Five major pain points of online education
1, the user pays a low proportion, and it is difficult to realize the flow.
The data shows that more than 50% of users spend less than 100 yuan per month, more than one third spend between1kloc-0/-500 yuan, and nearly 90% spend less than 100 yuan on each online education course.
Moreover, in order to enroll students, educational institutions mostly enroll students in the form of low-cost classes and free classes. It seems that the number of users has increased, but in fact life is more difficult. On the one hand, low-cost free courses increase the difficulty of user conversion, on the other hand, they reduce the user's unit price, making the price range acceptable to users lower and lower. Once the price rises later, the number of users will drop sharply.
The cost of attending classes is high, but the income is low, which is difficult to realize.
2. The effect is difficult to identify and is questioned by parents and users.
As we all know, the education industry has a characteristic different from other industries: the effect is not easy to quantify.
For example:
Why can Dana and Suntech go public? Both institutions have an obvious feature.
Dana's mainstream products basically guarantee employment and salary, and users have clear goals and expectations when purchasing;
Suntech institutions mainly do certificate/academic training. When selling products, it will be clear that you can get the certificate in a few years. If you can't get the certificate, you can guarantee a refund, and users can also see obvious effects and effects.
Other types of training, such as maker education for young children, mainly cultivate children's practical ability and logical thinking ability, as well as interest courses, such as dance and music, which are difficult to see clear results directly. Users mainly buy services and experiences within a certain period of time, so it is inevitable that they will be questioned by parents and users.
What such institutions need to focus on is how to quantify the effect of learning. Li Hongmei, the founder of Baby Play English, who just raised funds, also said at the press conference that the current model of Baby Play is to provide children with English enlightenment services with quantifiable effects based on courses and nursery rhymes.
3. The online promotion cost is high and the investment return period is long.
Educational products are not so much purchases as investments. When users make purchase decisions, they actually buy products with the expectation of future ability improvement. In this process, they will be in the stage of wait-and-see and peer comparison for a long time.
At present, the mainstream promotion channels in the education industry are mainly divided into free channels and paid channels.
Free channels mainly include SEO, self-media, official WeChat account and community. Although these free channels don't cost money at first, they may need to spend a lot of energy and content to deliver to users, including WeChat official accounts and communities, and they need to spend energy to attract more users, let users stay, and get conversion through contact with advertisements and content;
Payment channels mainly include SEM, information flow advertising, local promotion and circle of friends promotion. Under the current situation, the cost of a single delivery is rising.
4. Operating costs remain high and the threshold for resource acquisition is high.
For a simple example, even for the postgraduate entrance examination and civil servant training with a strong purpose, it is hard to say whether the people who finally passed the exam were due to the good quality of education or the students' own efforts. Many times it varies from person to person.
Therefore, we need to understand it through some external auxiliary content, such as external word of mouth, third-party evaluation, cases of previous students and so on.
For small and medium-sized educational institutions, there is no word of mouth at first, the operating cost is bound to be high, and the way to obtain resources is also difficult.
So when I first started to do marketing, I must have settled down to do service and make a reputation; When you have a word of mouth, it is also helpful for later marketing.
5. Both sides meet the source, online and offline "pinch".
In the case of certain resources, online and offline must be a red sea. In view of the service-oriented characteristics of the education industry, offline institutions have certain advantages in the radiation range around the school. Under the impact of accessing teachers and on-site teaching, the challenge of online education is still great.
Online education is not about building a network structure and moving content online, but also involves many factors such as user service, profit model, effect judgment, online and offline collaboration and so on.
Five-step development strategy of network education
1, lock in the target users, provide high-quality content to develop paying users, and expand the user scale by relying on the free model.
College students pay attention to TOEFL IELTS, white-collar workers pay attention to vocational skills training, enterprise managers pay attention to EMBA training, and primary and secondary school students pay attention to extracurricular interest learning. Online education is accompanied by every stage of users' growth, from preschool education to students' examinations and the improvement of professional skills after work, and different stages have different needs.
Training institutions should do a good job of user portraits of their products, target users, gain insight into user needs, and always think about what problems they can solve for users and provide truly high-quality content.
2. Find the breakthrough point
We must not only effectively solve the real pain points of users, but also find the policy changes and user concerns that users can accept and see quantifiable effects, such as preschool education, vocational education, quality education and artificial intelligence, which are the target markets for developing paying users.
3. Create an online brand
Online education is increasingly becoming a fast-moving consumer product, with specific use objectives and duration. Providing online education services requires product awareness, and building a brand can gain a loyal user base. Then we should create high-quality course content, put an end to simple product transplantation, do a good job in online and offline differentiated pricing, and strengthen social media communication.
All revolutionary business practices not only cater to the trend of innovative technology, but also touch the hearts of users in emotional experience. Similarly, for online education products, if you invest too much energy in new mode innovation, it is easy to be copied quickly by competing products, but only technological innovation (teaching content+tool research and development) and data accumulation (student learning data) cannot be copied.
4. Introduce more interaction. Compared with face-to-face teaching, online teaching is not interactive enough.
At the same time, increase investment in technology and broadband, create a smooth interactive teaching experience, introduce more interactive content, and make the teaching matrix more vivid and three-dimensional.
With the accumulation of users and technology, we can continue to try to realize it along the product logic, such as: online question and answer service, some students are willing to take the initiative to learn, and some students are inconvenient or afraid to ask the teacher; Products meet the needs of these users to a certain extent, and can also bring extra income to teachers.
It should be pointed out that the difficulty of this model lies in efficiency: for teachers, due to the low unit price of customers, it is necessary to consider how to make teachers have enough motivation to provide services on the platform;
For students, it is how to shorten the waiting time and improve the experience. If additional costs are added, it is difficult to achieve large-scale income by answering questions online. Therefore, how to realize user traffic is still a problem that the industry has been exploring.
5, enrich the product form, to change learning from a boring "coolie" into an interesting thing, we must increase the product form and avoid a single product form.
Relying on the accumulation of technology and user data, provide teachers' handouts and user curriculum planning; Equip teachers and students with hardware products such as smart pens so that they can communicate in real time; Provide teaching video playback, learning situation analysis, and feedback report on after-school homework, so that parents and students can understand the teaching effect.