With the disappearance of the demographic dividend and the intensification of market competition, the maternal and infant industry is experiencing an unprecedented "upside-down winter". In this context, more and more maternal and infant practitioners are constantly looking for the second growth curve to inject a steady stream of innovative vitality into the maternal and infant industry.
Private domain management, as a popular marketing model in recent years, can not only "reduce costs and increase efficiency", but also create more value for customers, which coincides with the business philosophy of the maternal and infant industry. Through private domain operation, mother and baby stores can not only meet the needs of customers more accurately, but also maintain their unique advantages in the fierce market competition.
"Reduce costs and increase efficiency", private domain operation empowers the maternal and infant industry
In recent years, in the communication with several mother and baby store owners, it has been found that private domain operation is an increasingly frequent topic. Nowadays, with the dissipation of the demographic dividend, the maternal and infant industry is gradually entering the "inverted winter period", with a wave of store closures and bankruptcies coming one after another. According to data from the Scout Research Institute, the closure rate of traditional mother and baby stores will be as high as 45% in 2023. By March this year, there were only about 160,000 mother and baby stores left in the country.
In the cold winter, how should the entity mother and baby save themselves? "Reducing costs" and "increasing efficiency" are the only ways to deal with the crisis. As we all know, the biggest advantage of private domain operation is "cost reduction" and "efficiency increase", private domain customers can not only be precipitated but also repeatedly reached, high-quality customers can even further expand the private domain traffic pool for the brand, bring more new traffic, and the additional cost is only the cost of private domain operation tool SaaS (digital service).
At the same time, customers in the private domain traffic pool tend to be more sticky to the brand, and the corresponding retention rate, repurchase rate and customer unit price are also relatively high, which happen to be the pain points of physical mothers and babies.
The three-year epidemic has allowed many physical mothers and babies to experience the advantages of private domain marketing and see the power of one of the private domain channels: the WeChat community. In this big test of the times, some mother and baby stores are flexible and adaptable, and in order to meet consumer demand, they have launched many online shopping methods such as "WeChat Mini Program Group Buy" and "Community Group Purchase Solitaire" for home delivery. "Cloud shopping" has allowed these physical mothers and babies to live very well, and even refreshed the GMV record, and many mother and baby stores have continued to retain the group purchase model after the epidemic.
There are also some physical mothers and babies who have created another "cloud consultation" model, establishing a "problem consultation room" for mothers through the WeChat community to provide timely and professional answers when the baby has problems but cannot go out. Either model finally points to a conclusion: the power of the private domain is powerful, and it can empower the physical mother and child, and the operation through the private domain can indeed "reduce costs and increase efficiency" for the physical mother and child.
A number of mother and child store owners who have tasted the dividends of private domain marketing told the author that the next goal is to strategically reduce the number of stores, not only to cope with the reality of decreasing customer flow, but also to save costs and focus on the construction of private domain operations.
The maternal and infant industry is naturally compatible with private domain management
There has always been a view in the industry that there is a natural fit between the maternal and infant industry and private domain management. From a business point of view, an industry that needs to directly reach customers many times, and needs customers to repurchase multiple times, and has a high customer unit price is the most suitable for private domain operation, and the maternal and child industry happens to have these characteristics.
With the dissipation of dividends, the traditional sales model of "you buy and I sell" is difficult to say that it is still applicable to the maternal and infant industry, and "better customer service" has become the business philosophy of many new maternal and infant stores, which coincides with the values of private domain management.
If the traditional sales model is to sell 1 product to 100 customers, then the value of private domain is to retain 1 customer with 100 products. The core of mother and baby stores and private domain operations is to create value for customers, from the previous offline "field" as the core, to the current online "people" as the core.
In the cold winter period of the industry, the private domain operation of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" is expected to be a new solution for the mother and child entity to open source and reduce expenditure, and create a new growth curve, but it is not easy to really give full play to the advantages of private domain operation, which is also the crux of many mother and child stores "discouraged" in the face of private domain operation. First, it is difficult to summarize a set of universal methodologies for private domain operation, and it is necessary to combine various elements such as the development stage of the mother and child entity, the allocation of store staff, and regional culture, and gradually explore and summarize a characteristic private domain business model in practice; Second, private domain operation is actually a big project, which requires accurate connection with every customer, and behind the refined operation, high requirements are put forward for cost and efficiency everywhere.
It is these problems that hinder the pace of private domain management for mothers and infants. But it can be said that every maternal and infant entity is actually more or less involved in the field of private domain management, in the communication with the store, the author heard the most sentence is, "I really want to do private domain management, I am trying, but I don't know what to do, and I don't know how to do it." ”
In fact, each mother and baby store has several WeChat communities, which are actually the basis of private domain management, and the question is how to mobilize these community resources more fully. The community marketing and mini program group buying mentioned above actually belong to the scope of private domain operation, in addition to other sales channels such as private domain live broadcast to be explored.
Digital management, mining the value of private domain
There is a special phenomenon in the maternal and infant industry, that is, how strong the stickiness between the store and the customer is, how high the sales volume will be, and the private domain is the glue of user stickiness. Some mothers and babies have already achieved tens of millions of GMV through private domain operations, but for more mother and baby stores, the degree of excavation of private domain treasures is less than 1%. One of the mother and baby store owners told me, "I usually use the private domain as a place to post event advertisements, but as a result, the group becomes more and more silent, not only does it not pay but it does not get anything, but the customer churn rate is also very large." ”
In fact, the situation of this store owner is not unique, some store owners told me that we tried our best to mobilize the activity of the WeChat community, but the result was only the store itself spoke, and most of the time, the WeChat community was like 'dead'. Another part of the store owner told me that my WeChat community is very active, mainly through my hot chat with customers, and we have become a kind of friend.
The latter seems to have successfully started a private domain, but in fact, it is not the most scientific method, and the "one-to-one" foolish help determines that the scale of private domain customers will be very limited. But they did do one thing right, that is, to create the "personal IP" of the store owner, and the private domain formed around the IP expanded the drainage and activity.
So, how to do scientific private domain management? The answer is digital management. The essence of digital management is actually to use tools to really understand your customers, and for the mother and baby store owner, it is just to move your knowledge and understanding of customers to the "cloud".
There may be millions or even tens of millions of customers in a large private domain traffic pool, how to organize and coordinate the huge customer information, it is necessary to use digital management tools to customize digital files for each customer, attract customers into different types, different ages, and different themes of the community, classify and operate them, and timely find the problem of weak growth in private domain operation through key data indicators, so as to carry out scientific regulation and management.
During the visit, the author found that a number of stores have begun to have the awareness of stratifying and grouping customers, but it is achieved through manual operation. For customers with a small base, the cost and effort invested may not be very significant, but for the private domain traffic pool with a large base, the scale of cost savings through digital management means is huge.
Some industry insiders once calculated that if there are millions of customers, digital private domain management can save at least 5 million advertising streaming costs, and can also create more additional value. Because the customers accumulated in the private domain can be reached repeatedly at a low cost for a long time, the cost of market research and other expenses is also saved, and the effect of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" is obvious.
In a new era, there should be new ways to play. This is a "bad era" for mothers and babies, and the industry is shrouded in a series of dark clouds; This is also a "good era", with thousands of new opportunities, new ways to play, and new models.
How to break the shackles and develop upward, mothers and babies need to re-understand this business, dare to fight and act in the new position. From July 30th to 31st, the 6th China Maternal and Child Frontier (CMIF) Conference will set sail again, and a large platform will be built to see how they can "reduce costs and increase efficiency".