Liby established an omnichannel digital business model that combines offline services with online tools. It introduced WeCom to empower its salespeople in terms of skills, tools, gains, and marketing content and bring in new traffic. It also built a customer data platform that gives it deeper insights into customers and their needs, which helped the company increase both repeat and new sales and maximize marketing results. In addition, thanks to its unique customer management strategy (with a special focus on memberships) and touchpoint analysis model, Liby is able to improve both customer engagement and customer loyalty.
Founded in 1994, Liby is a leading Chinese household cleaning product brand whose products are widely loved by consumers. It draws on advanced technologies around the world and is the only company in the industry with its own environmentally friendly laboratory for product development and studio for industry experts. Liby also holds the most patents in the industry and has contributed to the development of 28 national and industry standards for household cleaning products.
Liby started preparing for its digital transformation as early as 2018. Within a few years, it quickly established a direct-to-customer digital business model that is centered around CRM and connects physical stores with online channels including WeCom, Mini Programs, Weixin communities, and live streaming, bridging the company headquarters, resellers, offline stores, and customers.
Historically, the personal care and hygiene industry has relied heavily on offline sales channels, with a high percentage of sales coming from supermarkets. However, in recent years, online channels have quickly taken the place of offline stores. This became an even more obvious trend in the post-pandemic era as online shopping gained further momentum and the prevalence of physical stores declined. Personal care and hygiene brands faced a big challenge in maintaining their sales growth, and it has become essential for them to rethink their customer base, product structure, and sales channels and create new strategies to integrate offline stores with online sales channels to create new value for themselves.
Liby's customer operations department responded quickly to this change and discovered new growth opportunities by joining the Weixin ecosystem, combining offline stores with online channels, and empowering physical stores with digital tools.
With the help of Tencent Smart Retail, Liby established an omnichannel digital business model that combines offline services with online tools. With this model, Liby is able to break the limitations of time and space and convert online traffic into offline sales.
Salespeople are key to the operations of physical stores. In the past, Liby's salespeople engaged with customers online using their personal Weixin accounts. The problem with this is that it was difficult to track the communication data and evaluate the performance of salespeople, and the company was unable to effectively manage and motivate them. By introducing WeCom, Liby empowered its salespeople in terms of skills, tools, gains, and marketing content.
Given that most of its salespeople are of an older generation and are not familiar with social media marketing or WeCom, Liby worked together with Tencent Smart Retail and a third-party partner to compile a set of guidelines and standard operating procedures for its salespeople and implemented them across its offline stores. Salespeople are guided step by step on the phone and are able to improve their service skills and efficiency.
After introducing digital tools, Liby set new customer acquisition and engagement targets for its salespeople. It established a transparent management system that greatly improved its management efficiency. With this system, operations managers keep track of overall performance and key metrics and give instructions accordingly to regional managers; regional managers evaluate the performance of salespeople and motivate them, for example, by selecting and showcasing exemplary salespeople; the salespeople themselves can also check their rankings and sales statistics and try to catch up if they fall behind.
With respect to profit distribution, Liby tries to drive online customers acquired from supermarkets and other offline channels back to offline stores or refer them to community group shopping. This ensures continuous growth for offline stores. Liby is also considering collaborating with O2O platforms to deliver products to customers' homes.
Personal care and hygiene brands have long lacked the means to collect data about sales channels and customers, which has affected their marketing results.
Based on the Weixin ecosystem, Liby designed an integrated system that allows it to collect statistics from all sales channels. The company built a customer data platform that brings together statistics on sales channels, store visits, and transactions and allows it to track the entire customer journey from engagement to conversion. With deeper insights on its customer base, Liby is able to develop more targeted customer management strategies, implementing different service processes for different customer groups and reaching out to them with different marketing content during promotional events.
Through these measures, Liby has been able to overcome the problems it faced in customer reach and achieve targeted marketing. Based on the statistics it gathers from new and repeat sales, it can better understand customer needs and adjust its operations strategy accordingly to further increase repeat sales and bring in new customers, maximizing its marketing potential.
Personal care and hygiene brands often find it hard to build long-lasting customer relationships. To address this problem, Liby focused on customer operations and took measures both online and offline to effectively boost customer engagement and build customer loyalty.
Based on comprehensive customer knowledge and Tencent Smart Retail's community operation experience, and taking into account its own conditions, Liby set up a unique customer operations system that allows it to acquire new customers at much lower costs than the industry average. It also launched events such as "Share to Win Credits", "Blind Boxes", and "Membership Day" to attract new customers and increase customer engagement.
Tencent YouShu's touchpoint analysis played an important role in this process, helping Liby continually enrich customer labels, improve its understanding of customer preferences, and adjust its community operations strategy based on sales statistics and trends. For example, after a customer makes a purchase at an offline store, a salesperson can send them messages about online promotional events to encourage them to shop online as well.
Liby also has a well-established membership system. Customers can win credits on their first visit to Liby's Mini Program as well as when they favorite a product. Based on the products a customer favorites, Liby can send them messages once in a while to drive conversions and increase repeat sales. Meanwhile, by allowing customers to buy products at discounted prices using credits, Liby can not only improve customer engagement and loyalty, but also further grow its sales.
By adding the Weixin ecosystem to its portfolio of sales channels, Liby has injected new life into its reseller network and sales team and has seen an increase in brand exposure, customer stickiness, and sales. Thanks to its unique customer operations strategy and the introduction of WeCom, customer engagement grew significantly compared with when salespeople had to use personal Weixin accounts to manage customer relationships.