What should I pay attention to when creating an account? Are there any tips on how to increase the number of friends I have?
If you are reading this article and are trying to manage a LINE account for the first time, you probably don’t know where to start.
LINE is a very effective tool for attracting customers and marketing your business. There is no doubt that LINE will become indispensable for business in the future. It is deeply ingrained in our lives that many of us can’t keep in touch with anyone without it.
In, this article will explain the benefits of an official LINE account, how to operate it, and the key points for achieving KPIs.
table of content
1. Official Accounts on LINE Can Shorten the Distance with Customers
2. Advantages of Operating a LINE Account | What is the Difference from Other SNS?
3. Three Purposes for Operating a LINE Account
4. Things to Know Before Opening a LINE Official Account
5. Procedures from Opening to Starting
6. Three Most Important Factors
7. Points for operating LINE Official Account
8. Useful External Tools For Management
Conclusion
Official accounts on LINE are accounts that are specially designed to be managed and operated by companies.
They are designed to be optimized for business use, allowing multiple people to manage the account and analyze customer activity.
Based on LINE’s strength of “casual communication between individuals“, it is ideal for easily increasing contact with customers and naturally shortening the distance between you and your customers.
By setting attributes and narrowing them down, it is also possible to send messages to users with specific characteristics.
Today, it is said that “1-on-1 marketing” is more effective than messages to the masses, as it can only target specific demographics. This is because values have become very different from person to person.
YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and web advertising have a wide variety of platform options for attracting customers, but each has different strengths. The most important thing in attracting customers is choosing a platform. No matter how good your product is, trying to attract older men on Instagram is reckless.
So here are three advantages of operating a LINE account.
LINE’s greatest strength is the sheer scale of its platform.
In Japan, LINE has more than 90 million monthly active users, which is astounding considering that Twitter has about 45 million monthly active users. Not only the number of users but also the wide age range of users stand out.
There is a strong stereotype that ‘SNS is for young people,’ but 16.1% of LINE users are over 60 years old. A wide range of age groups means that it is highly compatible with any business.
In addition, LINE has many related services such as “LINE Pay”, “LINE NEWS”, and “LINE Manga”.
In the future, most of the actions that are essential to life, such as shopping and payments, may be completed only on LINE.
Many people must have seen services like “Register on LINE and get a free drink! If you have ever seen a service like “Free drink for entering your name, gender, and e-mail address!
Would you register? “Free drink is tempting, but it’s a hassle to register,” you might think.
Registering an e-mail address with a smartphone is a surprisingly tedious task. Aside from the flick input of hiragana, inputting English letters is detailed and time-consuming.
Some of you may be thinking, “Isn’t the quality of the customers you’ve gathered so low? Will they buy your product?” That’s perfectly fine. On the other hand, with LINE, simply reading the QR code and pressing the “Add” button completes friend registration. Since it is less time-consuming, if the offer is attractive, you will be able to attract users at a high rate.
However, the quality of the customers you attract may be low. Will they buy your product? But there is no problem at all.
As we will explain later, LINE is also a good platform for nurturing customers.
Another advantage of using LINE is that it can efficiently attract a wide range of attributes, from users with a strong desire to buy to casual people.
According to L-Step data, the open rate of LINE messages is over 60%, compared to the 10-30% open rate of email magazines.
Why is there such a difference in the open rate? It is natural to think that the reason for this is the transition of communication forms.
In this day and age, it is rare to communicate with acquaintances via e-mail. You probably use LINE to communicate with your friends.
In addition, spam and junk mail also arrive in the mail, so there are many cases where the existence of the message is not recognized in the first place before it is opened.
Messages are meaningless if they are not read in the first place. In this respect, LINE’s high open rate will be a great weapon in your marketing efforts.
The purpose of operating an SNS is to attract customers, but attracting customers is only the entrance to measures on any platform.
How do you approach your audience? This is where platform differences arise.
Here we will introduce the three main purposes of operating a LINE account.
LINE is suitable for slowly building up intimacy with users over a long period of time, since you can have continuous contact with them.
If you give useful information on LINE and cultivate loyalty, you will be able to sell some expensive back-end products.
At the point when you ask people to register as friends, they do not need to be interested in your products. From there, you can gradually build an appropriate scenario based on the user’s level of interest and gradually get them interested in your products.
LINE can also be used to sell new products to people who have already bought them.
In today’s saturated market, it’s more important to grow repeat customers than to acquire new customers. LINE is the best choice especially when you want to sell a high-priced product in a step-by-step manner, with customers buying a small-price product.
This is because, unlike other SNSs, information flows one after another, LINE can send messages in a push-type manner so that it is easy for users to notice.
LINE can also be used for following-up.
Especially in the case of high-value or information products, there will be many cases where readers send questions after purchase.
The concept of UX (User Experience) has been gaining importance in recent years. By carefully following up not only on the quality of the product, but also before and after the purchase, customer satisfaction can be increased.
LINE is a perfect tool for after-sales follow-up, as it is suited for easily sending out information to users.
Before creating a LINE official account, make the following three preparations.
There are two types of LINE official accounts: authenticated and unauthenticated. Other words that can be used are: Verified and Unverified.
Verified accounts are officially recognized by the management and are marked with a gray mark. Once you become Verified, you will be able to do the following:
- Add friends from the search
- Create additional pop-ups
- Ad placement
Although you can operate an account even with an unauthorized account, it is recommended that you raise it to approved, especially for corporations, because if you cannot add friends from search, you will have one less channel of inflow.
To be approved, it must pass the examination. In the review, past content is checked, and if it fails, there is a risk of an account ban.
To avoid an account ban, it is effective to undergo a review immediately after creating an account. If you want to be certified, apply for the examination as soon as possible.
Please note that once you have been authenticated, you will not be able to change the name of your account.
As of July 2022, the price plans for LINE official accounts are as follows.
- Free Plan: Send up to 1,000 emails for free
- Light Plan: ¥5,500/month to send up to 15,000 messages
- Standard plan: Send up to 45,000 messages for 16,500 yen per month
Once you exceed the prescribed number of messages for each plan, the monthly fee will increase with pay-as-you-go billing.
If you are operating as a corporation, use the light plan at least, and the standard plan if possible. It is also recommended to switch to standard when the number of registrants increases.
LINE checks the movements of official accounts quite strictly and freezes any account that is deemed inappropriate without notice.
Once banned, the account cannot be used again. All the customer lists you have collected so far will be lost, so you should be very careful about bans.
The following actions are highly likely to be viewed as suspicious by the official, so avoid them:
- Inserting affiliate advertisements into the timeline
- Too many posts on the timeline
- Inappropriate genres such as adult or gambling
If you operate a LINE account as a team, it is recommended that you create a manual for flaming measures and share it among members.
The following is a step-by-step guide to opening an official LINE account.
The account creation itself is easy, so let’s make it quickly when you have time:
To use a LINE official account, you need to prepare a dedicated email address.
If the account is operated by multiple people, it is recommended to use a corporate email address rather than an individual email address. This is because it is easier to collectively manage one address than to prepare each address.
Enter basic information such as user name, company name, industry, etc., and send the official application.
Once your application is approved, you will set up the detailed information for your account.
- Account Name
- Profile image
- Background image
- Authentication status
- Location information
These can be changed later. An explanation of other setting such as icons and home images in detail later.
The next step is to set up greeting messages.
A greeting message is a message sent immediately after adding an account as a friend. It is an important message that determines the first impression of the user.
How to create a greeting message will be explained in detail later.
A reply message or a message that automatically responds to a user’s question. Respond to keywords in users’ messages and send associated responses.
For example, if you receive a message with the keyword “business hours”, automatically return a message about business hours.
The content of the response message varies greatly depending on the industry, so discuss it with members or refer to the accounts of your competitors.
When you are ready, publish your account and start operating it.
Before publishing, it is recommended to test the account to see if it works as targeted. Have a third party check the accuracy and content of response messages.
There are many things to do in operating a LINE account, such as design, leads, and routes to attract customers.
No matter how much time you have, it’s not enough if you put all your effort into making even the smallest details.
Rather than allocating resources heavily to all tasks, focusing costs on high-importance areas will yield results in a short period.
Therefore, we will now explain the three elements that you should focus on first in your LINE operations:
Greeting messages are important messages that influence the first impression a user makes.
They are not subject to billing and have the advantage of being able to send 5 contents at the same time. The key is how much you can grab the user’s heart with these five.
In addition to text messages, you can also use images and cards. Create content that is relevant to your appeal.
Here are three tips for creating an effective greeting message.
- Push the benefits (i.e., reasons to stay connected with the official account). Send a coupon from the first move, for example.
- Use pictograms and line breaks to keep the text simple and easy to read.
- Send anonymous notification
If you don’t know what to make, add the competitor’s account as a friend and see the greeting message.
Along with greetings, the “icon” and “home image” greatly influence the first impression.
It would be a waste to open the registration screen and then just press the add button and leave.
Sometimes some accounts are set up with free images, but it is difficult to attract users’ interest with that. This is because users are not interested unless it is something new.
If you have a company logo, use it as an icon. Create your home screen using Canva, etc., and create a catchy image that matches your image.
Please note that once you change the icon and home image, you will not be able to change them for an hour.
The menu displayed at the bottom of the chat screen is called “Rich Menu.” It is used to direct visitors to other content, such as links to the home page or contact form.
Rich menus have a high degree of freedom in design and can create originality.
The key to creating rich menus is not stylish design, but rather “ease of viewing” and “ease of understanding”.
No matter how stylish the design is, it is meaningless if it is difficult to know where to press to open the homepage, or if the colors are so cluttered that the text is unreadable.
If you don’t have someone with design skills in-house, use Canva’s template to create your menu. Canva always has around 6,000 templates, and you can create a menu just by replacing the phrases inside.
The following are 5 key points to remember when managing your official LINE account:
The first and foremost thing to clarify is the purpose of operating LINE.
This is because the optimal measures will change depending on the purpose of the operation. In extreme cases, depending on the purpose, it may be better to use an SNS other than LINE.
As mentioned above, there are three main purposes for operating LINE.
- Education
- Sales
- After-follow-up
For after-sales follow-up, it will mainly be a chat-centered operation, and for sales, it will be mainly the distribution of coupons. First of all, be sure to clarify the operational purpose and share it with team members.
An important part of doing business is setting KPIs. By quantifying your goals, you will be able to objectively check the degree of achievement.
KPIs are determined by working backwards from the purpose of LINE operations. It is not recommended to set a sales amount without thinking, as it may be misaligned with the objective.
For example, for after-sales follow-up, set a target of “100% response rate”, or for repeat customer acquisition, set a target of “existing customers who repurchase fat/month”, and so on.
Quantifying your goals will allow you to accurately identify and improve your challenges. You can modify it after starting operation, so please try it.
Let’s set the target customer’s persona (= persona) in detail . For an accurate analysis of user needs.
It doesn’t matter how good your offer is if users don’t find it appealing. High quality is determined by the degree of matching with user needs. If we don’t understand the needs, nothing will start.
Here are some tips for setting up personas
- Examine demographics from existing customer lists to identify characteristics common to many people.
- Identify what kind of life users lead and what they are struggling with.
- Gather real voices by surveying and interviewing users.
Don’t base your personas on fantasy or delusions, but on the characteristics extracted from the data.
Business is a battle for position. Analyze your competitors and formulate your position relative to them.
Let’s pick up about 10 competitors who operate official LINE and investigate the following items.
- What is your greeting message?
- What are their icon and home image?
- What kind of offers are they making?
- What is the frequency and timing of messages?
- What scenario are you trying to get a CV?
Trying to do what your competitors do will not succeed. Let’s fight with weapons that can make use of our company’s strengths in a place where there is no competition (even if there is).
The key is to create a “step-by-step” scenario to achieve the objective.
A person who did not know the existence of the product until a while ago will not be in a state of “I definitely want it!” In most cases, interest gradually deepens over time and leads to purchase.
Please do not make the lead-in flow abrupt, and be sure to design it so that it follows a step-by-step process. If you cannot write well, consider outsourcing.
Incidentally, there are several frameworks that illustrate the “awareness → purchase” stage. Please refer to them.
AIDMA: Attention → Interest → Desire → Memory → Action
AISAS: Attention → Interest → Search → Action → Share
As you continue to use your LINE account, you may find yourself thinking, “Can’t this part be automated? This part of the process is very time-consuming. This is where external tools come in handy.
There are a variety of external tools available for LINE, and you can choose the one that best suits your needs.
Here we will introduce three external tools that can be used for a wide range of industries and are useful for LINE account management.
L step
L-Step is a tool that can do a wide range of things but is particularly strong in “automation” and “analysis.”
Automation allows you to automatically send predetermined messages to each user in turn. The advantage of this feature is that you can send messages tailored to each user, rather than sending the same content to all users at once.
Users can also be segmented with greater precision than usual. Without tools, you can only narrow down by assumption, but with L-Step you can narrow down users based on accurate information.
Elme is a tool that can automate customer attraction and sales promotion. The function itself has a part close to the L step.
The great thing about Elmé is that you can send up to 1,000 messages per month with no initial or monthly fees. Even with the standard plan, you can use all functions for 10,780 yen per month, so it is excellent in cost performance.
We recommend using this for those who want to start using small, inexpensive external tools.
My smart store
Mysmartstore is an external tool that allows you to complete all the procedures necessary for an EC site within LINE, from ordering to purchasing to payment.
You can sell your products at a much lower cost than creating and operating an EC site from scratch.
It has a wide range of functions, so it’s a good idea to get used to it while touching it.
In today’s age of IT in our daily lives, operating an official LINE account is becoming an essential task for companies to survive.
However, there are still many companies that have yet to adopt LINE. Be one of the first to start using LINE and stand out from your competitors.
