36Kr learned that Le Yaoyao Technology, an offline public account promotion company, has completed an A+ round of financing of 38 million yuan, and the investor is GF Xinde.
As we all know, online traffic is expensive nowadays, and everyone’s attention is beginning to focus on offline. In addition to traditional subway and elevator advertisements, there are also some new offline advertising models, such as acquiring customers through commercial Wi-Fi, represented by the company Maiwaidi; for example, the photo printers now common outside restaurants are dedicated to serving public account performance advertisements. Le Yao Yao Technology chose to use the claw machine for traffic distribution.
Founder Chen Genghao believes that there are two main reasons why he started with claw machines: first, there are 2 million claw machines in stock in China, and about 20 million coin-operated devices including them. These machines cannot accept mobile payments, and the pain points of consumers and merchants need to be solved; second, claw machines are mostly found in shopping malls, KTVs and other places, and the user group is women aged 16 to 35, so advertising is more precise.
From the perspective of the advertising audience, it can be seen that Le Yao Yao is more accurate in acquiring customers than WI-FI; and from the perspective of Le Yao Yao's business model, they do not produce their own machines like the photo printers on the market, but cooperate with machine manufacturers and only provide hardware boxes, so the business model is lighter.
Looking specifically at Le Yaoyao's business model, they provide hardware boxes and SaaS systems for the machines for free, and the manufacturers install the boxes and ship them to merchants. According to statistics, after mobile payment is implemented, the doll catching machine can increase revenue by 28%. When users want to catch dolls, they first scan the code on WeChat. There are two modes to choose from. The first is recharge, and users can spend 1 yuan to catch dolls after recharging. The second is free. After users choose this mode, they can catch dolls for free by following an advertiser's WeChat public account. Usually, users will see three or four advertiser's public accounts.
In this way, Le Yao Yao (currently installed on 30,000 machines) distributes advertisements an average of 10 times per machine per day. The entire platform can increase the number of followers for public accounts by about 300,000 per day, with an average of 70,000 or 80,000 per account. The average retention rate in a week is 65%. Usually the customer acquisition cost using Guangdiantong is close to 3 yuan per customer, while using Leyaoyao it is more than 1 yuan per customer. In addition to being cheap, Chen Genghao believes that the traffic generated by offline interactions will be more real and scene-based than online. However, he also said that Le Yaoyao and Guangdian Tong are not substitutes. Public accounts generally use different methods to acquire users.
According to Chen Genghao, most of the claw machine manufacturers in the country are in Panyu, Guangzhou. They have cooperated with more than 300 companies, basically covering all manufacturers. As mentioned earlier, they have installed 30,000 machines, covering 291 cities in China, and they plan to reach 100,000 machines in 2017. After this, they will expand to other gaming slot machines.
At present, Le Yaoyao has cooperated with more than 100 public accounts, and its customers include content entrepreneurs such as Guangzhou Chao Life, Tongdao Shu, Xin Bang, as well as brand public accounts such as Country Garden and Miya. The advertising order is tens of millions of yuan, and Le Yao Yao takes a certain percentage of the profit. Chen Genghao believes that public accounts are currently in greatest demand, and small programs can also become their customers in the future.
In addition to monetizing advertising distribution, Le Yaoyao also hopes to try more monetization methods in the future. When the number of accumulated users is sufficient, it plans to monetize through user operations, and may try games, e-commerce, etc.; the current monthly revenue is 40 million yuan, and in the future, it plans to carry out payment finance and industry chain integration businesses.
In terms of the team, founder Chen Genghao has 3 years of marketing experience in Unilever and HP. In 2011, he founded the marketing interactive company Weidian Interactive, which was acquired by a listed company in 2015. CMO Xu Deqiang was once the general manager of Sohu Focus Weihai Station Nantong Station; CTO Yang Kairan once worked for Oracle; business VP Zhang Jiebo is a senior executive of Ping An Insurance.