The influx of entrepreneurs, celebrities, and e-commerce platforms has brought live streaming to the market for a while, but the other side of the coin is the mixed hype and blind optimism.
Editor’s note: This article is from Tencent News Deep Web.
Author: Enron
Editor: Kang Xiao
“I am a bit regretful that I have not caught up with the first wave of Luo Yonghao’s delivery of educational products,” Zhu Ying, head of a K12 online education company, told “Shenwang”. After watching Luo Yonghao’s first live show on Douyin’s live broadcast on April 1, Zhu Ying found the business staff of the online education team of Luo Yonghao through the friends of the original “Ono Electronic Cigarette” team.
“At that time, the starting point of the pit fee was 600,000, and there were fluctuations according to the volume of the goods. At that time, they told me that Zebra AI wanted to broadcast the live broadcast of Teacher Luo, saying that Zebra AI had already paid 1.2 million pit fees. In addition to the pit fee, there is also a 20%-30% commission share. At that time, we felt that the price was a bit exaggerated, so we chose to wait and see,” Zhu Ying said to “Shenwang”.
On the evening of April 10, in the live broadcast room of Luo Yonghao, Zebra AI Lesson, Alpha Egg Intelligent Story Machine, and NetEase Youdao Dictionary Pen 2.0 all became Luo Yonghao’s “first educational product with goods”. Among them, the Zebra AI class eventually sold 10,800 sets, with a total sales of 529,200 yuan; the sales volume of the Alpha Egg Intelligent Story Machine Z1 was 7,461, with a total sales amount of 2,454,700 yuan; Netease Youdao Dictionary Pen 2.0 sales were 1,688, The total amount is RMB 1.179 million.
Luo Yonghao’s own IP effect and a 10,000-minute order amount in 15 minutes have released aThis signal, the tuyere for live broadcast of the lessons really came. In the period that followed, many CEOs of education companies went on their own to promote their own brands and products.
On April 28, Li Yongxin, the founder of Zhonggong Education, appeared in the live broadcast room and presented his first show in his live broadcast career. On May 14, Zhang Xiaolong, the founder of the chalk public examination, communicated with netizens in the Taobao live broadcast room Civil servants preparing for exams and employment in difficult situations”, and made a circle of advertisements for various courses of chalk.
The trigger event that allowed Zhu Yingmeng to contact Luo Yonghao’s business team again was that 5000 copies of “Guagualong English” were sold out on May 8 in Luo Yonghao’s vibrato live room for 10 seconds.
“I will contact Teacher Luo’s live broadcast team afterwards, and I was told that the online education company’s pit fee is between 1.2 million and 1.5 million,” Zhu Ying told “Shenwang”.
There are two major backgrounds behind the rising costs of online education products. First, the high cost of acquiring customers for online education is already an industry secret. According to some data, the cost of acquiring regular-priced live classes for large classes averages between 2,000 and 3,000 yuan; the second is that the WeChat community operation bonus Weiwei and the community management tool WeTool are disabled, and the cost of acquiring private domain traffic will become higher and higher.
Enemies on the back. In the eyes of some online education companies, the IP effect of popular anchors may be able to bring new users to their private domain traffic pools.
But reality is far more than ideal skinny. In the online education closed-loop chain of “traffic-customer acquisition-low-priced lessons (free lessons) sales-regular price lessons conversion-teaching services”, live broadcast of selling lessons is only the first step. After completing the drainage task of the low-priced course, how to transform the low-priced course into a regular-priced course in the later period, and how to improve the retention rate of users through teaching and services should be the key.
Another account for “Sales less than half of pit fee”
The underlying logic of live broadcast selling is “price war”, that is, the head anchor gets the product at the “lowest price in the entire network”, and then uses the advantage of “below the market price” to attract more users’ attention and purchase. But for the enterprise itself, after throwing away service fees and commissions, it is often difficult for enterprises to make money or even lose money. The three squirrels, Baicaowei, Zhou Dasheng and other listed companies that have cooperated with Li Jiaqi and other anchors have also said that the Internet celebrity economy does not bring considerable revenue.
The underlying logic of live streaming is also applicable to online education products. The difference is that because online education products themselves have closed-loop chains such as traffic acquisition, conversion of low-priced courses to regular-priced courses, and later renewal, live streaming brings another set of logic in the field of online education.
Take Luo Yonghao’s zebra AI class as an example. In the 15-minute live broadcast, Luo Yonghao sold 10,800 sets of low-cost lessons at 49 yuan, and the final sales were 520,200 yuan.
In terms of sales only, Luo Yonghao’s live streaming income for Zebra AI is less than half of the 1.2 million pit fee. In addition, Luo Yonghao’s live broadcast team will also draw 20%-30%.
Only looking at the book, no matter what the calculation, Zebra AI is doing a loss-making business. But unlike cosmetics, home appliances and other commodities, education products are not a one-off deal. For online education companies, acquiring customers at a low price is only the first step, and the subsequent conversion of regular prices or even renewal is the key.
“After registering for the Zebra English Experience Class, I was notified by text message to add the tutor’s WeChat. After that, the tutor will pull the parents who signed up for the 49 yuan experience class into several WeChat learning groups. 50 parents. In the week before the end of the experience class, the tutor will recommend the full-price class in WeChat group, the original price is 2600 yuan a year, the group registration can be discounted by 200 yuan, and you can also provide reading pens, picture books, etc. “Small gift”, Yu Huan, a parent who has signed up for Zebra English, told Deep Web.
According to Yu Huan, there are more than 50 parents in the WeChat group of her 49 yuan class experience class, and there are more than 20 parents who signed up for the regular price class. According to the conversion situation in the WeChat group where Yu Huan is located, the conversion rate of the regular price class brought by the Zebra English 49 yuan experience class is about 40%.
If the simple conversion rate is 40%, the 10,800 courses sold by Luo Yonghao’s live broadcast room can bring more than 4,000 regular-priced users. Each regular-priced user is calculated at 2,400 yuan, and the sales are more than 9.6 million yuan.
For the logic of bringing goods in Zebra English, some online education investors explained “Shenwang”, the main purpose of which is brand promotion. “This algorithm is in an ideal state under the refined operations and services of Zebra AI in the later period. At present. , Zebra AI’s regular-priced class has exceeded 500,000 students. Luo Yonghao only sold more than 10,000 experience lessons this time. Compared with the preparation of 50,000 sets of inventory, the effect of bringing goods is general. However, Zebra AI has this Bringing goods through Lao Luo was not just for selling courses, but for branding and seizing the IP effect of Luo Yonghao’s first cooperative education brand. At the time, Zebra AI also promoted this cooperation with Luo Yonghao.
“But not all online education companies are suitable for finding online celebrity live broadcasts, but also need to look at the model of educational products. Users will grab low-cost experience lessons in the online celebrity live broadcast room. “One-on-one online and small class interest.” The above investors added to “Shenwang”, “but it is undeniable that the sudden epidemic has indeed accelerated the outbreak of live broadcast and cargo energy. Short video + live broadcast will become an education industry The focus of the research is on the ecology.”
Live streaming with “star” is still playing private domain traffic
In May, the online education company Spark Thinking launched five live broadcasts on Tencent’s watch live broadcast. “Unlike the previous use of internal employees as the anchor, each live broadcast of Spark Thinking in May invited stars or education, parenting vertical V cooperation,” Spark Thinking internal employees told “Shenwang”.
Starting on May 7, Spark Thinking invited writer Hao Jingfang, moderator Xie Nan, Douban red person “Always Maverick Cat” (Zhao Xing), Weibo Parenting V “Small Earth” The founder of “Orange” and the public name “Three Moms and Six Babies” Tutu Ma was in the live broadcast room to discuss parenting and learning experience with Spark Thinking sales consultants and teaching and research teachers. .
According to public data in the live broadcast room, these five live broadcasts in May brought more than 20 million sales to Spark. Compared with its monthly sales of more than 200 million yuan, live streaming in May brought nearly 10% of the company’s revenue. In this regard, the internal staff of Spark Thinking expressed to “Shenwang”, “Spark Thinking is one of the earliest education companies to start large-scale live broadcast of online education companies. The live broadcast process began in the second half of last year, so this year The data of live streaming with goods in May is expected.”
How much does 20 million in sales cost? For this question, the internal staff of Spark Thinking said that the cost is mainly the service fee of the guests. As for the service fees of these celebrities and the big V, the employee did not directly disclose, but only stated that “the fare fee is much lower than that of Teacher Luo.”
In the second half of 2019, Spark Thinking began to test live streaming with goods internally. After running through the live streaming process, it officially launched live streaming with Double 12 in 2019. For more than half a year since then, Spark Thinking has launched a live-streaming 60-hour lesson package at different nodes such as daily and anniversary.
Different from Zebra AI, Guagua English “smashing money”, please Da V and Internet celebrities to cooperate in live broadcast delivery, the early spark thinking is more cautious in exploring live broadcast delivery. In order to reduce costs, the anchors before Spark Thinking were mainly dominated by the company’s internal sales consultants and teaching and research teachers. It was not until May this year that external traffic such as celebrities and vertical Vs were intensively introduced.
According to the observation of “Shenwang”, although Spark Thinking tried the live streaming to bring the goods very early, the explosive growth of sales started from 2020. At the special time point of Double Twelve in 2019, the sales of Spark Thinking live broadcasts were only 1.6 million yuan, which was less than 1/4 of the ordinary daily live broadcast sales (7 million) on April 13, 2020.
The contrast between the sales of live broadcast goods on Double 12 and the ordinary day shows that more and more users have become aware of live broadcast goods. “Live streaming is an outlet and a tool. In the future, you can graft a lot of other games, such as gaining customers and transforming, Repurchase, branding, etc., are all imaginable scenes,” internal employees of Spark Thinking expressed to “Shenwang”.
Through live broadcast grafting more gameplay, will live broadcast with goods become the company’s main sales channel in the future? In this regard, Spark Thinking replied, “80% of our users come from referrals every month, so we reverse the number of times we need to do live broadcasting according to reverse thinking. For example, now to achieve a monthly revenue of 200 million yuan The goal is that we need to make more than 20,000 orders per month. So we will reverse the amount of traffic we need based on the teacher’s monthly order volume, instead of relying on live broadcast to sell lessons.”
For the “backward logic” of Spark Thinking, some education practitioners explained to “Shenwang”, “The mode of Spark Thinking class is an online small class live broadcast mode, and the customer price is more than twice that of AI class, and its development speed It will be limited by the number of teachers, and we must consider the problem of teaching and service undertaking after the sudden influx of traffic. Therefore, it is a more rational approach to reverse the traffic expenditure that needs to be purchased according to the monthly amount of teachers.”
“But after all, comparing the number of online users in the live room of Luo Yonghao (more than 10 million) and the number of viewers in the live room of Spark Thinking (30,000 to 150,000), we can find that there are no live broadcasts with stars and big blessings. It’s still the private domain traffic of the online education company, which is a refined operation of old users. If you want to convert new traffic, you still need to attract stars and big V. This is also the main reason why Spark Thinking focused on finding big V cooperation in May. “, the above education practitioners added to “Shenwang”.
(At the request of the interviewees, Zhu Ying and Yu Huan in the article are aliased)