China’s beauty market has experienced significant growth in the past few years, with international brands accounting for 80% of the market share. However, with the rise of domestic beauty enterprises, their leading position has been threatened. The most prominent example is perfect diary, a young Chinese cosmetics brand, which uses private traffic to disrupt the market. It refers to the traffic from the brand’s own channels. Compared with the public social content platform and market, the brand has more control over these channels. Perfect diary implemented it as a brand strategy and helped create a Gmv of RMB 300 – 500million and a private traffic pool of 5million users in 2019. In this case study, we will discuss how they implement private traffic as a core business strategy to become one of the most influential brands in the Chinese market.
Develop private flow pools through offline and online touchpoints
The perfect diary uses online and offline models to transform public traffic from the market to their own developed communities (private traffic). For example, in every package sold on traditional e-commerce platforms, perfect diary will insert a promotional card with its wechat official account QR code posted, and use exclusive benefits to encourage customers to scan the QR code. After scanning the code, the customer will be asked to add a personal account named “xiaowanjia”, which will give the customer access to the community and invite the customer to enter the private traffic pool.
Perfect diary follows the online model, has opened 40 physical stores, and plans to open 600 stores in the next three years. The key intention behind this ambitious plan is to reach out to more people, turn them into new customers, and then they can be attracted to their private traffic pool. After purchasing goods, customers will be motivated to enter the new private traffic pool by scanning the QR code displayed on the store or gift card.
Create a virtual Koc to develop closer customer relationships
The perfect diary visualizes its brand through a virtual role called “xiaowanzi”, which has similar characteristics with the target customers of the brand (generation z). The brand has created hundreds of such roles, run specific wechat personal accounts, and have the same circle of friends and personal profiles. Xiaowanjia will not only share high-quality content (such as product related knowledge sharing) in the wechat circle of friends to stimulate purchase intention, but also provide exclusive promotion and new product launch in the wechat group it is responsible for. It also addresses product related issues and concerns raised by team members. In this way, customers will regard xiaowanjia as a truly trustworthy friend, so as to trust the brand and become loyal customers.
Retain customers through engagement strategies
In addition to the self created Koc, the perfect diary also integrates the external Koc, and is committed to creating high-quality promotion, new product launch, new product trial and other content information. These contents will be regularly published in private traffic groups and small Wanjia’s circle of friends to ensure the retention of brand customers. Each post is attached with a link to provide customers with access to the brand applet on wechat and encourage them to buy products.
