What exactly is the “straight group” discussed by profitable merchants on Xiaohongshu?

It has recently become popular within e-commerce to create "straight groups". Xiaohongshu's "straight group" strategy provides merchants with an effective private domain marketing method through the organic combination of notes, live broadcasts and group chats.

Currently, there is a new and much-discussed way to make money on Xiaohongshu, which merchants call the "straight group".

Simply put, it is a marketing method that combines Xiaohongshu's "notes, live broadcasts, and group chats".

It may seem simple, but it has begun to attract more and more attention and has played a big role in the business growth of small and medium-sized businesses.

In the recent "Grass Planting Awards" held by Xiaohongshu, a special private domain track was set up, which shows the current hot trend of private domain marketing. Behind it, it also reflects the reality that many brands rely on Xiaohongshu's private domain strategy to achieve business growth. After in-depth observation, Jianshi found that the "straight group" strategy also played a key role in many successful shortlisted cases.

1. Cold start accelerator for new brands of "Notes + Group Chat"

For "Waipu Waipu Children's Clothing", a children's clothing brand that has just been established for more than 60 days, how to attract target users in a short period of time and establish user loyalty to the brand is the key to its survival.

This is also a difficult problem that all start-up brands need to face. For such brands, the pressure of how to quickly complete a cold start has always existed.

If you search for information about "Waipu Waipu Children's Wear" on the Internet, you will find that it is rarely seen on other platforms except Xiaohongshu - yes, this new brand's cold start was placed on Xiaohongshu. In their view, the crowd on Xiaohongshu will make their cold start faster.

Facts have proved that this is indeed the case: after a period of operation, namely posting notes on Xiaohongshu and operating users in private group chats, Waipu Waipu Children's Wear quickly accumulated the brand's first batch of loyal users, and created star-style new products with these users. At the same time, it also used methods such as group chat exclusive in-app purchases to improve conversion rates, especially making group chat users' transactions account for 18.77% of the total GMV.

How is this done?

First, the brand published high-quality notes on children's clothing dressing/new product experience officer recruitment notes on Xiaohongshu to attract precise target users.

If you often browse the content of Xiaohongshu, you will know that after searching for keywords, what is usually presented to users is a double-column information flow content. Users can "actively choose" to browse the content they are interested in according to their preferences and needs.

Just like shopping offline, there are various shop windows on both sides of the street, and every "store" that users are willing to enter is selected by themselves. This naturally makes it easier for users to have a favorable impression and interest in the target brand, and the difficulty of subsequent purchase conversion can be greatly reduced.

Next, they took a key action in the process of attracting users: they mounted a group chat entrance below the note to guide interested potential target users to join the group chat.

It is worth mentioning that if it is just a simple communication, users can complete it by commenting under the note. However, real-time, in-depth communication and interaction with the brand is more suitable for completion in group chats.

Group chat is like a scenario that provides emotional value, enabling users to complete emotional connections with brands in addition to their interests, thereby ultimately completing a "long-term direct connection" between the brand and the user. This is not only the beginning of a single purchase conversion, but also the beginning of long-term repurchase.

And Jianshi noticed that when brands directly mount the group chat entrance component under the notes, there is no time limit. In addition, merchants can also directly put the Xiaohongshu group chat QR code in various online/offline communication materials, and the QR code is valid for up to 28 days.

This has greatly lowered the threshold for merchants to operate group chats. In addition, Xiaohongshu users are relatively young and have a high acceptance and desire to explore new brands such as "Waipu Waipu Children's Wear", so the activity level after joining the group is also very high.

For example, many users are usually highly sensitive to brand movements and market trends. Many of their discussions and suggestions in group chats can often provide brands with valuable market insights and trend development directions.

Therefore, the brand also took advantage of this and did the following: co-creating new products with users in group chats. Through voting, group co-creation and other methods, it quickly gained insight into users' preferences for clothing accessories, materials, etc., and created some celebrity-style clothing.

In terms of improving conversion rate, the brand increased conversion through exclusive benefits in group chats. For example, exclusive benefits such as group chat exclusive in-app purchases and limited-time group experience coupons increased user stickiness, stimulated user purchasing desire, and greatly improved the conversion rate of group chat users.

Seeing this, we understand the complete process and link of the brand's cold start through "notes + group chat":

By publishing high-quality notes, accurate users and potential users are attracted, and then users are deposited in group chats for in-depth operations. In this process, the brand will flexibly adopt group members' suggestions to co-create new products, and improve the conversion rate of new products through exclusive in-group purchases and other benefits.

2. "Group chat layering + KOC" is a new brand's word-of-mouth communication amplifier

After the brand has completed the cold start on Xiaohongshu, it continues to face the next challenge:

How can we make loyal users continue to split? How can we improve word-of-mouth communication through in-depth user operations to achieve breaking through the circle and splitting of the crowd?

This difficulty can be solved through "group chat stratification + KOC".

Let’s also talk about a small example, such as the case "Veizhuos 3C Digital", which was shortlisted for the private domain track of Xiaohongshu’s Grass-roots Awards a few days ago. This case was selected from hundreds of cases, so its gameplay is very representative.

Usually, 3C digital products have high customer unit prices, and user conversion is difficult, and the majority of users are male. So how did this brand quickly break through the circle and convert the female population? The answer is "group chat layered operation + incubation of brand KOC" gameplay.

For brands, by setting different group chat thresholds on Xiaohongshu (only allowing members of the live broadcast room fan club to join/users who have purchased products to join/users who are interested in a certain topic to join), the quality of group members can be ensured, thereby establishing a highly active community environment, allowing brands to establish closer ties with these highly loyal users and achieve refined user operations.

Therefore, "Viltrox 3C Digital" first classified the Xiaohongshu group chats into fine categories according to brands, scenarios, etc., such as "Fuji user discussion group", "Sony user discussion group", etc., and after realizing that female users are concerned about "how to take good-looking photos of people and scenery", they also specially formed "Landscape Photography Discussion Group" and "Portrait Photography Discussion Group".

At this time, for brands, "customer acquisition means stratification". Such a stratification strategy helps to accurately reach different target users and stimulate their enthusiasm for participation.

It's like a user walks into a store and then walks into an area of ​​the store that interests him or her. This area is full of people who have the same hobbies and interests as him or her. The distance between users and the distance between users and brands are instantly shortened.

After completing user segmentation, how do you improve conversions?

Jianshi noticed that after users join the group, the brand will publish product notes in a targeted manner and push links to products that users are interested in directly in the group chat, etc., carrying out a series of personalized content push and services.

In the process, group members are also encouraged to actively share, initiate topic discussions, answer each other's questions, etc., so as to achieve conversion while planting grass. At this time, Xiaohongshu's "automatic order posting" function begins to play a big role. When users purchase products in group chats or live broadcast rooms, the order will be automatically posted.

If we are familiar with the operation of social networks, we will understand a phenomenon: "social synchronization/social imitation", that is, if your friends are discussing an event, then you will also participate. If your friends like a certain product, there is a high probability that you will also buy it.

Automatic order posting within Xiaohongshu group chats is precisely this underlying mechanism, which can not only greatly enhance the purchasing intention of other group members, but also form a sense of group identity in the community, thereby reducing the difficulty of users' purchasing decisions.

At the same time, "Viltrox 3C Digital" is also actively incubating KOCs with high influence and credibility in the group. As real users of the brand, KOCs' recommendations and sharing are often more credible and influential, which can help amplify the product word-of-mouth effect and accelerate potential customers' decision-making through the real word-of-mouth of KOCs.

Finally, through the gameplay of "group chat stratification + incubation of KOC", "Viltrox 3C Digital" achieved the following results:

We have accumulated 11 active group chats on Xiaohongshu, covering more than 3,000 users, and added more than 500 new group members within 30 days. The GMV brought by the group chats within 30 days was more than 140,000.

3. "Group Chat + Live Broadcast" is an efficient catalyst for transaction conversion

When a brand has completed the cold start and user fission on Xiaohongshu, how can it achieve efficient conversion next?

Let’s take the growing brand “Tinsili Pet Nutrition Cream” as an example. Growing brands usually have their own customer base, but it seems that there are not many of them. They have a certain degree of popularity, but they are not as well-known as well-known brands. These brands have passed the cold start period and need to continue to expand their user base and continuously improve conversion rates.

The approach of "Tiansili Pet Nutrition Paste" is to heavily use the "group and live" linkage strategy, first significantly increasing the user viewing time (such as making the group chat users watch the broadcast for 9 minutes and 22 seconds), and then under this sticky data, it naturally promotes the increase in group chat GMV. For example, the entire contribution of group chat accounts for 25% of the overall GMV. On the 618 big day, the comprehensive ROI of live broadcast reached 2.2.

Let’s look at the details:

The "Tiancili" team first planned special activities using notes to attract targeted users such as pet owners and core brand groups to join group chats.

After that, we continued to reach out to the group, continuously improving user stickiness, and corely stimulated user conversion through "direct group linkage".

Before the live broadcast, the Tiancili team first released the live broadcast preview to the group for warm-up. During the live broadcast, a group password lottery was initiated in the group chat to provide exclusive benefits for group chat users, enhance the group users' favorability towards the brand, and stimulate users' willingness to buy.

Since these users who enter the group chat already have pet-related consumption and search needs, they have a higher willingness to buy. Coupled with the high interactivity of live streaming, the user conversion rate can be greatly improved.

The closed-loop linkage advantage of Xiaohongshu group chat and live broadcast also makes the "group-direct linkage" combination an efficient catalyst for improving brand conversion.

These gameplays don't seem complicated, and often, focusing on a certain scenario can achieve good results. This is because operations sometimes rely on their own strengths. Once you find a gameplay that suits your stage, you can just keep repeating and amplifying this strength.

"Notes, group chats, and live broadcasts" are not complicated, and are all common operational foundations. From an industry perspective, why have they become the most widely used combination by small and medium-sized businesses, and have quickly stood out on the Xiaohongshu platform and solved different growth problems?

It is precisely because these basic operations do not require difficult skills, but persistence and repetition. If effective methods are continued and repeated, good results can often be achieved.

Do you know any new ways and combinations that can get results? Feel free to chat.