What is WeChat binding? Technicalities and key takeaways.

WeChat binding is the process of identifying individual consumers’ online and offline transactions and social behaviors by their WeChat accounts. It means brands can track them and their spending habits in order to enhance the customer experience and identify key customers.  

A brand’s online and offline territories can be wide-ranging, from offline shops to official accounts on WeChat, Mini Programs, and other e-commerce platforms. As a consumer interacts with these various channels, the footprint provides brands with a valuable source of consumer intelligence in the form of consumer habits and frequency of transactions. As such, brands should stop focusing solely on their followers and move forward to the WeChat users, transitioning their consumer intelligence model from FRM (Fan Relationship Management) to CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Binding creates a link among all these touchpoints by connecting their WeChat accounts to key consumer information such as telephone numbers or member IDs, essentially creating a singular customer view (SCV). Creating an SCV benefit both the brand and the consumer; it allows a brand to constantly gather data and utilize algorithms to inform marketing strategies and to keep an up-to-date consumer database, affording brands the ability to work on customer retention and boost sales in some cases. In turn, it will provide consumers with an enhanced friction-less and personalized shopping experience.

In this article, we will explore the four main steps in implementing an effective WeChat binding campaign, which consists of customer matching (identifying a key audience), data consolidation (binding process), and customer engagement and KPIs.  

1. Identifying a key audience.

Identifying and targeting your key audiences is the first step in implementing an effective WeChat binding campaign. This can be done by recognizing which touchpoints within your brand’s WeChat territory consumers interact with the most. By means of obtaining users’ WeChat Union ID, which can be done via the WeChat Open Platform, a brand can classify a wider key audience by searching for “lookalikes” of key “seed users”.  

An algorithm can build a target audience of consumers that match existing key users by using hundreds of data points across the WeChat ecosystem and assessing top purchasers by average frequency, quantity and purchase location. Once such consumers are identified, they can be targeted with personalized messages, rewards, and services. This method can also be used to reactivate inactive customers.