Wechat Campaign that Works: Case Study
WeChat has always been a complex platform. Started as a social networking app, it incorporated various functions and features into its system over the years.
And now, the WeChat feature Mini Programs allows you to do online shopping, ordering food delivery, playing games, looking up information, and more. Meanwhile, its another feature, Official Accounts, apart from sending you articles on a daily basis, can also function as a portal to Mini Programs.
So a powerful tool such as WeChat is bound to be utilized by different businesses for turning profits.
How to be successful on Wechat? What strategy is the right strategy?
Today GMA is going to share with you how a cosmetic company named Perfect Diary (完美日记) achieved some of the biggest marketing successes on WeChat.
Perfect Diary: A Chinese Cosmetic Brand that you should learn from
Perfect Diary is a Chinese cosmetic brand established in 2017, and its Taobao store was also opened in the same year. It didn’t set up its first physical store until 2019; but in the same year, its sales also rocketed.
Perfect Diary has risen to prominence to become China’s most important domestic brand. Perfect Diary was the top-ranked makeup brand by sales in both the 618 shopping festival and the double 11 shopping festival in 2019. Analysts reckon that the turnover of this brand in 2019 was over 3.5 billion Yuan.
Because of its impressive performance, Perfect Diary was hailed as the “light of domestic goods”.
For a brand three years old, its explosive growth in sales is indeed amazing. And it has a lot to do with how Perfect Diary operates on WeChat using Mini Programs and Official Accounts, and maintains a large fan base and advertises on WeChat Group Chats—together they have been nicknamed the “WeChat Community”.
And now we’ll look into this “community” and see how it works.
PERFECT DIARY WECHAT COMMUNITY
Official Account & Mini Program
By subscribing to Perfect Diary’s official account on WeChat, an article is automatically sent to you, which contains a sort of instruction introducing you to its features and promotions, followed by a link to its Mini Program, with a gift for every new subscriber.
And its three root menus each leads to different promotions, cosmetic tips, online stores, coupons, and such.
So at first glance, Perfect Diary’s WeChat official account seems no different than any other brand’s, a very standard and professional official account that aims to sell you things.
However, by tapping the bottom right root menu, among the four sub-menus, one of them is labeled “撩小完子”, which means “flirting with Xiaowanzi”. By tapping this sub-menu, a QR code pops up, and scanning it allows you to add Xiaowanzi as a friend on WeChat.
Xiaowanzi is the user name of the girl in charge of running Perfect Diary’s official account, as well as the chat group. And it’s a name cleverly and carefully selected.
Xiaowanzi consists of three Chinese characters: 小 (xiao), 完 (wan), 子 (zi).
The middle one “完 (wan)” is the same as the first Chinese character of Perfect Diary’s Chinese name “完美日记”.
And the name in its entirety is a homophone to Chibi Maruko-chan, the name of a cute and classic Japanese cartoon character which is also super popular in China, especially among girls.
Therefore, Xiaowanzi is a name that both associates its user to the brand and also appeals to Perfect Diary’s target customers, which are mainly female millennials.
Xiaowanzi: A community manager customer can relate to
From the avatar, we can tell that Xiaowanzi is a beautiful-looking young woman in her twenties, gender and age relate to Perfect Diary’s target customers the most.
By visiting her Moments, the first thing we naturally notice is her Moments background, which is herself by the sea, holding a cup of milk tea, with sunshine, blue sky, gentle breeze, and everything. Very casual yet somewhat represents a carefree and leisure lifestyle.
Customers feel far more relatable to this image than the heavily photoshopped ones with people dressed up in suits and ties and looking sharp and all business, which is a typical picture many brands use, to stress that they are professional, but neglected if this is really the best impression to leave to the customers.
Use of Wechat Personal Account: Playfull and smart
Xiaowanzi’s personal statement, or “What’s Up”, is “不知名逗比一枚，不撸妆会死星人。”, which in English roughly means: “I’m a funny nobody, from the Makeup Planet where cosmetics is life.”
The translation may fail to convey it one hundred percent, but the Chinese phrasing and wording Xiaowanzi uses is identical to most of the Chinese millennials’ daily language, especially girls.
As for her Moments update, most of which are Perfect Diary ads and make-up tips, but there are also selfies, and photo-touching tips; and occasionally, she also shares a movie or two that she watched.
So from the avatar to the Moments, everything Xiaowanzi does is for two purposes: first, to sell Perfect Diary products; second, to build herself as relatable as possible so that she can do a better job maintaining customers and selling more Perfect Diary products.
And there are generally four interactions a user can have with Xiaowanzi:
- Free chat / Shooting the breeze
- Receiving coupons
- Placing orders
- Getting invited into her WeChat group
It takes both money and time to see how long the first interaction can last. The second and third ones are as plain as their names suggest. But the fourth one is worth a deeper analysis.
Perfect Diary Great use of WeChat Group
Those who join the group are mostly girls who buy cosmetics, so you can say that everybody is a customer and everyone is bound to be enticed one way or another into buying something as long as she remains in the group.
Since one has to complete a series of steps in order to join the WeChat group, and unless it’s someone with other purposes in mind (such as me), he or she wouldn’t go through this trouble just to join a WeChat group full of advertisements and girls who are into cosmetics.
So because of the nature of the group members, to sell Perfect Diary Products in the group is like shooting fish in a barrel, ideally speaking. And based on Perfect Diary’s sales record on Taobao, one can imagine the result wouldn’t be too far off on WeChat, if not better.
More than a Wechat group, a community
A couple of times a day, either Xiaowanzi herself or her assistant, posts a Mini Program link or announces a promotion in the group, and those who are interested can tap the Mini Program to go directly to the item they want to buy (with a discount of course), or to a live-streaming channel which advertises a certain cosmetic product.
And besides business, Xiaowanzi and her assistant also interact with the group members, such as praising their Moments update or joining an ongoing discussion between other group members.
Therefore, each WeChat group serves as a community of 200+ members, and everything is revolved around Perfect Diary.
The Pop-up WeChat Group
The pop-up WeChat group is another one of Perfect Diary’s powerful strategies, which operates like a surprise event: to set up a WeChat group and fill it with customers in a very short period of time, carry out the promotion, end the event, and disband the group. The whole process takes less than 4 hours.
And this is how Perfect Diary operates the pop-up group on WeChat:
- Xiaowanzi sends an invitation to each customer via private message;
- Those who receive the invitation join the group;
- Xiaowanzi announces in the group the exact time of the promotion 3 hours prior;
- Xiaowanzi reminds everyone at the time the promotion starts;
- Customers enter the Mini Program and purchase;
- After the purchase, Xiaowanzi introduces customers to the link of a live-streaming event, in which a streamer sells Perfect Diary products live;
- Customers enter the live-streaming room, where re-purchase occur;
- Xiaowanzi disbands the group.
In Short
What makes Perfect Diary’s pop-up WeChat group so effective is its standard operating procedure, which consists of two core elements:
First, it’s simple and straightforward. There’s no additional announcement or other events during the process, besides the above steps mentioned.
Second, the re-purchase. The pop-up group promotion and live-stream take place at night, after dinner hour and before bedtime, so the entire time before customers go to sleep can be spent in the happy-shopping-Perfect-Diary Hour.
The pop-up group aims to grab only an hour of the customers’ attention on WeChat, increasing the likelihood of a sale. After purchasing during the promotion, those customers have, for the time being, become momentarily active; and by bringing them to the live-streaming room, their probability of purchase is again increased, so more sale happens.
Thus, Perfect Diary’s pop-up WeChat group accomplishes its double-sale objective.
The above words have painted a more or less general picture of how Perfect Diary operates its WeChat community.
In a time when almost every company turns out good quality products, perhaps it’s true that winners are those who do a better job maintaining and serving customers.