LINE official accounts incur fees based on the number of messages broadcasted. Broadcasting messages without a plan will not generate results. Increasing cost effectiveness requires planning. This article explores three key planning points: Broadcasting, features, and attracting customers.

1. Coming up with a broadcast plan

When coming up with a broadcast plan for LINE official accounts, you’ll need to consider KPI and touchpoint configurations based on each user.

1–1. Configuring KPIs based on your purpose

Configure KPIs for LINE official accounts by considering the purpose of the account and the effect indicators on LINE.
The purpose of the account refers to what you want to achieve through operating your LINE official account. Depending on how you implement measures for the company, product, or purpose, this can be anything from expanding sales, raising awareness, promoting understanding, or even acquiring leads. Effect indicators on LINE refer to measurable indicators on your official LINE account. Examples include friend count, broadcast count, open count, and click count.

Next, you’ll configure an appropriate indicator as your KPI to evaluate your progress. For example, if your purpose is to increase interest and awareness for your product, your measurable indicator on your LINE official account should be the open count (or open rate) for messages, as shown in Figure 2.

1–2. Touchpoint configuration based on each user

Recipients of messages broadcasted on LINE official accounts can be classified into “unopened users,” who don’t open the message, “opened users,” who open the messages but don’t click on the link, and “click users,” who open the message and click on the URL. Increasing the effectiveness of your broadcasts requires turning unopened users into opened users and opened users into click users. Start off by checking the composition of users on your account.

Suppose the status of your users resembles the illustration in Figure 3. If a message is broadcasted to every friend on the account, 150,000 are unopened users, 80,000 are opened users, and 20,000 are click users. Assume that the number of opened users needs improvement to achieve the KPI.

Figure 4 illustrates the organization of the final touchpoints and messages for each user status. To improve the open rate, consider conveying the benefits of opening the message at the beginning of push notifications and making important points stand out using emojis to come up with methods to achieve your KPI.

2. What features should you install?

Additional features can be installed on your LINE official account by connecting external tools. Implementing external tools incur additional costs, so think about whether you really need to install the tool to achieve your KPI and which features are the most appropriate. The following are some commonly installed features.

2–1. ID connection feature

This feature connects the member ID of users of your service to their LINE ID. You’ll be able to differentiate users who linked their ID in the customer database and make broadcasts based on recorded purchase data and demographics.
For example, if the KPI for an account handling health products is purchase count, installing ID connection will allow you to estimate when a user will finish using a product so you can time a broadcast for the same product.

2–2. Survey feature

Conducting surveys of your friends on your LINE official account will allow you to view the contents of each user’s response. You can also send messages based on the response data. For example, if you operate an LINE official account offering cosmetics with ROAS as your KPI, you can ask users what concerns they have with their skin and only broadcast messages about products that solve the users’ problems to keep broadcasting costs down while maintaining revenue levels.

3. Attracting customers

Planning on how to attract customers is especially important for LINE official accounts because costs are related to the number of messages broadcasted. For example, if you constantly attract users with little interest on an LINE official account used to increase revenue on an e-commerce site, you’ll end up with higher broadcasting costs and unsatisfactory revenue.

There are two primary methods of attracting customers: Using in-house assets and using LINE ads. Choose the method that best suits your account’s KPI.

3–1. A comparison of using in-house assets and using LINE ads

If you have an e-commerce site, signboards in physical retail stores, or email newsletters, you can user existing points of contact (assets) to attract customers with existing relationships with your company or brand. However, this method is not suited for attracting customers on a large-scale. Using this method to attract tens or even hundreds of thousands of people is difficult. In other words, this method is more suited for LINE official accounts that focus on CTR and CVR.

On the other hand, with LINE ads, you can attract millions of customers. You can target your ads to show them to new users or existing customers, which makes this method suitable for a wide range of purposes including improving brand recognition and increasing revenue.

4. Plan using LINE ads and LINE official accounts

The benefits of using LINE ads as a means of attracting customers to your LINE official account are not limited to gaining more friends. For example, LINE ads can be used to acquire new users who may contribute to revenue, or to increase the effectiveness of distribution on the LINE official account.

4–1. Example of broadcasting using LINE ads

Using the LINE Open Campaign (survey type) ad menu allows you to survey users when attracting customers. The response data obtained from these surveys can be used as the basis for selecting the target audience for the broadcast. For example, this data can be used to design a broadcasting plan that matches the user’s motivation.

4–2. Example of attracting customers using LINE ads

“Add Friend Ads,” which incur a cost for each new friend acquired on the LINE official account, offers a targeting setting called “Similarity Extension” that can be used to target users with attributes similar to those of the set conditions. By using this feature to deliver ads based on the phone numbers recorded in the customer database, you can attract new users whose characteristics are similar to that of existing customers.

5. Summary

This article discussed the key points of broadcasting, features, and attracting customers, which are important points to consider when planning an LINE official account. As the cost of an LINE official account depends on the number of messages broadcast, there are cases where the cost-effectiveness of an account may not be worth it even if just one of these points is missing. When managing your account, be sure to plan with these three points in mind.

In addition to what we discussed, we offer a wide range of support services related to LINE official accounts. Please contact us if you have any questions or would like to learn more.

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