New opportunities in the home business

In the past two years, the importance of the home business has been revived.

In the short term, there is the impact of the normalization of epidemic prevention behind it, and the industry that originally took the store as the main model is facing continuous challenges; in the longer term, with the rise of a new generation of consumer groups, the consumer demand around the home is greatly excavated and stimulated. Multi-faceted shopping experience optimization has become a key proposition for the entire industry.

Home service, from O2O in 2014 to today's instant retail, behind the change in the name, also reflects this industry change: home service is no longer limited to individual segments such as catering, coffee and tea, supermarkets, etc., but expands to all retail categories, such as mobile phones and clothing; and, ten years ago, the first wave of O2O waves, fresh e-commerce to explore the home business, generally choose to build their own APP; with the rise of takeaway platforms, a large number of brands layout takeaway platform to achieve home; in the past two years, more and more brands 3. Merchants lay out private domains through multiple platforms to find increments.

The data shows that in the past six months, the home business of Alipay Mini Program has entered a blowout period, especially in the retail and catering industries. In the past, the retail industry, which was deeply rooted in offline and e-commerce platforms, has doubled the transaction volume of Mini Programs to home business in the past six months, and since January this year, the number of Alipay Mini Programs accessed by the catering industry has tripled year-on-year.

What are the reasons behind the evolution of the home-to-home industry? Is home business equivalent to takeout? Under the normalization of epidemic prevention and control, how can enterprises establish a set of matching playing methods? And how to seize the opportunity of the outbreak of home service and open up a new situation of growth?

On April 25th, Future Consumption held an industry seminar with the theme of "The Opening of the "Home" Economic Era - Home Consumption Ushers in New Opportunities", inviting a number of brands and platforms including Xibei Noodle Village, Laoxiang Chicken, Luckin Coffee, Jindingxuan, Murakami House, Convenience Bee, Multi-point Dmall, Alipay, etc., to discuss the opportunities and challenges in the field of home consumption.

For traditional brands, an industry consensus today is that traffic is becoming more and more saturated and expensive, it is difficult to pull new products, the cost of customer acquisition is high, the access channel is limited and the accuracy rate is low. It is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve double-digit growth on e-commerce platforms; to continue to tell the story of sales and user growth, we must tap new channels to broaden business increments.

In the face of normalized epidemic prevention and control, many brands have formed a set of their own playing methods, and take the private domain as the focus of layout. For example, Laoxiang Chicken has begun to exert its home business and has launched takeaway on the Alipay Mini Program (currently limited to Hefei); for example, Xibei Noodle Village has vigorously developed takeaway after the epidemic, and has recently made efforts to pre-made dishes, with the goal of private domain channels accounting for 20-30% of sales; the private domain scale of multi-point Dmall has accounted for 70%-80% of the overall sales.

"Under the normalization of the epidemic, it is still necessary to be close to customers, considering what the real needs of customers in the home scene are, for us, takeaway is an overflow of our dine-in ability, retail is an overflow of takeaway capabilities, the core things are the same, including Xibei is also doing small program APP and other platforms, the core is still around how to better serve customers." Sun Yueyang, director of the brand marketing center of Xibei Restaurant Group, described its layout logic in this way.

For the reasons why brands have made efforts to private domains, the multi-point DMALL private domain growth and operation officer Lu Lulu frankly said that the real core of the private domain is that the cost is low and can reach users for free. Li Lin, head of Alipay's digital retail beijing region, believes that the cost of self-built APP and self-developed digital system is too high, which may cost millions or even tens of millions of investments; coupled with the traffic of e-commerce and takeaway platforms, the cost of corporate customer acquisition is becoming higher and higher, which is also a big cost for enterprises, so doing private domain has become a more cost-effective choice.

Some people say that takeaway is home, such a view, many guests have expressed their disagreement, such as the service provider of FMCG and IP and other brands, Zhou Cong, co-founder of Juhui, believes that takeaway services are equivalent to consumers having takeaway needs and placing orders. The home business is more like focusing on existing fan portraits and needs, combined with the scene of the brand, integrating or creating a new scene appeal, helping consumers discover more new needs, and more to provide him with refined services, rather than to meet the takeaway demands.

What are the differences between platforms? Zhou Cong summarized the characteristics of the current private domain operation of weChat and Alipay two mainstream platforms: brands operate on weChat, and more use tools and private domain operations to push themselves; Alipay is currently a traffic dividend period, the brand can get the support of public domain traffic, and the operation of the mall can be quickly established during the cold start. In addition, WeChat is a global user platform, Alipay user population is mostly 15-45 years old, social attributes are slightly lower than WeChat, but the purchasing power and acceptance of new things is higher, users have a certain understanding of the product, when the use of refined rights and interests to reach consumers, the community churn rate is lower.

The following is a selection of the seminar, compiled by Future Consumption Editors:

"What is the reason behind the private domain of brand merchants?"

Multipoint DMALL Private Domain Growth Operation Officer Lulu

For the private domain, its real core lies in the low cost, which is equivalent to being free and can repeatedly reach users, and the private domain has become a proportion that cannot be ignored by major businesses.

The pain points of the retail industry and supermarkets include that it is difficult to pull new products, and the cost of obtaining customers is very high. Secondly, the reach channel is limited, one is that the cost is relatively high, and the other is not so high in precision, and the efficiency of the reach is low.

In the Internet era, each merchant's competitors are all over China, for users, his choice cost is extremely low, why are they talking about private domain now, or hope that major businesses can improve the quality of existing users while pulling new ones.

Especially retailers or supermarkets, catering, its consumption frequency is high, the customer unit price life cycle is the direction we need to consider, for the private domain, the private domain is just a name, we want to achieve the low cost and repeated reach, and more and more accurate, whether it is not self-built APP, or with any channel, to establish effective contacts, more optimized my products, no matter which contact point is built, let his contact point more effective and more accurate, this is to achieve the most effective promotion.

Li Lin, Head of Alipay Digital Retail Beijing Region

There are objective environmental reasons for the layout of private domains by brand merchants, and there are also needs for their own digital transformation.

In recent years, the consumption habits of users have changed significantly, and the epidemic has catalyzed this. During the epidemic period, the sharp decline in the flow of customers in the store and the sharp decline in dine-in income have had a greater impact on the industry; at the same time, consumer demand for e-commerce and home delivery services has exploded sharply, the development space of home services is huge, and the demand for layout home services is urgent.

However, the cost of building an app alone is too high. Building a digital system may require tens of millions of dollars of capital investment, and enterprises need to spend money to raise many programmers, and the cost of doing it alone is too large. In addition, the traffic of e-commerce platforms is becoming more and more expensive, and the cost of corporate customer acquisition is becoming higher and higher, at the same time, the platform commission charged by the takeaway platform is also a big cost for enterprises. Doing a private domain is a more cost-effective option.

In the past six months, the number of merchants accessing home services has surged. The retail industry used to cultivate offline and e-commerce platforms, and now it also provides home services through the private domain layout, and the transaction volume of home Mini Programs has doubled compared with the same period last year. A national supermarket chain in March Alipay home Mini Program transaction volume, transaction amount and member pulling new compared with the same period increased by more than 1 times, while precipitating millions of members.

The same is true of the catering industry, from January to now, the number of merchants who have accessed the Alipay Mini Program to the home service has risen more than 3 times in the same period. In March this year, LaoXiang Chicken launched a home service on the Alipay Mini Program, using explosive coupons as a touch tool to pry. The number of orders in one month increased by 40 times month-on-month.

"Under the normalization of the epidemic, how can brands form a set of matching playing styles?"

Zhang Hongguang, head of member operation of Laoxiang Chicken

For the hometown chicken, the business of going home has become a very important piece.

About doing private domain to home, in order to better serve customers. Otherwise, customers can also order food when they open other platforms, so why search for self-operated takeaway mini programs? Based on this point of thinking, doing self-operated takeaway is essentially to provide customers with better service, which is very important, based on this thinking, we have built a lot of marketing games on the Mini Program, and now basically completed the self-delivery performance capacity in most areas of Anhui Province.

We have jointly carried out some activities with Alipay, and the number of orders has grown rapidly to a scale of 2,000 orders per day. If you want to better serve customers, the operation is different from the practice of centralized platforms. The practice of the public domain can be understood as through bidding, ranking, exposure, undertaking is the immediate pan-demand of customers, when opening the platform, customers through the way of browsing to the last order, there is no very clear and direct choice of a business. Second, how can we better serve customers? First of all, we must choose the platform suitable for customers, we chose to build a private domain community through Alipay, prepare exclusive activities on the side of Alipay, and give surprise temperatures every time customers open, thus generating such mental memory. Private domain, the value is not your discount, but the temperature of the brand, such as preparing a coupon for customers to go home, passing on a kind of security, mobile phone ordering contactless more secure, do a good job of personal protection, everyone is an anti-epidemic hero.

Finally, to sum up, do private domain to home, be sure to consider three questions, first, who are your customers. Second, the channel you have to choose can help you better serve your customers. Third, to provide customers with a better experience. Only when these three are done well can you do your private domain.

Xibei takeaway director Xi Dan

At the beginning of the epidemic, the Chinese New Year's Eve deployed overnight, including everyone in the takeaway department. In the case that the store cannot be opened, all the takeaway stores are still open, and all the employees who spend the holiday in the store work hard for the takeaway meal, and there is no rider to deliver the food by themselves.

The first is to ensure the supply of the surrounding residents. On the other hand, the Spring Festival also has a backlog of a lot of raw materials, the need for takeaway this export to sell out, the most important point, during the epidemic period, can not let people's will be consumed, to ensure daily supply, so that the whole team to maintain a very fresh and positive state, this is our idea in the face of the epidemic at that time.

After a takeaway battle was fought, the company's awareness and attention to takeaway was much heavier than before, and after the epidemic, it has always regarded takeaway including home business as the top priority in its strategy.

Sun Yueyang, Director of Brand Marketing Center of Xibei Restaurant Group

Now, the number of family members is getting smaller and smaller, the development is small, the uncertainty of the epidemic is increasing, and we have launched Jia Guolong Kung Fu dishes, or around how to let people eat a good meal anytime and anywhere to lay out our business. Under the normalization of the epidemic, it is still necessary to be close to customers, consider what the needs of customers are, and what are the real needs of customers in the home scene.

For us, takeaway is an overflow of our dine-in ability, and the reason why Sibei does takeout is because we do dine-in well enough and the demand of consumers is large enough to start doing takeaway. Retail is the overflow of takeaway capacity, retail is hot meal cold matching, hot matching is takeaway, so is there a difference between takeaway and retail, are sold to customers to take home, hot delivery is hot, retail is frozen prefabricated dishes, the core of the thing is the same. Including Xibei is also doing small program APP, including various platforms are trying, the core is still around how to let customers enjoy our better service.

When we do private domain, we are also thinking about how we can make the customer experience better without increasing the cost, we have been thinking about the central idea of happy customers, all for customers to "eat well", or in the case of normalization of the epidemic, how to do our takeaway, how to do our retail, this is our core idea that has not changed.

Murakami Ichiya Marketing Director Ji Lei

Murakami Ichiya was established at the beginning of its establishment in 2016 to establish a two-wheel drive model of dine-in + takeaway, and the area of dine-in at the beginning was about 80 square meters, which is equivalent to the number of seats at 8-10 tables in each store.

In order to improve efficiency, we must make my kitchen move, and use takeaway to replenish the remaining energy in the kitchen, and at the beginning we made takeaway accounting for about 30% of the entire brand. Later, after the outbreak of the epidemic, the entire market dine-in sharply decreased, and takeaway accounted for 40% to 50% of the entire business.

I understand that the home business is definitely not equal to takeaway, I think the home business is in addition to dine-in in addition to the second piece of economic income, at present we from the platform takeaway, public domain takeaway also at that time with the help of our self-built takeaway, to today's vibrato, let us see a piece of the outlet, live broadcast or the current content video dissemination is good, these two pieces will also be our current main grasp of the tool income.

At present, we are also using small programs to build up our own private domain, and the user loyalty of this piece is relatively high. Another platform traffic is more expensive, there are pain points, we want to explore the retail products, but the Japanese material can currently retail products are relatively small, so in the time of the epidemic, we have derived private customized services, to do the current home growth.

Li Lin, Head of Alipay Digital Retail Beijing Region

Through the Alipay Mini Program and other private domains to achieve home, first, to provide merchants with a new incremental channel to achieve sales and user growth; as the merchant's own place, can precipitate the merchant user base, and then do secondary and multiple reach; for retail, catering and other merchants, there is help merchants online and offline global access, to achieve full-platform operation, improve operational efficiency; and, after the private domain begins to take shape, it can effectively reduce the cost of transportation.

As far as Alipay is concerned, the first is that we are improving the basic capabilities of the Mini Program carrier, which can provide the interface of home service and SaaS template to help merchants quickly launch their own home Mini Programs, I believe that some catering merchants have found that alipay Mini Programs can currently use Alipay Mini Programs to open takeaway interfaces, and the platform acts as a matchmaker to match merchants and transportation capacity.

Secondly, we adhere to the open model of "decentralization as a supplement and centralization as the mainstay". It is hoped that through rich end scenarios, public domain traffic support will be provided to help merchants start cold;

Moreover, we have made some improvements in the App product experience, taking Dingdong to buy vegetables as an example, the user searches for Dingdong to buy vegetables on Alipay, after placing an order, alipay's home page has a message reminder in a conspicuous position, real-time notification of service progress, I know where the rider is, and what points can get what I bought. Order payment - service progress - order completion - operation revisit, can help merchants better operate around the home service scenario, which is the advantage of the Alipay platform.

"What is the value of a private domain compared to a food delivery platform?"

Zhou Cong, co-founder and marketing director of Juhui

The challenge for traditional enterprises to achieve home business, including online business, is that, first, whether there is a breakthrough in operational capabilities; second, how to put more energy and manpower into the home business when the cost is relatively tight. Under the background of the epidemic, brands have many appeals to narrow their relationship with consumers, and even brands want to have a direct relationship with terminal small B and supermarket sales factories.

This year in the Alipay Mini Program side of the development of home business, is a blowout period, compared with last year's formation of an exponential growth, we expect this year's enterprises will break through 2021 more than five times the brand of the user to the home Mini Program business.

Regarding the layout of private domain businesses, it can be seen more directly that the development of private domains and the direct demands of home business can be seen.

First, compared with the e-commerce business, the Alipay Mini Program sales fee reduction is a good tool for the development of e-commerce business.

Second, brands can reach consumers through direct contact through private domain layout.

Third, when brands are doing private domain marketing, we can be more at ease at the bottom and provide different marketing according to the needs of consumers.

I don't agree that the home service is a takeaway version of the online business. The home business is not only the provision of simple services, but also the provision of refined services for users based on scenarios.

Brands in different industries have different demands for home. The demand for FMCG is the user pulling new and the sales of offline overall GMV; the core business of IP brands is in licensing, paying more attention to analysis and pulling; cosmetics brands are concerned about fan pulling and retention reach.

Take Wahaha, for example. Originally, the Wahaha water delivery platform was very traditional, and by calling to order water, the clerk delivered it to the home. In 2017, we helped Wahaha to complete the online layout and mini program at home, covering 21 provinces and cities, and more than 4,800 stores have now reached the Alipay Mini Program, with the cumulative number of users exceeding 10 million. And we will also serve the products of 20 or 30 FMCG brands in the Wahaha To Home Alipay Mini Program, empower the water station with products other than large buckets of water, and increase linkage sales.

This year, we helped Wahaha to do a one-thing-one-code activity, a total of 15 billion two-dimensional codes covered Wahaha's full range of products, allowing consumers to complete the code scanning activity and provide a small red envelope. Three months to pull new 15 million followers.

In addition, we cooperate with Qiaqia to launch a mini program on Alipay, based on the business of the mall, through the mode of membership points, points redemption + consumption, to help leisure snack brands to do in-depth, do incremental, 3 months to help Qiaqia mall break through 3 million + sales.

Operations Manager Liu Bince

The value of private domain traffic, divided into two ends, a B-end, a C-end, the biggest value of private domain traffic is to generate demand and meet demand, while generating demand, what we need to do is to change the traffic into a volume, to maximize the value of traffic. One of the monetization channels is to increase repurchases, reach you through precision marketing, marketing tools or user portraits, issue coupons to you, and generate secondary consumption. From the brand level, you can cultivate the group of emerging users, like Quanjude, the user group is relatively aging, but the emerging group is not particularly liked, when you do B-end operations, new product sales can reach these users, forming a future consumer group.

C-end appeal, how fast and good to save four words, private domain traffic operation can only meet the fast good province, how to solve more than this problem, is cross-industry cooperation, increase other categories to users to do supply.

The big problem faced by the catering industry in doing private domains is that the products that can be provided to merchants are too single. But the user's appeal is endless, the catering industry is doing better, doing private domain traffic operation is better is KFC, his APP users have a hundred million, in addition to burgers, fried chicken, skin care products, cosmetics, etc., through an APP to meet the unlimited demand. The online mall can be built into an advertising space or dealer, and the profit can be increased through high-margin products, thereby reducing operating costs.