How does the perfect diary grow through small red book delivery and private domain traffic?
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Growth black box Growthbox” (ID: growthbox2), by Zac & Yolo.
If you know a little about beauty products, you must have heard of the brand known as “Light of China” – Perfect Diary. Just last month, it received a new round of financing, with a valuation of more than $1 billion.
Although the market competition for the perfect diary’s main lipstick, lip glaze, eye shadow and other make-up products is fierce, the sales data chart below clearly shows that it is breaking out at an alarming rate:
In just 8 months, sales have increased nearly 50 times, not only to suppress the domestic counterparts such as Meikang Fanyu, but also to catch up with international brands such as YSL and SK-II. In 2018, the perfect diary is only 650 million yuan in Tmall’s GMV.
Data Source: Tmall, E-commerce Mirror
Know that This brand was just born in 2016, and the Tmall flagship store was only available in 2017. In 2018, Tmall Double 11, the perfect diary for the first time to participate in the event, only exceeded 100 million sales in 90 minutes; from January to April 2019, the perfect diary has been stable in Tmall The beauty sales volume was the first; by 2019 Tmall 618, the perfect diary was the first hour of the Tmall Makeup Top1.
The perfect diary is so hot, people are starting to study the growth strategy behind it, and the analysis of the perfect diary is overwhelming. Everyone may have learned from the articles in the market that the most important strategy of the perfect diary is the small red book launch and perfect user operation system.
However, how is the perfect diary delivered? In what way is the user operated? No one has ever analyzed the flooring details of these strategies.
So, we decided to dig deep into the perfect diary from the perspective of data. Little Red Book KOL vote put, WeChat private streamQuantityYunCampus,Look at them How to play a role in the growth of the perfect diary, and what is the specific implementation method.
1. Little Red Book KOL Delivery
On the small red book, the perfect diary official number has 1.68 million fans, the total number of notes on the platform is 120,000+, the total exposure is hundreds of millions, far beyond the brands such as Baique Ling, L’Oreal and so on. In the job advertisement of Perfect Diary, the position of “KOL Delivery” only valued the experience of candidates in Little Red Book, which shows the importance attached to the operation of Xiaohongshu.
In order to study the law of the perfect diary in Xiaohongshu, we collected the data of the Xiaohongshu platform full million accounts, and selected thousands of accounts and 45,000 notes related to the perfect diary.
We found that in the few months since the Tmall store was first launched in July 2017, the sales volume of Perfect Diary has actually not improved. The most crucial turning point is that in February 2018, Perfect Diary started the operation of Xiaohongshu as a key channel, and increased its efforts, and then its sales began to rise rapidly. At this point, the data shows that the perfect diary has not yet shaken the account, Weibo is not maintained, and the B station is not operating.
How What?
We will first examine the changes in volume (ie, note-message + likes + total collection), because the effect of the delivery directly reflects the volume of sound – and by varying the difference in volume during different periods, it can be inferredFor the law. The data shows that the perfect diary has a significant increase in the volume of sound in March-April, August-September.
Data Source: Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
We will look at the total number of notes in the full diary of the Xiaohongshu from the perfect diary. As shown in the figure, during the above period, the number of notes related to perfect diary has a significant step-by-step growth, proving that there is an intensive delivery behavior during this period.
Data Source: Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
Why is the time for the perfect diary to be concentrated in these months? From the perspective of e-commerce operations, this may be relatively simple: start to build momentum before 618 and double eleven. But when we return to the product level, finds that the new cycle of the perfect diary is also concentrated in these nodes.
Source: Tmall, Tianzhu Capital, TH Capital, LLC
Finally, we can see from the GMV data that the sales volume will increase in the new time period. But the real explosive growth is still focused on the follow-up 618 and the double 11 big promotion.
Source: Tmall, Tianzhu Capital TH Capital, LLC< /p>
In combination with other clues, we can initially infer: Perfect diary will focus on product launching and big preheating at one node, launching a burst of money through the small red book, and quickly sprinting sales through subsequent big promotion.
So, since there are so many new products in these time periods, how do you arrange the content to be delivered? We selected some of the products that were relatively well sold in the first month of the line, and analyzed the ratio of their notes to the total notes for the month – more than half of the products ranked first in the current month’s notes. Obviously, the perfect diary is put on the Xiaohongshu, and each period is concentrated on 1-2 products. The target of the explosion is very clear. In the following period, the sales volume of the products can be greatly increased, which proves that most of the explosions have been successfully created.
Source: Xiaohongshu, Qiangua data
In order to further demonstrate the placement strategy of the perfect diary, we selected the explosion of March this year – Explorer twelve-color animal eye shadow as an example.
Through the microblog display, the perfect diary officially launched the explorer’s twelve-color animal eye shadow on March 13 (the small red book was announced on the 15th). But before the 13th, there have been animal eye shadow related posts shared. We divided the explorer’s twelve-color animal eye shadow into productsonlineprevious, medium, and late Analyze separately.
Pre-launch (3.5-3.15): The explorer’s twelve-color animal eye shadow was pre-sold on Tmall, and the bloggers of millions of fans posted relevant product sharing stickers. A lot of attention. Among them, the blogger of 1.269 million fans “is three years old” released the relevant Amway stickers on March 5.
Medium mid-term (3.16-3.31): Perfect diary official account launch #Explorer animal eye shadow #topic sharing, forwarding lottery and other activities. At the same time, a number of bloggers with a capacity of 50,000-500,000 fans share product reviews and makeup-related content. @胖着那 @猫抖抖 @裴幸运 @一卷卷 @宅大圣等博主 as the main node to spread.
Post-up (4.1-4.15): The content is mainly recommended by the makeup tutorial, makeup sharing to recommend the explorer animal eye shadow. At the same time, there will be a large number of 300-5000 fans of blogger product feedback stickers to create a good reputation. Of course, at this time, some bloggers with 5-50 million fans will share the content to maintain the discussion of the product.
Data Source: Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
The number of notes plummeted in May, proving that there were not a lot of notes.
And the same strategy, we can also see in another explosion of “mosaic small squares” – This is a regular dip in the perfect diary on the little red book.
At this point, we can get a relatively complete strategy: Perfect diary online a lot of new products in March/April and September/October, in a month, relying on small red books, Weibo, vibrato 1-2 explosions on the platform, frompre-emergence,topost-maintenance< Strong>Operation, total time spentonehalfmonth or so. Then, using the huge potential of Tmall 618 and Double 11 activities, the product sales will be pushed to a higher level. Controlling product quality and user needs, also making perfect diaryThe explosion has a longer-lasting appeal, so that after the perfect diary sales went up, there was no landslide-down, but instead a step-like rise.
About the effect of the explosion, the sales situation also gives the answer. Since the 12-color animal eye shadow disc has been on the line, sales have never fallen out of the top 10 of the perfect diary official store. Making an explosion is equivalent to having a cash cow, which leads to high sales for a long time, and can also drive sales of other products.
Source: Tmall, Tianzhu Capital, TH Capital, LLC
Who is it for?
Since the centralized delivery strategy for the perfect diary is clear, the next question is How does the perfect diary choose the delivery goal.
First, we first classify accounts as fans, which are mainly divided into
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Stars (Certification, such as Zhu Zhengting)
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Famous KOL (plus v certification, such as: Li Jiaqi)
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Header (fans > 500,000)
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Waist at the waist (50,000 vs. 550,000)
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Beginners (5k<fans<50,000)
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Amateur (300<fans<5k)
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People (less than 300 fans)
We found that the perfect diary is not a blind end to the big name star, but a wide range of KOL below the waist. Its top-down ratio is 1:1:3:46:100:150. For the “passer-by” type, it basically belongs to the user’s spontaneous transmission.
Data Source: Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
From the composition of the volume, the main provider of perfect diary volume is the junior and the waist up. From the perspective of the explosive volume of the twelve animal eye shadows, it also conforms to the distribution trend. The size of passers-by fans looks great, but in fact it doesn’t make much contribution to sound volume; stars and well-known KOLs have a very small amount of sound.
Data Source: Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
In this way, we can also speculate that this “pyramid” delivery strategy is based entirely on people’s “follow the wind” mentality:
1. First of all, cooperate with stars and well-known KOL, but the number is very small. The main purpose is to build the momentum.
2. Secondly, since the head will follow the trend, and then talk to them about cooperation, the conditions will be more relaxed
3. Then, the waist up and the junior up will follow the head and star, and it is very easy to cooperate with them
4. Finally, create a grand event where everyone is using perfect diary products, leading ordinary users to follow their own notes
So, which KOLs are connected to the perfect diary? Who is most favored by the perfect diary? We have verified in many ways that the following user groups are targeted for perfect diary:
1. The small red book user mentioned in the perfect diary Xiaohongshu account notes
2. Write a perfect diary sharing user
3. The first to experience and share the perfect diary new product
After analyzing all the notes published by the Perfect Diary Little Red Book, we have developed a list of targets (partial). It can be seen that the same period of comparison between 2018 and 2019, the number of KOLs put on the perfect diary in the small red book has increased significantly.
Data Source: Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
The top10 for the placement list is below:
Data Source:Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
In addition, we found the head users who wrote the notes of the little red book at the time (the part shown here) by exploding the items
Data Source: Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
Horizontal comparison of these KOLs, we found a rule: Perfect diary may be more inclined to be widely distributed, most KOL and perfect diary cooperation times are 3-6 times, and a small number of high-value KOL will Repeated delivery. It can be seen that the KOL of the incremental part from 2018 to 2019 is also concentrated in the 3-6 cooperation interval.
Data Source: Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
In this way, we can find the part of KOL that works well for the perfect diary based on the frequency of KOL’s release (shown in the image below). This data also validates the conclusions mentioned above: the perfect diary is mainly based on the waist KOL.
Data Source: Little Red Book, Qiangua Data
2. WeChat private traffic
Subsequent retention and repurchase are obviously more important than how to quickly pull up users. – That’s why the concept of “private traffic” is being fired. For consumer products, using WeChat personal number to create private domain traffic is naturally the best solution.
Similarly, you can find clues from the recruitment information of the perfect diary: for example, the “Android development engineer” position, the Xpose technology mentioned in the job requirements, its most widely used application is “WeChat group control” . The reverse development mentioned in the article is the basis for establishing a group control system.
Next, let’s study the micro-signal system of the perfect diary.
How to create
First of all, the purpose of establishing private domain traffic is not to acquire new users, but to find ways to retain old users who have already purchased products. From the process we can see:
1. After purchasing the perfect diary product, attach a “red envelope card” to the package and scrape the layer to get a special password
2. Scan code to follow the public number
3. The public number immediately pushes a page containing the personal number QR code
4. After receiving the personal number, I received a small program QR code
5. Scan the code and enter the password to receive the 1-2 yuan red envelope
It seems that only costs 1-2 yuan, can get a public number fan, a personal number friend, a group member, the price is really high.
So, how efficient is this private domain traffic system? How many personal numbers are in the perfect diary?
By studying its technical architecture with simple code, we were able to trace back the personal number that the perfect diary used in the past ( is probably full). Due to the time relationship, we have identified dozens of them for a while, but it is enough to explain the problem:
Conservative estimates, Perfect diary has hundreds of personal numbers, and its unified logo is set for “small children”. According to the 3,000 person/number standard, the number of fans in the “private domain” should be at nearly a million levels. According to the consumption level of 260 yuan/year of Chinese cosmetics per capita in 2017, this flow pool has a consumption potential of nearly 100 million yuan per year! With such huge volume and commercial value, it is no wonder that the perfect diary is willing to cost and develop its own group control system.
On the other hand, these micro-signals not only have automated processes such as keyword response, pull group, but also real customer service behind manual response. The combination of the two not only ensures efficiency but also guarantees service quality. We deliberately selected some of the problems that we had to drill, and we quickly got a reasonable answer – if this is a robot, it proves that it has passed the Turing test!
How to operate
Of course, the operational strategy of Perfect Diary is not over yet. Pulling the user into his “private domain” only completes the first step. The follow-up needs continuous operation to maintain the purpose. Based on the personal number, there are two main directions for the perfect diary:
First is the WeChat group. After adding the “small end” in the first step, the user will receive an invitation to add the group, which is named “Little Finishing Beauty Research Institute” – thus generating thousands of WeChat groups. We found that the operation of its WeChat group is actually carried out around multiple small programs. Through the “small end of the child” this person, to create high-quality beauty content, published daily to the small program, and then forwarded to the group, causing users to continue to pay attention and discussion. Live broadcasts, sweepstakes and other activities will also be released to the group. In addition, various user research and market research can also be carried out in the group, which greatly facilitates the iterative optimization of the product itself.
Second is a circle of friends. Everyone must be very curious, why does the perfect diary use “small end” to unify all the micro signals? The reason is very simple, that is, by creating a person, let the user generate trust. When you first add a micro signal, the first sentence of “Little Finish” is: “I am really not a robot!”. Whether it is a small program or a circle of friends, “Little Finish” is a real person, so that everyone can see a flesh-and-blood sister, your “private beauty consultant.”
“Small end” will not only release various daily self-portraits in the circle of friends, but also new product launches, sweepstakes, etc., which greatly affects the user’s purchasing decision.
I quoted a quote from an old friend and female marketing expert Doris here:
“When I added this micro-signal, I thought it was just an ordinary customer service micro-signal. It turned out to be a small IP, called Xiao Jingzi. Xiao Jingzi actually has a real person image, this girl … her friend circle is carefully operated, 2-3 times a day, as if it is a daily life of a girl who likes makeup. This is the customer service number, it is better to train the “amateur blogger KOC”
KOC (Key Opinion Customer) is another word that has been very hot recently. Amateur bloggers don’t have a lot of traffic like KOL. KOC is like a friend you trust. She can influence you to buy and buy.
——Knife Doris
What surprised me is that the friends of each micro-signal are not mechanically synchronized, but have some differentiation. This may mean that the perfect diary has the ability to user segmentation within private traffic, which differentiates the content based on user interest. This kind of refined operation is undoubtedly another great tool to improve the cost of conversion.
How to convert
After all, the ultimate goal of accumulating traffic is to sell conversions. After a long period of user incubation, the perfect diary’s repurchase conversion is also a matter of course. We observed three main ways to convert:
Friends circle spike ads, WeChat group push, personal number private chat push, mainly for promotional activities. What’s more interesting is that when “small finished” is advertising, is not a blunt push to push a link, but to guide users to actively express their willingness to purchase, interested in sending links again. For example, the form of replying to a specific number in the figure below.
Since WeChat and Tmall are unable to communicate, their purchase channel is completed through the Like Mall. However, it is worth noting that the purchase link pushed in the community is not the official flagship store that leads to the perfect diary, but the order to the “Little Finish Flagship Store”. More importantly, we found that each group (the group owner is a different small micro-signal) pushes the product link with a different UTM code. This may indicate that the operators behind each account have a certain sales KPI, and UTM is used to track their performance.
3. Summary
Through the above research, we started from a single point and combed two key means of perfect diary growth:
1. Little Red Book KOL launch: The purpose is to create a burst of regularity. In the first two months of the 618 and Double 11 promotion, the new one was selected, and 1-2 potential products were selected for centralized delivery. Among them, preheating for half a month, maintaining a heat for one month, spanning one and a half months. In the KOL selection, the perfect diary uses a typical pyramid structure, driven by a small amount of head KOL, but the main volume is from the waist and the primary KOL. Through the exploration of 2018, the perfect diary has been able to screen out the good KOL, and in 2019 to increase the intensity of repeated launch. In fact, KOL delivery is not a direct purchase conversion method, but through the creation of brand awareness and purchase desire, and finally on Tmall.
2. WeChat private domain traffic operation: The purpose is to improve user retention and repurchase. Firstly, the user is guided by the card in the physical commodity to add the WeChat personal number, and the red envelope is used to increase the user’s willingness to add. Perfect Diary has a large number of personal numbers, which can be flexibly switched through the QR code of the page to build hundreds of thousands of WeChat friends’ traffic pools, while using automated replies to improve operational efficiency. Secondly, through the private chat, the purchased users are added to the WeChat group, and the high-quality content in the small program is used to attract users’ attention. Subsequently, by creating a “small end” KOC friend circle set, you can effectively market the user’s purchase decision. In the end, the products are synchronized in the circle of friends and WeChat groups in a promotional manner to guide the final repurchase.
Based on various points, we can summarize the growth strategy of the perfect diary here as “public-private partnership, hand-in-one”:
Get new users and deals through so-called public domain traffic (Little Red Book + Tmall), then use the operation of private domain traffic (WeChat ecosystem) to enhance the user’s lifetime value and use manual + automated Improve operational efficiency.
Of course, the success of the perfect diary must be more than the above two points, a complete “combination boxing” can push it to today’s position – the operating strategy of consumer goods companies is very complicated This also involves logistics, supply chain, customer service, product quality inspection, channel management, etc., each of which is a “hard barrier.” But, starting with the details, we can still get valuable inspiration from it:
1.Little Red Book KOL launch can play a positive role in product sales, especially in the creation of explosions. At this point, the platform dividend has not completely disappeared, we should go to actively try.
2. You can use refer to the delivery object of the perfect diary to find the right delivery target to improve your delivery efficiency. Waist and junior KOL may be the most cost-effective choice.
3. The new customer acquisition will not bring continuous growth momentum, and it will be able to obtain long-term benefits by retaining old users through reasonable means. Therefore, utilize microLetters to build your own private traffic may be a cost-effective way.
4.”Plus friends” is just the first step in building private domain traffic. We also need WeChat group, circle of friends, etc. to continuously publish content, let users continue to pay attention, and establish deep connections with users through manual services. People are set up well, dry goods are shared, and advertising will be transformed. If you want to harvest, you must pay first.
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T. H. Capital, LLC: An independent secondary market research organization. Since its inception, it has been working on the development of alternative data for nearly seven years, exploring the application of alternative data in secondary market equity investments.