6 steps for beauty industry brands to create a high-conversion private domain

This article first introduces the development of the beauty service industry in recent years, and then introduces the reasons and methods for the beauty industry to create a private domain. This article is suitable for beauty industry practitioners to watch and learn about private domains.

In recent years, with the upgrading of consumption and the rise of the "appearance economy", people have paid more and more attention to their appearance, which has also ushered in a spring of rapid development for a number of beauty service industries.

However, the cost of acquiring customers through public channels in the beauty service industry is getting higher and higher, the quality of users is uneven, and operating costs remain high, prompting more and more beauty stores to begin to plan refined operations in the private domain.

Next, I will conduct an in-depth study of the private domain operations of the beauty service industry around two questions: Why does the beauty service industry need to operate in the private domain? How can the beauty service industry operate in the private domain well?

1. Why should the beauty service industry develop private domains?

According to data from Meituan, in 2022, consumers' demand for beauty will remain strong, and the scale of China's lifestyle beauty market represented by beauty, hairdressing, manicure and eyelash extensions will be approximately 800 billion yuan.

Although the entire industry has ushered in a spring of rapid development, the endless emergence of competitors has also made many small and medium-sized beauty institutions face a more severe living environment and many problems:

• The beauty service industry is over-marketed, negative events are endless, and consumers’ trust needs to be extremely high;
• The cost of marketing customer acquisition is high, the accuracy is low, and the channel costs are only increasing;
• Serious customer churn, easy to be sold out;
• …

The beauty service industry in particular mainly relies on offline stores and only does business within 5 kilometers of the surrounding area. If you want to make a stable profit, you must do two things well: how to attract customers at a low cost, and how to operate old users to generate repeat purchases.

This is also the main problem solved by private domain operations:

1. Reduce customer acquisition costs and stabilize customer sources

Operating a private domain is a very suitable approach for industries such as the beauty industry, which have a very high repurchase rate. Users introduced from the public domain to the private domain can be directly reached repeatedly without having to pay again, effectively reducing costs and increasing profit margins.

2. Helps shape brand image and build trust

Operating a private domain helps shape the brand's image in the minds of users. On the one hand, it allows new users to experience the services provided by the company, and on the other hand, it increases user stickiness through interaction with old users.

3. Refined operations to improve purchase conversion

The quality of users acquired through public domain channels varies greatly. Private domain operations can help businesses better screen and acquire high-quality users. They can also manage them efficiently, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

2. How can the beauty service industry develop private domain well?

How to do it specifically? You can refer to our original six-step private domain operation method: IP, connection, activation, stratification, repurchase, and fission. It is also the most efficient method path we have summarized from a large number of project practices. (If you want to learn more, please contact Xiaoqi at the end of the article)

Below, we will break down these 6 steps and give examples, hoping that they will be helpful to you.

1. IP creation: Establish brand personality and bring users closer

The purpose of creating an IP in the private domain is to establish trust and communication with users, allowing users to truly feel the "warmth" and thus promote transaction conversion.

IP is about creating a persona, which needs to have life, stories, and emotions. You need to design your own IP positioning based on the purpose of doing private domain and product attributes.

For example: if you are in the hairdressing business, your IP is a barber or a barber shop owner; if you are in the medical aesthetics business, your IP is a beauty expert, beauty and health instructor, or Doctor X (provided you have a certificate).

Take Nairil, a leading beauty brand, as an example to see how their IP is created:

Nickname: There is no unified nickname for the account, including Nai Ruier Welfare Officer, Nai Xiaoyue, and Nai Xiaomei

Profile picture: Brand name and logo Moments background: Product image

Signature: There is no uniformity, including: Your exclusive welfare officer, help you get the best deals! Find good stuff!; Professional money saver, help you get all kinds of deals

Automatic welcome message: Send the community link as soon as possible and inform the benefits included in the community, so that users can grasp all valuable information in time

Moments content: mainly advertisements and event introductions, and you can share more daily content.

Once you find a suitable "personality" positioning, you must stick to it and not change the "personality" at will. Only in this way can the IP convey an image consistent with the brand when communicating and interacting with users.

2. Connection: Design long-term value and attract user attention

If you want to do well in the private domain, the public domain needs to have a steady stream of traffic to ensure that there is always inventory in the private domain.

Therefore, in addition to advertising, how to attract traffic from the public domain at a low cost becomes the key, and it is also necessary to design value points to attract users' long-term attention. For example, low-cost traffic and free services are good ways and have been proven to be effective.

Taking the beauty industry as an example, you can develop the following channels and make choices based on your own positioning, budget, cost, and conversion data.

Stores: Set up a QR code for traffic diversion in the store or at the cash register, and let the staff guide customers;

Official Account: You can set up drainage channels and design hooks in the welcome message, menu bar, and article content to quickly join the private domain.

Video account: Video content mainly focuses on professional knowledge and real case studies such as facial massage techniques, skin care, and hair care to enhance user trust;

Mini Programs: Usually, the beauty industry’s Mini Programs are used as a tool for appointment sales, and private domain channels can be added to them;

Social platforms: If conditions permit, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo can all be operated to divert traffic to the private domain.

Tips: For customers who join the private domain, operators must be clear about their sources, especially those introduced by friends, to prove that customers will listen to the advice of people around them, have a fixed circle, and are also seed users for future fission.

3. Promotion: Create user touchpoints and maintain interactive exposure

After users enter the private domain, a series of operational actions are required for users to ensure conversion rate.

The operation of private domain communities is the most common and effective way. Knowledge is shared within the group, and discounts are communicated through private messages, especially for high-order products, as customers want to get a bargain.

There are four key points in building and operating private domain communities:

1. Community positioning: determine the type of community, whether it is a traffic generation group, a welfare group, or a flash mob group;
2. The basic construction of the community: including group nickname, welcome message, group format, group announcement, reward and punishment rules;
3. Community content: content production and content distribution sop;
4. Community operation: community management scale and interaction mechanism.

Let’s take Nariel’s community as an example and break it down.

(1) Community positioning: welfare-oriented community

(2) Community infrastructure construction

Group nickname: Nariel's beautiful life

Welcome message: The welcome message of Nairier Enterprise Micro Community includes three parts: value proposition, group rules explanation and warm reminder. It is noteworthy and worth learning from.

Group rules: There are 3 group rules in the Nai Rui Er Enterprise WeChat Community, which are concise and clear. The official will @ people as soon as possible and release the instructions for joining the group.

(3) Community content

Group content: The content mentioned by Nairil in the welcome message and group entry instructions mainly includes: discount flash sales, beauty and health tips, topic interaction, fan-exclusive new products, skin care tips and health care lectures.

(4) Community Operation

Usually a group needs roles such as group owner, operation, atmosphere group, etc. In Nariel's community, the operation usually speaks more frequently, and almost all questions from group members are answered.

Tips: Of course, in addition to social networks, there are also Moments, official accounts, video accounts, etc., which are all scenarios that can create touchpoints. Merchants break down the content and output the same content according to different platform rules to improve content utilization.

4. Layering: Establish user tags to achieve precision marketing

The core purpose of private domain is to tap into the lifetime value of customers. From the perspective of customer value, 20% of users can contribute 80% of the revenue, so concentrating resources on key customers is the best solution.

Therefore, by adding good "labels", doing a good job of "user segmentation", identifying "key" customers, and serving them well, you can maximize user value.

In actual private domain operations, labels can usually be assigned based on four dimensions: demographic attributes, channel sources, user levels, and consumption information, and then the labels can be subdivided according to the differences of each company.

Taking the beauty industry as an example, the following subdivisions can be made:

Demographic attributes: gender, age, occupation, hobbies, region, income; channel sources: public accounts, official websites, Baidu, Douyin, Dianping, Meituan, friends’ introductions; user level/status: A (high-frequency consumption), B (consumed more than twice), C (first-time in-store consumption), D (made an appointment but did not arrive in the store), E (consulted but did not consume); consumption information: consumption capacity, consumption frequency, consumption preferences, special requirements, etc.

Tips: Pay attention to identifying whether the user is a koc, this is very important. If the customer is, the merchant must pay attention. And every time you come to the store, try to provide customers with more materials. You know, a koc promotion is much cheaper than the merchant spending money on advertising.

After the basic stratification of users, different business strategies can be used to achieve precision marketing. It should be noted that employees need to be trained regularly to facilitate the operation of the operation team and ensure that every front-line employee can use it without making mistakes.

5. Repeat purchase: guide user demand and create secondary transactions

To do private domain is to do repeat purchases, the purpose is to maximize the guidance of users to make repeat purchases and improve the conversion capacity of private domains.

In addition to regular marketing activities (group buying/discounts), you can operate on platforms such as social networks, official accounts, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, etc. You can also increase repeat purchases through theme activities (the most beautiful young lady/happy tree/true love declaration/poetic "flower" meaning), increase customer returns to the store, bring friends to participate, etc.

In the beauty industry, membership operation systems are generally divided into two types:

(1) Deposit and recharge membership

In the traditional beauty industry, the most common membership method is the stored-value membership method. For example, the common method of charging 1,000 yuan and getting 500 yuan free, becoming a member and enjoying member prices and discounts, etc. The biggest role is to bind consumption scenarios.

After consumers make a purchase once and become members, they will be stimulated to make another purchase when they make related low-frequency purchases.

For example, if you recharge 1,000 yuan for your first haircut, it only costs 1 yuan, and then you can enjoy a member-level wash, cut and blow-dry at a price of 35 yuan. The purpose of this method is that when consumers want to get a haircut again, they will give priority to the store where they have a stored-value card.

(2) Growth Members

Growth-type members include the common point accumulation type and amount accumulation type members.

For example, gold membership, platinum membership, etc. This membership system has different requirements for the growth value and accumulated amount of members of each level, and upgrading requires meeting certain requirements.

The biggest role of growth membership is to encourage users to be more active, that is, to use more, consume more and earn more points. Members of different levels have different loyalty to merchants. Generally speaking, the lower the level, the lower the loyalty to the merchant and the more sensitive to price.

In actual operation, the two systems can be combined for membership design. In short, using the membership system can help us cultivate paying and loyal users. Further membership operation is to distinguish high-value customers and provide differentiated membership services or prices.

6. Fission: Expand the user base and achieve word-of-mouth communication

In the beauty industry, the cost of acquiring customers is high. To achieve low-cost and accurate customer acquisition, driving the fission of existing customers and attracting new ones is a very effective way. Incentive measures are used to stimulate users to make self-propagation recommendations, allowing old customers to bring in new customers and form a virtuous circle.

Common private domain fission methods include:

• Invite with gifts: Use certain benefits to induce old users to actively invite new users, thus achieving rapid user expansion;
• 0 Yuan to win: Get prizes by attracting new customers, suitable for limited-time activities at a certain marketing node;
• Group buying: Based on the number of people in the group, preferential prices are used to stimulate and attract users to initiate group buying to achieve fission.
• Distribution: Use cash or physical rewards to stimulate users to promote products spontaneously, thus achieving fission propagation.

Tips: The most common form of the beauty industry is the main and secondary cards. The membership card is designed with the main and secondary cards, and the bestie card, so that besties can come together to do hair and beauty. As long as the customers are brought in, they can be contacted and added to the private domain for continuous transactions. This method is very useful for high-end customers in actual operation.

Take Nariel as an example. During the 520 marketing period, it planned a 0-yuan bargaining fission event, which reduced the store’s average customer acquisition cost to 1.6 yuan per person, saving 50% of the store’s customer acquisition budget.

Activity breakdown:

• Activity form: push activity posters within the community, and stimulate users to actively attract new members through welfare bait;
• Activity threshold: Invite 5 people and receive a 99 yuan facial mask for free.
• Activity process: Social push – Add WeChat – Automatically push activity link – Participate in bargaining and share poster – 5 friends complete bargaining – 0 yuan prize
• Activity data: 1,086 participants, participation rate 139%, and a total of 2,696 new members.

3. Final Thoughts

Of course, in the actual operation process, each company has different problems and symptoms. In private domain operations, in addition to operational problems, there are also management problems, team problems, etc.

The complexity of the beauty industry scenarios and the professionalism of beauty industry personnel determine that the private domain of the beauty industry must be a large system, which requires the entire enterprise to plan the system well in order to continue to operate.

Author: Yan Tao San Shou WeChat public account: Yan Tao San Shou