Electric Merchant Moving Metamorphosis: Stones

Behind a popular app, the talent team tells us how to use data analysis to help business decisions

Huang Haze

More than 3 years ago, Jinxin, a strategic planner for the American New Egg Network (Weibo), went to Salt Lake City to attend the Omniture summit (Omniture is the leading online analytics technology and service provider, Ebay, Wal-Mart, etc.), and in various forums he often hears people mention "Mobile" ( Move) "The word, the new wave of technology is beginning. At that time the Chinese market is still Nokia's world, the iphone has just been introduced, has not become an arcade, Android users are few. At that time Jinxin may not have expected, three years later, he is running on the road of mobile internet entrepreneurship.

Now he and Dengtianzho, who also come from new eggs, have developed mobile apps, "Tonight's Hotel Specials", which are open every 6 o'clock in the evening and sell to customers at a discount on the hotel's "tail", which was not sold that day. The app, which was launched almost overnight after September 2011, received 100,000 downloads in 3 days. Currently there are 700,000 downloads.

However, this is only the beginning, in the future they want to cover more booking form, to make the hotel booked the Austrian, to meet the needs of price-sensitive users, to help the hotel to dispose of the vacancy.

The egg under the electric dealer

This entrepreneurial team has two distinct tags-american new eggs, data analysis.

Dengtianzho was a business analyst and data-management product manager for the New American Egg Network. Jinxin first in China's new Egg network responsible for marketing, and then to the United States New Egg network work. In fact, the two had separate projects before the joint venture, and they all sent a strong invitation to the same person-Zhenghaiping, who was the head of the analysis of the New American Egg website, and now Cheng for the team's product data director.

Core members this common electrical business experience is extremely important.

New eggs to buy the configuration of Coremetrice and other web analytics services and tools, will also buy Hitwise (micro-bo) and other third-party data. Jinxin smiled and said: "The company bought a big toy, it must be better fun." "Many of the features that no one has used have been touched by him and Zhenghaiping," he said. These young people, who are graduating soon, get a steep learning curve in the most advanced electric business operating system in the United States. How to fight a price with a competitor? How to improve the success rate of user login? How to improve the viscosity of old users? The user orders but did not pay how to solve? from which channels to advertise more effective? These problems are solved through their layers of data analysis, test improvement Program and RE analysis.

The methodologies for data-driven decision-making are then run through their entrepreneurial processes. Data analysis is not just a system to catch a bunch of data reports, the key is to collect and analyze useful data (including competitors, market data, etc.), and ultimately linked to business decisions-see annex

In the preparatory phase, Dengtianzho and Jinxin bullish on the future of the mobile Internet and the online tourism market, and in choosing a more fragmented approach to entrepreneurship, the electric trader's experience tells them: prices are the way to kill into the market. So they chose the hotel specials to start. But they are also very clear, eat not a fat, must be cut from the market segments, and the tail housing market is small enough, enough subdivision, it is possible to eat.

Initial locking direction, Jinxin still worried: The market will be too small, whether there will be no room in the peak season, the off-season is full of vacancies? So they still use the data sampling to talk, selected the Shanghai World Expo, around the Expo Park, inexpensive hotel. Results Jinxin found that even in the hottest one months of the Expo, the hotel still has 5 days occupancy rate of less than 80%, and it is widely accepted that there are no vacant hotels in Shanghai, the severity of the information asymmetry can be seen. It also gives him more certainty about the direction of the subdivision.

The Shangda of electricity and the number of people in the group also bring in extra bonuses. After the explosion of the Chinese market, the industry knowledge and talent are extremely scarce. Before and after 2009, they have returned to the domestic, by virtue of the experience and insights of the electric business industry, the rapid access to electrical business, the identity of the investment circle and the accumulation of contacts, with Jinxin own words is "wide knot marriage", which also for the later venture financing and promotion lay the foundation.

Dengtianzho after leaving the new eggs, responsible for China Mobile (Weibo) E-commerce. Jinxin, while reading Ceibs MBA, advises many advertising and electric business enterprises. Jinxin also started blogging for Mars opinion in 2006, and published about 500 blogs in more than 5 years, with the exception of poetry and fiction, most of which shared his thinking about marketing and management, especially how to improve marketing through data analysis, with a large readership. His recent blog about tonight's hotel specials has 1000 forwards, bringing thousands of downloads. Even have the advertising channel business is also mars opinion readers, so in providing services to them do not dare to rashly on the data, for fear Jinxin in the blog dissatisfied.

Jinxin Frankly, a night of red is largely dependent on those electric dealers, VC circle influential friends on Weibo to help forward. A friend complained that the "Tonight Hotel Specials" appeared more than 40 times in a day on Weibo.

Stones

The taste of red, sweet with bitter.

"Tonight Hotel Specials" on the first line, look at the number of people, but less people buy, order conversion rate is very low. From the data point of view, the main problem in the mobile phone payment link. At that time, every 10 people placed orders, and 9 failed to pay. In the initial product setup, the user only completes the mobile payment to be able to book the room successfully, but cannot go to the hotel front desk to pay (the current hotel reservation mainstream practice). This is considered from the hotel and the developer's own perspective-to improve the hotel's willingness to retain rooms, to avoid user bookings but ultimately not to stay, to reduce the cost of communication between the team and the hotel, and to increase cash flow.

However, due to the mobile phone to pay the outbreak point has not come, the user's acceptance is not high, the quality of the payment service provider is not good enough, this design to the customer brought a bad experience, so greatly hindered the transformation. As a result, the team quickly adjusted, replaced the payment service provider, and as many of the hotel agreement front desk pay the way, after the conversion rate increased by several times.

and payment problems almost at the same time, but also known as the Ctrip crackdown events. The most difficult period in the last October, when they dared to cooperate with the few hotels, "the guests are almost gone, because come up to think you too rotten, only a few hotels." The wastage rate is terrible. "Jinxin originally held more than one thing less than the idea of trying to communicate in private but no fruit." Starting in November, he fought back on Weibo and caught a lot of media attention. "The media's follow-up will give small companies a lot of free exposure." From this point of view, the suppression is not necessarily a bad thing, was beaten to cry. Afterwards Jinxin said so.

However, these two things also let the whole team reflect, if the product quality does not pass, import more customers will not stay. So the paid ads in marketing stopped for a while, and they focused on the expansion and grooming of the supply chain, as well as on client-side product optimization. This is all in order to take root in this subdivision area of the hotel tail to stabilize and accumulate ammunition. In Jinxin's view, the big explosion of mobile internet in the 2013, they want to be ready, stones, ahead of the crater, the homeopathy.