How do offline stores use Alipay to promote operations?

As a payment platform, how can Alipay be better used in offline stores for operation and promotion? Let's read this article to find out.

When it comes to Alipay, everyone should be familiar with it. It is a payment platform under the Alibaba Ant Group. It mainly provides comprehensive services such as transaction payment and financial management, such as online transaction payment, transfer, credit card repayment, water, electricity and gas payment, mobile phone recharge, personal financial management and other fields.

According to official data, the platform currently has 1 billion consumer users. At the same time, Alipay users generally have the habit of opening the platform and using it, and leaving after use. Therefore, the purpose of use is more obvious than other pan-entertainment platforms, so payment transactions are also simpler and more direct.

1. The role of Alipay

So what kind of help can Alipay bring to the operation of merchants' stores? Here, Qianmo summarizes it into two core values, namely, reducing costs and increasing efficiency, as well as increasing turnover.

Cost reduction and efficiency increase: that is, reducing costs and increasing benefits. In simple terms, it means saving related expenses through efficient store management, daily operations, and communication with store staff. The increase in turnover is naturally related to many factors such as customer flow, promotions, product features, and repeat purchases by returning customers.

2. Construction of Alipay Mini Program

Now that we already know the commercial value of Alipay empowering merchants’ stores, how do we implement these two major areas on Alipay?

First of all, merchants need to build their own mini program on Alipay, which is the same as the WeChat mini program. Simply put, it means building an Alipay store. This construction requires a certain level of technical basic capabilities. The store needs its own technical team or find an outsourced team to build it. The main requirement is not high, and the annual fee is usually only a few hundred or thousands, which is basically not expensive when calculated over a year. Then, after the basic construction is ready, you can officially start a series of operations on Alipay.

3. Operational Strategy of Alipay Mini Program

The three promotion and operation steps of the merchant’s Alipay mini program are to attract users, retain users, and operate users, ultimately achieving cost reduction and efficiency improvement in store management and increasing sales.

1. Drain users

For store merchants, we can attract users both online and offline. In addition to the traffic from the Alipay platform, merchants can also aggregate users from other platforms such as Douyin, Meituan, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili to the Alipay Mini Program. For offline user traffic, we can comprehensively extend the traffic from our own stores and offline advertising. There is only one purpose for this, which is to gather our store users to the Alipay Mini Program and lay the foundation for subsequent user retention and operation.

At this point someone might ask, why not just keep all of the WeChat mini programs, wouldn’t that be better?

Indeed, as a national-level social software, WeChat is indeed the most frequently used in daily life. However, compared with Alipay, it does have certain limitations. For example, its free traffic source is relatively single, mainly coming from users' active searches or private guidance from stores and merchants. For Alipay mini-programs, in addition to satisfying the above two methods of traffic diversion, it can also combine the relevant functions of the Alipay platform and participate in the platform's related promotional activities and welfare subsidies, etc., to divert Alipay users in the same city, such as Alipay group buying, and exposure and diversion of coupon activities and subsidies from nearby merchants in the same city.

Therefore, Qianmo thinks that there is a saying that goes, children make choices, adults want everything.

2. User retention

OK, after our users are directed to the Alipay Mini Program, the next thing we need to consider is how to retain these users. User retention in the Alipay Mini Program can be carried out in four aspects, namely, the operation of the Alipay homepage, the collection guidance of the Mini Program, the sending of Mini Program information, and the application of the Sesame function.

Operation of the Alipay homepage: According to the relevant algorithm rules of the Alipay platform, relevant users can directly access the Alipay mini program of the store through Alipay’s homepage recommendation service or keyword search and recommendation. Therefore, accurate configuration of keywords is a crucial step for merchants when initially building the mini program.

Favorites of Alipay Mini Programs: This function is the most popular shortcut key among Alipay users, which is why it is also set to appear on the Alipay homepage. It can be used to help Alipay users quickly return to the Mini Programs they have used. As long as the Mini Program has been favorited by the user, it will be visible when the user opens Alipay's favorites again. Therefore, it is particularly important for merchants to guide new users to favorite Mini Programs.

Sending of information from the Alipay Mini Program: that is, through service dynamics and related activity notifications, relevant information is conveyed to Alipay users to form active reach, which can help users quickly understand discount-related service content, and ultimately form a habit of information subscription, which can be simply understood as service information notifications in WeChat.

Application of Sesame function: This is a special function of Alipay platform, which allows Alipay users to enjoy more credit services to improve user experience, such as the most common deposit-free car rental and power bank rental in our lives. Merchants can combine this function to design services for related products, such as using first and paying later, including installment payment for high-priced package membership cards, etc. Reducing users' consumption expectations can further improve conversion and user stickiness in using Alipay mini programs.

3. Operational users

The last one is the operation of mini program users, which is also the private domain operation we often hear about. For example, common store merchants can distribute membership card packages and merchant activity coupons to meet the repurchase of old customers and guide users to share and forward to attract new traffic, etc., including the improvement of store operation management, which is mainly reflected in the communication and assistance between employees. Unified management of multiple stores and application of various demand scenarios such as orders and product inventory.

IV. Summary

It can be seen that if merchants want to promote and operate their own stores on Alipay, then the establishment of Alipay Mini Program is a prerequisite, so as to provide convenience for subsequent user traffic, retention, and operation on Alipay, including store management, such as scanning code payment or online reservation and ordering. Compared with WeChat Mini Program, Alipay Mini Program provides huge support for the platform's own traffic and the connection with Sesame Credit, such as the setting of "pay first and pay later", which can also improve the store's faster transaction and bring further improvement. Of course, more related operation methods are not limited to this, mainly combined with the actual needs of merchants and stores in various industries.

Author: Ckay