Chinese New Year, Customer Journey & Mobile Phone?

Chinese New Year or the Spring Festival, is the most important traditional festival in mainland China, and it has long been a peak of the consumption of Chinese people. According to custom, people go shopping for new clothes, food, drinks and gifts for the whole family before the New Year’s Eve. Many merchants take it as an important opportunity to increase their sales.

Nowadays, along with the widespread of smartphones, life during the Chinese New Year has changed a lot. It was reported that 51% of people would like to with others happy New Year on mobile phone, 32% of them would like to order tickets by mobile phone, and more than 12% of them claimed they would like to buy New Year goods with mobile phone (企鹅智酷，2015).

It is clear that mobile phone has become a so important part of the Chinese New Year that it has to be considered when doing promotions of New Year goods.

So, how does mobile phone changed the customer journey of buying New Year goods?

Think about the traditional path from demands to the purchase decision first. People usually go to the market they are familiar with or their families are used to going for shopping when they begin to prepare for the Chinese New Year. Sometimes they may also ask for suggestions from friends and neighbors, or they may want to have a try when hearing their friends talking about certain markets or stores. Other times people may just go the market nearby if they have no preference, since the New Year good are often weighty and hard to be carried back. But with mobile phones and the Internet, now they can easily get access to any market, any store and any goods all over the world.

The impact of mobile phone is even more than that.

“In the mobile age, instead of a few "moments of truth" or a Zero Moment of Truth, consumers experience countless micro-moments throughout the day while exploring interests, solving problems, searching for products, and making decisions. These micro-moments are the new battleground for hearts, minds, and wallets.” —— The You Tube insights Team (2015)

That’s right. Customers today are always companied by their phone. Whenever they want to have fun, have a break or relaxed themselves, they reach for their phones, sometimes with particular needs in their mind, sometimes don’t. They read through the new messages on social media, see what their friends are talking about, read about the new trends, watch videos and browse the ecommerce websites to see if there is any new products from their favorite brands and stores, or just to pass time. In a word, people tend to spend their leisure time on mobile phones more and more, and they are exposed to large amount of information every second.

The customer journey no longer begin with the idea “I want to buy …”, it begins even before the demands exist. These days, increasing the exposure of your brand and product information on mobile devices may lead people to think: “Oh, it’s interesting, someday I may want one of them. I’d better put it into my favorite list or wanting list now.” And evaluation between different markets nearby and the consideration of convenience and traffic do not matter that much anymore.

What about the words of mouth? According to the report from QiE ZhiKu (2015), about 90% of people would like to use mobile phone to share interesting things happening during the Chinese New Year, over 40% of them will share information even more than other time. Therefore, words of mouth have been important nowadays more than any other time. To be fun and topic-indicating may also increase the opportunity of your brand and product being discussed online.

Look at the customer journey we talked above again:

Now you see the importance of the words of mouth and user generated content.

Ø  Ensure the quality of products and services.

Ø  Be interesting.

Reference:

The YouTube Insights Team (2015). Why Online Video Is a Must-Have for Your Mobile Marketing Strategy. Retrieved from https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/features/online-video-mobile-marketing-strategy.html

企鹅智酷（2015）。2015年春节中国手机用户使用习惯调查报告。http://www.199it.com/archives/329018.html

What if we have only very little and the most basic data?

Big data is really hot word. I know many people are talking about it and wondering how to deal with the overloaded information, and how to take full advantage of this digital age. However, what if you are only an owner of a micro business, a founder of a start-up organization with very limited budget, or you are a freelancer or independent content provider and you only want to do better management of your personal website or social media platform? And what if, without resource or willing to get access to big data, what you have got is only very little and the most basic data?

Of course, still you can do a lot.

Usually no matter which platform you use, you can get the following numbers from the background: the number of views/unique viewers, when the viewers come, the time they stay here, where they come from and what devices they are using.

With all these numbers, actually you can get a good understanding of the viewers. The simplest analysis is to look at the numbers one by one. Here you know when there are most viewers, which channel is the most important, and on which device the performance of your website or other platform should be cared about the most.

Now we combine them together.

You have already known at which time where they come from. For instance, if you observed that in the early morning, most of them are from some news websites and in the afternoon many of them from websites offering financial information, and this happens repeatedly. Then it’s likely that this is the media using habit of many of your viewers. You can also do some psychological analysis of the viewers, for example, they are hard-working business man or they are concerned with their financial situation. You can even do some content analysis of the resources from which your viewers come to further investigate the viewers. For example, what kinds of financial websites are they browsing? Based the answer to this question, you may get some rough ideas about whether they are experts in this field or the ones who are eager to increase their income looking for guidance, you can even estimate their level of income though the estimation will be very inaccurate.

And think further. What if you observe that most of them come from social media like Facebook all the time? What if they usually come from shopping websites? With the analysis, you can not only see which channel is most important to you, but also examine whether your target strategy is working well, and whether the people coming are those you really want to attract.

At the same time, is you take a further look at the staying time, you may see that people from one channel stays longer than those from another. In this way, you may conclude that those who are more interested in your content also like to view certain kinds of websites, supposing your promotion of your website on each channel are the same.

Besides, why devices is important? If you see that many of the viewers view your content on smartphones, and the time is often at night, with relatively longer staying time, this may implicate that they prefer to do some deep reading (if what you offer is some long articles or serious insights) at night in the most private time. If purchase behavior is included, then the data about devices is even more important, because the purchasing experience may have great influence on the conversion rate while it may have different performance on different devices. You may give priority to improving the purchase experience on the devices mostly used.

What I have talked about are only some simple instances, the most important thing is, not to complain about the limited resources, but try to creatively use them and optimize the understanding of the potential customers or viewers as much as possible.

Promotion on WeChat: What does matter?

Marketing on WeChat has been accepted and adopted by more and more companies. According the financial report released by Tencent in 2014 (京华时报, 2014), the active users of WeChat has been over 430 million. More than 50% of the mobile phone users have registered as WeChat users and over 25% of the mobile phone users are active WeChat users. That’s to say, WeChat is becoming one of the most important communication tool of Chinese people. To increase followers on WeChat is to increase the opportunity to directly and instantly communicate with potential customers.

Without proper goals, the promotion actions will never be effective. However, since WeChat is still a newly grown up social media and instant message platform, and it is quite different from website witch can be seen by any Internet user, or other social media like Weibo witch can be easily searched, it should be thought through what should be set as proper KPIs for the promotions on this unique platform.

With a simple exploration of the background of WeChat, we can easily see what kinds of data are collected. As many companies has noticed, it’s true that the increased number of followers and number of views of each article or message are important metrics, but there are another two metrics which are also important but easy to be ignored.

l  The arrival rate

The arrival rate = number of followers who received the content sent by the company/the total number of followers.

This is a metric easy to be misunderstood. Many people, even some of the professionals thought that it always equals the number of followers and therefore never examined this number. Actually, since WeChat users may choose to block the messages from the public accounts, the actual arrival number may be less than the total number of followers.

If the arrival rate is higher than 90%, usually it’s Okay, because different users have different habits. Some of them may block messages only to avoid interruption during their work time, instead, they prefer to check the message when it’s convenient to them or when they see it’s followed and shared by their friends. If this is the case, it won’t hurt the number of views too much.

However, if the gap between the arrival number and the total number of followers is larger, there may be some problems. It is dangerous because it may lead to “unfollow” behaviors among the target customers. The most possible reason for the decrease of arrival rate is too intensive promotion which makes the followers annoyed. It may also be caused by improper target strategy or bad promotion activity design. For example, the interactive activities are not attractive to the target customers or the promotion activity is too complicated and long. In this case, some revision of the promotion plan is required and some research is needed to understand the psychological background of the target customers.

l  The open rate

The open rate = number of followers who clicked and opened the public account after they received the content/total number of followers who received the content.

The open number is not the same with the number of views. In WeChat, users may click into the public account to see the titles of the newly published articles, and if they have any further interest, they may click into the page of articles and read for further information. Not all users will click into the article page after they have a glance at the titles.

Whether they will click and read the articles is influenced by many factors, including the quality of the main picture, the title and the summary. But factors that may have influence on the open rate is much simpler. Usually it depends on the choice of time to publish or send the content. For example, it was reported that the peak of views on WeChat is from 20:00–22:00 (契约, 2015), they may also read during the hour before their work day or during the break of work. It needs further investigation to determine when is a better time particularly for certain target customers.

Low open rate may implicate that the content is sent at a time the followers are busy or inconvenient to use WeChat. And this will decrease the opportunity of the content being seen by target customers. Therefore, just like any other promotion, thorough understanding of the target customers’ background, media using habits and psychological characteristics is really important for successful WeChat promotion.

Reference:

京华时报（2014）。微信用户数量大增 腾讯盈利122亿同比增58%。http://media.people.com.cn/n/2014/0815/c40606-25470311.html

契约（2015）。关于公众号群发时间的研究。http://qiyue.baijia.baidu.com/article/39114