In his 2018 New Year's Eve speech "Friends of Time", Luo Zhenyu mentioned a new term, "super user". The general idea is this: The era when traffic is king has passed. Brands should not only care about how many users they have, but also how many "super users" they have, that is, users who are willing to pay for the brand and recognize the brand's connotation. Super users don’t just refer to paying users. Payment is cold. Super users are users who are “proud of the brand”. For example, fans of Xiaomi recognize the meaning and value given by Xiaomi’s brand.
This is not a new term or new way of thinking just to give new words. Only those who have truly worked in the industry can understand the pain behind it. In the past, as long as users came in, all that was left on the Internet was a string of numbers, such as retention rate, conversion rate, and repurchase rate. But that doesn’t work anymore. Many Internet companies have suffered terribly from traffic in the past few years.
When the mobile Internet just started in 2013 and 2014, everything was full of vitality, and the vast world of mobile Internet had great potential. On the one hand, many companies clamored "Whoever wins the diaosi will win the world" and attracted people with free services. Various emerging industries, such as O2O industry, live broadcasting, and micro-business, have risen and fallen due to casual users. But who knows how many products and content companies have really benefited from it. On the other hand, companies that focus on high-quality products and services, from luxury e-commerce companies to various expensive Internet education companies, have annual customer acquisition costs that are even higher than the company's turnover.
No matter what route and product positioning, traffic cost is inevitable. Those who really control the traffic are not small companies, from Kuaishou, to Toutiao, to Pinduoduo, there are also traffic black holes like WeChat. The founder of a cross-border e-commerce company revealed that their current cost of a valid order on WeChat is 300 yuan, while the unit price is only 200 yuan. No matter how much profit there is, if they do not retain customers and repurchase, “the bigger the business, The more you lose."
This is the end of the barbaric growth stage of the industry and the beginning of the era of intensive farming.
"The company's internal requirements are that retention should exceed 50% and the repurchase rate should reach 75%." Zhang Wen is the head of the overseas product department of a small cosmetics e-commerce platform. She has formulated the company's The indicators are somewhat criticized. "I also understand that with the company's investment in advertising, if we don't retain customers well, the company will definitely not make money. But one size fits all is not an option. Many of our employees are doing tricks in private in order to make up for the quota."
Zhang Wen’s discovery is that under the company’s marketing system, the quality of customers coming in from different channels is uneven. For example, users who can read public account articles and participate in the company’s survey questionnaires basically do not need any services, and their retention is More than 80%; however, some users who come in through display ads just come to take a look, or even click by mistake, and less than 10% are retained. She believes that refined management is not only a necessary part of guiding the company's performance indicators, but also the company's overall operating methods.
Zhang Wen’s company’s original customer management system was a large EXCEL. After many communications between her and other department managers, IT made simple back-end statistics, but the needs changed again and again. , has been unable to come online for a long time. Later, the company launched a professional CRM system, and the situation improved.
Most CRM systems can effectively sort out the company's existing customers and classify them into different categories to achieve different management for different users and improve efficiency. CRM is not a particularly new concept or industry. It is even one of the earliest enterprise-level applications since the advent of computers. But in the mobile Internet era where "traffic is king", CRM is not popular because users can make money just by coming in, and no one cares about how to manage users. Times are different now. The first requirement for refined operations is to be able to manage customers.
Saleforce, a well-known foreign CRM company, is already an enterprise with annual sales of nearly 10 billion U.S. dollars and a market value of more than 80 billion U.S. dollars. After experiencing the Internet's low period, the company won the title of Global Innovative Enterprise of the Year together with Tesla and Amazon in 2017, and once again entered the spotlight of public view. The company's abbreviation on Nasdaq is CRM.
The two domestic followers, SalesEasy and Funfensuke, are also companies that have been in the industry for a long time. Binfensike has more than 100,000 corporate users, more than 10% of which are paying users. The core starting point of Distribution Sales is to serve the necessary links needed by enterprises with "light functions and strong rigid needs", solve the daily work needs of department heads of small enterprises like Zhang Wen, and better manage user data.
The number of customers of SalesEasy is about 6,500 to 8,000, most of which are paying corporate customers. SalesEasy is relatively more like a PASS platform, providing customers with more API interfaces, empowering customers to link data transmission between different departments of the enterprise, and achieve more customized functions. Therefore, SalesEasy focuses on the scalability and compatibility of its products. It has a high degree of grasp of opportunity management and complex sales scenarios, and its products are very professional.
There are approximately more than a hundred companies engaged in CRM in China, distributed in different industries and functional areas.
Analysys International estimates that companies like Salesforce that provide CRM services in the cloud will form an industry worth more than 5 billion in China in 2018.
Rick, the person in charge of a CRM company, said that the main problem faced by Chinese CRM vendors is not that there are no customers, but that there are many customers, but they are limited by their own level and cannot meet customer needs. With the Internetization of enterprises, the data that enterprises can collect has become diversified and complex, so the needs of enterprises have also become diversified and segmented.
"We used to pursue modular services by guessing the CRM needs of companies in a certain industry, and then developing 10 to 20 modules, combining them, and selling solutions to customers. Now, each Customers are all different. "Rick's engineers now have to do modular processing every time they serve a new industry, but their plans often fail to keep up with changes.
Changes in the Internet industry have put pressure on the entire industry, from customers to CRM service companies. On the one hand, CRM is learning from Salesforce, hoping to "APPStore", connect more third-party developers or the company's own development department, meet the different needs of each company, and rely on third parties to provide customized services. But it's a long road.
"There are always some ways. The technology is available, but it requires patience and popularization." The person in charge of this CRM company found a start-up company, Weishi Cloud, a service company that makes light application platforms. The core service of Weishi Cloud is to break the CRM service into parts, call all API interfaces directly from the customer, edit them on the platform, and then output the results according to the customer's needs. In this way, developers no longer need to rack their brains to refine modules, but according to customer needs, soldiers will block it and water will cover it.
"In more than half of the industries we are familiar with, I can use visual interfaces directly without arranging programmers, and complete program development after communicating with customers." Rick told his partner Weishi Cloud Expressing satisfaction, although Weishiyun is a company established less than 2 years ago, it has made weapons needed by the CRM industry. "This may be a trend. CRM development needs to be more flexible and agile."
On the other hand, CRM is also making more use of dynamic data and social information to serve users personally. In a communication between Zhang Wen and her company’s CRM supplier, she repeatedly emphasized that she needed real-time data and real-time processes to make decisions, “I can’t wait for 48 hours for a customer’s dynamic analysis. My potential Customers come in from the official account, what articles they browse, how long they stay, and what products they view. I will know in the next second. Then we can work hard on product push and customer service guidance. If you want super users, I first need a super CRM. . ”
This is not a joke or entrepreneurial brainstorming. In an environment where the cost of acquiring customers is increasing day by day, whether you can make good use of the CRM system and capture “super users” is a matter of life and death for your company.
The super CRM mentioned by Zhang Wen is not a fantasy. In fact, the solutions of SalesEasy or Fenfensuke, and even smaller CRM companies, can provide basic services, plus micro-services The cloud's visual development platform can make Zhang Wen's CRM a reality at a controllable cost. But this requires a long process of understanding and adaptation. Originally, from barbaric growth to intensive farming, there is pain relief.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is a dreamer. Since 2016, he has invested heavily in and acquired many artificial intelligence and big data technology companies to upgrade Salesforce’s CRM service ecosystem. system. Salesforce’s newly launched service – a system called “Einstein”, is full of the flavor of this technology. This is also the only way for the future CRM industry. If you shoulder the mission of saving the enterprise, you must arm yourself with the best technology.