Welcome to the Jing Daily WeChat Edition

Dear WeChaters, 
This week, we review Lancôme’s Singles’ Day WeChat Campaign and MoMA’s tailored WeChat approach. From there, we explore Tencent’s new WeChat Pay feature and break down why WeChat has blocked some external links just in time for Alibaba's shopping festival. Enjoy! 

—What's New—

The latest WeChat news gathered from top sources

 MOMA Wechat 
After a four-month-long renovation, an added 47,000 square feet, and a cost of $450 million, America’s newly-reopened premier modern art museum can be partially understood in numerical terms. While many museums simply translate English-language content and write generic articles about their collections, MoMA is tailoring posts specifically for Chinese readers by offering deep dives into the stories behind MoMA artworks, creating video guides with its Chinese curator Sophie Zhang, and building a community of readers by inviting art lovers into their WeChat group.
Read More 

 easy money 
Tencent’s WeChat Pay is launching a new payment feature that lets people transfer funds using a mobile phone number, TechNode reported on Oct. 23. WeChat users can unlock the new feature from the messaging app and transfer money to the receiver’s WeChat wallet by entering a phone number — even if both parties are not friends. The feature is currently available only on iOS. Ant Financial’s Alipay, a WeChat Pay’s rival, launched a comparative feature in 2012 that lets users send and receive funds using a mobile number or email addresses. 
Read More 

 bitcoin bounce 
On Oct. 25, the price of a Bitcoin took flight, going from approximately $7,300 to $8,600 and further continued the next day jumping to as high as $10,600. This surge marked the 3rd largest one day gain in Bitcoin’s history. Economist and trader Alex Kruger shared via Twitter that Bitcoin internet searches on Google, Baidu, and WeChat have seen spikes of 233%, 200%, and 145% respectively.
Read More 

—The Campaign—

Recent noteworthy campaigns & case studies on WeChat Wiki

LANCÔME scores
Facts:
Lancôme releases its Singles’ Day WeChat Campaign one month ahead and achieves huge success.
Features: 
— Pre-sale strategy: Starting a month before the Singles’ Day, Lancôme released a pre-sale article including deals like buy 1 get 1 free, gifts, and more.
— KOL strategy: On Sept 25th, Kris Wu became the representative of Lancôme in China, helping Lancômeachieve a significant amount of traffic.
— Membership strategy: Lancômemembership model gave exclusive point rewards, including an extra 500 points while purchasing during the pre-sale time. 
— Multi-media strategy: In its WeChat articles, Lancôme inserted its short promotional video featuring Kris Wu broken up by bits of Wu’s audio comments, which increased the intimacy between the brand and its audience.
Results: 
Each post views ranged between 47k to 91k, with one presale post reaching 100k views, and the average share reaching 661 shares. Given this, Lancôme gained a significant amount of traffic. 
Our Take: 
Lancôme’s four strategies achieved a win-win outcome for bothLancômeand the Chinese customer. 
Read More in Chinese

DIGITAL PUSH
Facts:
The Shinsegae Group is one of Korea's largest travel retail, leisure, and real estate conglomerates. Here, we take a look at new Shinsegae's WeChat Mini Program.
Key Takeaways:
— Travel retail in Asia is important for brands and retailers targeting Chinese consumers. Many Chinese consumers cannot find certain cruelty-free cosmetics in mainland China because of animal testing requirements, or simply because the import taxes are too high. Given this, Rihanna's Fenty Beauty has focused heavily on selling through travel retail locations as part of its China market entry strategy. 
— Shinsegae's Mini Program focuses on loyalty member benefits by offering discounts across its travel retail ecosystem of malls, brands, hotels, and more, as well as partner discounts through WeChat Pay and other travel retail players.
— Other Mini Program functions include a travel retail guide location and shopping guides, as well as a currency conversion calculator. Such functions are designed to make the travel retail shopping process easier and less stressful.
Read more

—Deep Dive—

Must-read, in-depth guides, tutorials & reports

 no go 
WeChat blocked "external links" just in time for Alibaba's shopping festival. Well, not all the external links, it turns out. Starting on October 28, users will not be allowed to share links related to “group shopping.” Pinduoduo will take a significant hit, as it relies on information exchange between WeChat friends. Tencent already blocked the links sharing for Taobao stores before, so Alibaba thought of a different way of sharing it (a complex text code to copy-paste). Now, even that may be blocked. However, users are still able to share links from JD.com, which is a partner of Tencent. It is a part of an on-going battle between Tencent and Alibaba. The Upcoming Double Eleven festival (Nov 11) is the most important day for Alibaba, and the promotion for it has already started. However, from the user perspective, the new WeChat policy is a good thing, as they're usually harassed by "requests to group buy" from strangers.
Read more

—System Update—

Stay on top of WeChat's evolution

 Wechat search 
WeChat has updated the way it displays search results when users search for a brand’s name. The restyled results page now shows the brand’s official image, a link to its official website, and a short description. Below the image, users can also find the brand’s official account, as well as related mini programs, products, and services. At the moment, it appears that only a few selected brands can leverage the new design.   
Source