Meiyijia, based on its membership system and leveraging mini-programs, is opening a community platform offering comprehensive services including products, services, entertainment, consulting, and logistics to provide richer services for members.
More and more physical retail enterprises are shifting from serving stores to serving customers—Meiyijia, with over 10,000 stores, has even made this strategic adjustment.
For Meiyijia, membership seems even more significant. With over 11,200 stores nationwide, it serves more than 3.5 million customers daily, who not only bring sales but also generate massive data for Meiyijia, especially membership data.
"This is our greatest value," said Li Fang, Director of Meiyijia's Membership Operations Center, at the "Omnichannel Practice of Physical Retail" sub-forum of the 2017 China Retail Convention. The membership system is evolving from a traditional backend system into a driving system for Meiyijia's retail front end.
To this end, in 2017, "membership" became Meiyijia's first-tier strategy, prioritizing the best resources for members and ultimately delivering them online and offline, driving new growth and development through a membership platform.
This shift from a store-centric approach to a customer-centric approach through stores highlights a significant strategic turn in the company's development and a reinvention of channel and enterprise value.
Digitalization of the Membership System
A large membership base can create competitive barriers and differentiation for retailers, and it is also an important reflection of brand loyalty. In this process, interaction with members largely determines front-end operations such as product assortment and marketing.
An indisputable fact is that consumers shop both online and in physical stores. Chen Xiaodong, CEO of Intime Retail, even believes that there has never been a case of one channel driving traffic to another, because 98% of online and offline consumers overlap.
The diversification of consumer needs, shopping channels, and consumption times means that the same customer's purchasing behavior will be recorded across multiple platforms or channels.
In this process, how to achieve unified management of members across multiple channels is a primary issue for many retail enterprises, especially physical retailers.
"Because multi-channel information can easily lead to information redundancy and distorted consumer profiles, affecting subsequent operational management," said Wang Yongsen, CEO of Shandian Gou.
In this regard, Hema Fresh, which inherently carries an internet gene, has already been quietly practicing this. Hema Fresh's full name is Hema Fresh Member Store. Besides attractive dine-in seafood and steak, and O2O instant delivery, the word "member" is often overlooked.
While people complain that Hema requires payment via the Hema app or Alipay, Hema has already completed the digitalization of its membership system. All purchase behaviors are ultimately reflected through settlement, forming a complete chain.
"In this process, completing the digitalization of the membership system is only the first step. Unfortunately, most companies have not yet realized this," Wang Yongsen admitted.
As one of China's best convenience store enterprises, Meiyijia has taken a step ahead of physical retail peers by focusing on digitalizing membership.
For Meiyijia, the theme of "convenience" is eternal. How to establish new digital contact channels with customers, continuously analyze and position consumers based on consumption scenarios, form close connections and interactions with customers, and ultimately deliver products and services is particularly important.
By analyzing changes in customer traffic and average transaction value from 2014 to 2017, Meiyijia found that convenience store customer traffic continues to rise, but the number of items purchased per customer is slowly declining.
This means more people come to convenience stores, but each visit is light, and they don't want to carry many items.
In response, Li Fang said, "How to maintain steady growth in customer traffic, how to provide more services in a small space, and how to satisfy customers who buy fewer items—these are what we need to think about and solve now and in the future."
To this end, Meiyijia partnered with Shandian Gou to connect the entire FMCG retail industry chain through a comprehensive system. It implemented solutions for 500 stores, including mobile omnichannel traffic integration, store and product management, and instant delivery, achieving digitalization of the overall architecture, especially the membership system, while also bringing more incremental growth and service experience to Meiyijia.
According to Lingshou, this system is referred to as the "May 1st Project," which uses one system to connect all online and offline traffic channels, with unified management of all orders, shipping, marketing, and even inventory. One user ID maps to all channels, and users from each channel return to the user membership center. After entering the membership center, an electronic membership card connects all membership circles online and offline.
After the membership system was integrated, Meiyijia's customer profiling and demand pattern summarization became more accurate.
With the assistance of Shandian Gou, Meiyijia developed a food delivery mini-program, creating its own food delivery entrance. Each store uses this mini-program to make more direct and higher-success-rate recommendations to regular customers and nearby community customers, Li Fang explained.
Another phenomenon is that compared to in-store customers, online order average transaction values are much higher. Also, unlike offline customers who buy more beverages and fresh food, online orders have a higher proportion of emergency supplies and daily necessities. Therefore, the system pushes different notifications and reminders for online and offline.
Given Meiyijia's massive transaction scale, building an online business requires a professional operating platform to connect online traffic and synchronize product and user management. "For Meiyijia, focusing on its core business and leaving professional matters to professionals is the way to achieve twice the results with half the effort," said Chen Yuefeng, CEO of Lingshou Media.
Building a Large Platform with Shared Data
Is fully connecting internal and external systems enough? Obviously, in the data war, this is just the beginning.
Major food delivery platforms, social media entrances, stores, and other channels bring massive traffic and data. At the same time, Meiyijia's unique business model determines the complexity of multi-role participation in operations, including self-operated stores, franchise stores, suppliers, partners, and customers.
At this point, the significance of data analysis and sharing becomes apparent. Because all customer purchase paths and demand expressions are recorded, through data analysis and application, differentiated and targeted membership benefits and experiences can be generated. This is even more significant for consumers who increasingly seek personalization.
Meiyijia's idea is to focus on customer value, break the mindset of independent value creation, establish a comprehensive membership connection strategy, and ultimately rise to more meaningful connections, creating a community life platform—a comprehensive platform that connects with customers and interacts with them, allowing stores and suppliers to participate and jointly manage customers.
It is reported that Meiyijia will, based on its membership system and leveraging mini-programs, open a community platform offering comprehensive services including products, services, entertainment, consulting, and logistics to provide richer services for members.
For example, a user has recently placed two orders: one for beverages online and one for rice and flour at a store, and may also have records of sending and receiving packages and paying utility bills. If the user has bound a membership card, then when placing another order, it first enters the membership center. The backend analyzes past consumption records and basic data to more accurately mobilize partner resources, intelligently matching corresponding coupons and reminders to the user.
This not only facilitates relationship maintenance throughout the member lifecycle but also, for partners, this sharing is more conducive to targeted marketing.
However, data-driven operations are a long process, starting with the collection of basic data.
Li Fang also frankly stated that data-driven ideas are good, but they require a gradual process. The first step is to accumulate basic core data, and then transition to a data-driven structure.
For example, Meiyijia found that food delivery customers rise sharply around 6 PM, and male customers become particularly active after 9 PM, when female user orders are only half of male users. Additionally, women purchase more personal care products.
Through analysis of these basic data, Meiyijia developed marketing campaigns such as late-night specials for male users and personal care specials for female users. Such pushes and promotions are essentially driven by needs derived from large amounts of basic data.
As for profitability, Meiyijia is not in a hurry; "profit can only come slowly." But Li Fang emphasized that only data can tell you the right next step.
For the future, Meiyijia, after integrating all channels, has a clearer understanding, especially of potential challenges.
Meiyijia's core is membership, essentially aiming to connect more customers. How to make connections meaningful and make consumers voluntarily and proactively connect.
Consumers have different needs for different consumption scenarios, and online customers have different expectations for service experience. How to leverage supply chain advantages and existing online operational strategies to balance different customer expectations and needs online and offline.
Everything will change in the future; today's strategy may need adjustment tomorrow. But Meiyijia's attitude of embracing change in response to external changes is commendable. However, for a company like Meiyijia focused on the convenience store industry, one thing remains unchanged: providing members with a convenient lifestyle. All changes and attempts are essentially about providing better services and experiences for consumers on this basis—this can also be said to be the change and constancy in the digital retail era.
Source: Lingshou (ID: lingshouke)
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