquire customers will long-term test the survival skills of online education platforms. At present, the price of a user acquisition of online education platforms has reached thousands of yuan, which is much higher than other areas of the Internet. At the same time, the conversion advantage of high customer unit price is another threshold for user value conversion. Therefore, from now on, online education platforms should have Think about how to acquire customers at a lower cost than competitors, otherwise once the capital dividend period ends, a chain decline in profitability will be an inevitable trend.
Civil service training institutions, Zhong Gong and Huatu, can reach the top of the capital market and have a high profit margin in the entire industry. The reason is that it has extremely low customer acquisition costs. Although the customer unit price is tens of thousands or tens of thousands of yuan, it has established a low industry brand. Therefore, the platform itself will hardly invest heavily in acquiring customers. These are two Education and training companies can maintain important factors that continue to be optimistic about the capital market.
Therefore, for online education platforms to significantly reduce customer acquisition costs, brand establishment will be a key factor. The current situation is that although the current trendy photo search, online teacher live lectures and other new styles The online education method has been recognized by parents of a certain scale, but it is still a small piece compared to the broader education and training market.