Introduction
Taking a closer look at the current cross-border e-commerce industry, the mainstream models are nothing more than Amazon-like platforms and independent websites. These two major models have their own advantages and disadvantages. They are like two forking roads in front of cross-border e-commerce merchants. One has a low threshold and has its own traffic so you can get a share of the pie. The other has flexible independent operation and management and can be said to have no worries about account suspension.
However (facts have told us time and time again, but the focus is later), the path with low thresholds has homogeneous competition, fierce internal bidding, and must abide by the rules of the platform for operation and management, otherwise it will be directly cut off once account suspension occurs; the path of freedom and flexibility requires complete self-expansion of traffic, high costs, low conversion, and difficulty in operation, making it equally difficult to survive.
Trapped in platform account suspension and suffering from independent site traffic, are cross-border e-commerce merchants really at a loss?
01 Part One: Internet dividends disappear and user growth becomes a common problem
In the Internet era, the essence of business is traffic. When the number of Internet users reaches saturation and the benefits of the Internet are exhausted, traffic becomes a common problem for everyone. When we break down the pain points, difficulties, and itches of businesses in various industries, in a nutshell, almost all of them can be said to be traffic problems.
Take the cross-border e-commerce industry we are in,customer acquisition cost is highIt is the roadblock that stands in front of every cross-border person.
B2C companies themselves are subject to competition from overseas counterparts. Some cross-border third-party platforms (such as Amazon, Ebay, Alibaba, AliExpress, Wish, Lazada, etc.) have fierce homogeneous competition within the platform, are prone to price wars, and are also susceptible to regulatory account suspension by the platform. Some other merchants adopt the independent website (such as Shopify, UEESHOP, SHOPYY) model. Although there are fewer constraints, independent website sellers can only rely on their own traffic and use Facebook/Google and other advertising to place bidding rankings. The cost of customer acquisition is getting higher and higher. Here, I would like to add that the Amazon account suspension wave that started in May is not caused by the high cost and difficulty of public domain traffic? Let us derive it:
- It is said that the cause of the account suspension trend is fake order reviews, so why do many sellers do this in spite of Amazon’s disapproval? Of course it’s for more positive reviews.
- Why everyone wants to praise reviews is because the Amazon platform operation has four major characteristics: emphasizing recommendations over advertising; emphasizing display over customer service; emphasizing products over stores; emphasizing customers over sellers. The more positive reviews you have, the greater the chance your product will be recommended to users, and the more times it will be recommended.
- In this way, will it be easier to obtain platform traffic, and will the cost of customer acquisition be lower?
In addition, communication with overseas customers is costly and inefficient. Traditional CRM products require manual input of information and cannot save customer data and communication information in real time, which has also become an obstacle to the growth of customer acquisition.
02 Part 2: The world has been suffering from traffic for a long time, and the owned channel model has officially awakened
The problem of traffic is not only in foreign countries, but also in the domestic market. When the dividends are exhausted, customer acquisition costs for public platforms are high, and the platform will naturally shift this burden to merchants. But business still needs to be done and money still needs to be made. Let’s look at where the breaking point lies first.Two cases shared by well-known business consultant Mr. Liu Run：
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has had a negative impact on the economy. Not only have the two companies Powerlong Group and Luzhou Laojiao not been affected by the epidemic at all, they have also achieved good profits. Many people are curious about how they did it. Is there any way to turn stone into gold and turn things around?
It turns out that Powerlong Group had already deployed its own APP two or three years ago and migrated offline users to the APP, forming a million-level customer pool. When the offline real economy suffered a heavy blow during the epidemic, through live sales of goods in mini programs, sales were achieved that were 7 times higher than offline sales. Coincidentally, Luzhou Laojiao has already begun to lay out the construction of its membership system a few years ago, and uses and operates its membership system to steadily improve customer reach rate, repurchase rate and association rate.
It is no surprise that operating owned channels will determine the future.
2020 is also called the first year of the awakening of the owned audience. When people who originally suffered from public domain traffic wake up and look at owned channels, they seem to see a beam of light in the boundless darkness.
Now, owned channels have become ubiquitous in our daily necessities, food, housing, and transportation. When buying something or staying in a hotel, you will be told to leave your phone number and add WeChat to scan the QR code. Corporate public accounts, mini programs, WeChat groups, and APPs are everywhere building owned audiences. The longer we are immersed in the environment of owned channel, the more meaningful and urgent we feel about this matter.
03 Part 3: Self-circulation of traffic, looking for incremental growth in the stock market
So, what exactly is an owned audience? Why have owned-channel operations become the “savior” of many companies?
Owned channel refers to the users that the enterprise has trapped and can be reached repeatedly. Its essence is to "reach the user N times at a cost close to zero." Owned audience is used to replace the traffic of advertising, so as to reduce the cost of customer acquisition and solve the problem of traffic.
SocialEpoch discovered this commonality from the owned channel model:To build an owned audience pool, companies need to implement a traffic self-circulation model from traffic introduction to conversion to repurchase to recommendation, relationship progression from fans to customers to members to distributors, and product system design from low customer unit price to high customer unit price.。
The first step: attract customer acquisition from other domains in the public domain and stick to customers.All customers and clues reached, whether they are customers who have completed transactions or those who have not completed transactions, will retain the information at the first time. Those who have completed transactions will promote repurchase, and those who have not completed transactions will continue to plant grass to stimulate purchases.
Step 2: Promote fans to convert into customers through owned-channel operations. This is also one of the manifestations of the value of owned channel. Owned channel allows every merchant to face customers directly, gain insights into customer needs and understand customer data, thereby realizing the "thousands of people and faces" in the owned channel model and promoting efficient transformation.
Step 3: From conversion to repurchase, use the membership system to stick to customers.Once a deal is made, it will stick with you for a lifetime. This is the essence of owned channels. Customer costs remain high. Building a membership system can increase customer unit price and repurchase rate, and improve ROI.
Step 4: From repurchase to recommendation, create more distribution agents, and your customers will help you sell.Design a profit-sharing system to provide commissions and commissions to each distribution B, forming a friendly chain of gratitude that is both self-interested and altruistic. From this, a self-circulating model from traffic to conversion to repurchase to recommendation quickly begins to form a flywheel for the growth of the enterprise.
There are two other points worth mentioning here:
First, in the past two years, the DTC model has slowly moved from behind the scenes to the front. The awakening of DTC is also a great awakening at the marketing level.. Being a DTC brand helps companies independently grasp the relationship with consumers, tell brand stories in a personalized way, and promote marketing and product optimization and iteration through branded operations. Now, being an owned channel is undoubtedly an ideal carrier for the DTC model, and the same is true for global expansion across borders.
The second is the two leading companies in domestic global expansion: SHEIN and Anker.Both are super big sellers, and they always like to be compared, but their traffic moats are from different starting points. SHEIN adopts an independent station model and accumulates its own owned audience pool to firmly lock customer data. On the other hand, most of Anker's revenue comes from Amazon. Amazon cannot directly touch customers, so naturally it cannot use it to divert traffic to its own owned audience pool. We all know that DTC brand global expansion and owned-channel operations can be said to be standard. Anker can naturally see this, so in recent years it has also been making continuous moves in owned-channel operations, such as increasing investment in brand official websites and adopting a platform + official website dual operation model.
Here is a small summary: Solving the traffic problem means finding a third way out for cross-border e-commerce merchants. Now, the owned channel model is a smooth path that has been repeatedly verified by facts.
04 Part 4: Is it possible to copy the domestic owned channel model overseas?
Of course, domestic owned channels are in full swing, but overseas it is still an unexplored virgin land. This is related to the differences in the development of mobile Internet at home and abroad. No matter what the reason is, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to resolve traffic difficulties. Moreover, with the help of a large amount of experience accumulated in domestic owned channels, the overseas owned channel model continues to benefit. How to do it? Copy the domestic “owned channel method” + localized design! SocialEpoch dismantled the entire overseas owned channel model into three major links:
- The first step: attract customer acquisition, add the customer’s WhatsApp account, and accumulate owned channels.
It is not difficult to see that owned-channel operations are inseparable from the carrier of social media. Domestically it is WeChat, and abroad it is “WhatsApp” known as the overseas version of WeChat. Through online Facebook batch intelligent marketing, INS intelligent marketing, SMS marketing, intelligent voice calling, WhatsApp precise marketing, group marketing, and offline gifts and friend additions, we can attract customer acquisition and quickly accumulate customers into the merchant's owned audience pool.
- The second step: batch management and interesting operations to revitalize owned channels and promote conversion.
Draining customer acquisition is not the ultimate goal. Only by revitalizing owned channels can it be possible to reduce traffic costs again and again. However, whether the traffic can be well operated and transformed after it comes in will test the company's operational capabilities.
For example, when customers flood in in batches, the response efficiency and content quality of customer service affect the customer experience; a single account is added as a friend too many times at the same time, which increases the risk of account suspension; customers do not understand the language and communicate poorly, and frequently switching translation software is cumbersome and inefficient; frequently pushing product information in the owned audience pool will cause users to "review product fatigue", and the experience will reduce user churn over time... In terms of SocialEpoch, these problems basically come from two dimensions:One is the efficiency of owned-channel operations, the other is fun.
Therefore, SocialEpoch has also done something about these two pointsWhatsApp SCRMowned-channel operations treasureandowned-channel marketing treasureTwo products,One hand focuses on batch operations and sales management, and the other hand focuses on the production of interesting and interesting materials, achieving both global expansion owned-channel operations.
With the assistance of two hands, the process of owned-channel operations is easier and more efficient, that is, the system design, link connection, customer advancement, etc. mentioned above are realized from traffic to conversion to repurchase to recommendation.
- The third step: buildingSocial fission micro mallto achieve rapid distribution and monetization
All the previous actions are for the final step, using the owned-channel operations model to monetize. The brilliance of the owned channel model lies in building a social fission micro-mall. This mall system is different from Amazon’s iron-fisted methods and the traffic difficulties of independent stations. It adopts a distribution and profit sharing design. Participants at each level can obtain real benefits and cash out through purchases, forwarding, invitation registration, etc., and profit-driven every link and every level. Moreover, unlike the domestic one, the foreign distribution system is legal and compliant, and can be developed to a ten-level scale. This size is unimaginable.
These three major links are interlocked and work step by step, copying and transforming the entire owned-channel marketing and domestic micro-business models, revitalizing global expansion social owned-channel marketing, and helping every owned channel merchant to quickly monetize. These three major links also constitute SocialEpoch's S2B2C global expansion socially owned-channel marketing solution, which is also the third opportunity for global expansion merchants to take off after Amazon-like platforms and independent websites.
The opportunity is not groundless: if the above is an interpretation of the meaning of global expansion social owned-channel marketing from the perspective of traffic, here we will explain its differentiated advantages from the global expansion market model. As follows, weConducted a dichotomous analysis of the global expansion market model：
- The entire cross-border market can be divided into two: B2B (such as Alibaba International Station RTS model) and B2C;
- The entire B2C cross-border market can be divided into two parts: Amazon-type platform type and non-platform type (independent website, second-category e-commerce type);
- Non-platform cross-border e-commerce can also be divided into two: independent station type and SocialEpochS2B2C social owned-channel marketing type.
On this cross-border track, S2B2C attacks in a differentiated manner, starting from the currently popular social owned-channel operations to reduce customer acquisition costs and achieve long-term growth of the enterprise.
For B2C platform sellers, through the social owned-channel marketing model, we can get rid of "Amazon dependence", increase opportunities for face-to-face dialogue with customers, achieve dual-line growth of the platform and self-operation, and avoid the risks of platform punishment in the slightest and account suspension in the worst case.
For B2C independent sellers, with the help of S2B2C model, owned audience can be used to replace advertising traffic, reduce customer acquisition costs, develop the social value and lifetime value of each user, realize the progression of more users from fans to members to distribution customers, and reduce customer acquisition costs to the floor price.
The social owned-channel marketing model is an attackable Plan B and another basket for cross-border sellers to put their eggs.
05 Part 5: Successful cases of global expansion, social owned-channel marketing, both talking and practicing
As the saying goes: all talk but no practice of fake moves, all talk but no talk of silly moves, all practice and talk of real moves. Global expansion social owned-channel marketing (the S2B2C model mentioned above) is so well said, is anyone doing it? How effective is it? Of course, SocialEpoch also provides two customer cases here: one is the global expansion of a domestic e-cigarette brand in Southeast Asian countries, and the other is the global expansion of Miniso in India.
The categories are slightly different. Miniso is a distribution type with many SKUs, while e-cigarettes are a high-repurchase type with strong social attributes. However, the strategy is similar. By building an S2B2C model, customers can gradually transform and form a model in which customers help you sell, distributors help you sell, and you also sell. All employees sell goods, leading to explosive growth.
E-cigarette customers achieved an operating scale of tens of thousands of customers per operator within 6 months of the project's launch, the highest GMV in a single month was nearly 10 million, the number of distribution small business owners reached tens of thousands, and the number of registered users in the mall reached one million.. The case data of Miniso is even more gratifying (to protect customer data, specific data will not be disclosed).
Back to title:
Seeing this, the answer is clear at a glance, but as the saying "all greatness comes from a brave beginning", no matter how good the model is, it will eventually need to be implemented gradually. SocialEpoch believes that S2B2C social owned-channel marketing is a top-down CEO project. Determination and perseverance go hand in hand to achieve independent traffic, and tall buildings will naturally rise from the ground up.
The next SHEIN is quietly lurking among them, isn't it?
