How make Live streaming sale revolutionize your business in 9 tips?
Since the advent of live shopping in Asia, Europe is talking about live streaming for sales. Is this a fad or a sustainable profitability?
What is live selling?
Live selling consists in organizing an event caught on video and broadcasted by a live data stream to an audience. The difference with live television is that online live event are often coupled with an online chat that allows viewers to interact with the moderators of the event.
Live sales, especially on platforms like Live Me Up, also allow a company moderator to project the products being shown onto the videostream so that they can be clicked on and added to the cart. Live selling is therefore the possibility of introducing,talking about and making purchases to a community of viewers, who may alreadybe customers or future customers.
It is also the opportunity to mix events with business, and to give transparency to a brand's speech. For example, the live events can be animated in a store but also in a warehouse or any other placethat would allow the brand to say more about its products, its values, its way of working.
Benefits of live selling
The benefits of live selling are :
- create an animation about the brand, make sure that the brand shows its energy. Today, customers tend to quickly disengage from a brand that doesn't talk to them regularly on social networks, so you need to find away to reach out to communities.
And classic advertising is not always appreciated by customers, because it is too thoughtful, not spontaneous enough.Live selling is a new way to quickly create content that lasts: because Live MeUp's live events are automatically converted into replays after each live event! - Another benefit of live selling is the chance to show products in a different light, and to make it easier for people to want them.
Customers buy products they can see themselves in. Let's take a dress: our customer will be more inclined to buy this dress if she sees it being worn andif she receives advice on how to match this dress with the right shoes and bag. - This is indeed a third benefit of live selling: to be able to bring, in person, a set of advices to buyers. Customers need to be advised to make the right choice or to choose what is best suited to their needs.
In a physical store, a salesperson will also be an advisor. Online, it is difficult to find the right advice. The reviews of other customers can help but they are not specifically adapted to the customers and sometimes do not answer precisely to their questions
Live selling platforms: Social media, third-party networks, or owned channels?
The point of social networks is to create a personal link with the audience. How do brands become love brands? Of course they have visibility and virality, but this virality is based on the emotional link that the brand creates with the people who tune in.
So social networks are a solid base to help you create your community. But in your marketing strategy, you can't write your strategy based on social networks only. The algorithm changes, and your content disappears in the news feed.The best strategy for you is to cross the algorithms: by crossing the social networks and the search engine algorithm (Google, bing, baidu) you will secure your strategy.
But how to do it? How to place engaging content, which develop your community and visible from the search engine? The answer to this question: your website!
Your content, to be visible from the search engine, must be placed on your website. It is therefore recommended to place your livestreaming platform directly on your website, your own channel. This way, your site is the core of your transactions and you also involve the SEO strategy since the contents attract people who spend more time on it (it takes more time to watch a live or a replay than a product picture). Finally, SEO attracts regular traffic over time.
9 live selling best practices andreal-life examples
1. Use live selling for pre-launch promotion
What a stress to launch a new collection: will the customers be there, will they like the new products? How to take the least possible risk and bet on the product that will sell right away? How to manage stocks, should we take less stock on a product that we think will sell less?
In the end, how to manage the stocks to have sufficient quantity and not to disappoint the buyers who would not find the product anymore? So many questions that these merchants ask regularly. But live selling is a way to answer these questions!
Indeed, during a live eventdedicated to the launch of future collections, show your prototypes or drawingsand ask your audience for their opinion. Better yet, if you have theopportunity, organize a live event to co-create the future collections withyour community.
This way, there's little risk of being mistaken about yourcustomers' tastes!
2. Create a community
The key to your future revenue is your community. Previously, brands didn't care about creating communities, they had customers that they gathered into personas.
But today's customers want to share more with brands.Hence the birth of communities. The community gathers individuals with commoncharacteristics, but the main feature is communication.
A community requires to communicate with the brand regularly, it is a link that is maintained. Live allows you to do this quickly and efficiently.
3. Move to owned live shopping
The best way to switch to live shopping directly on your siteis to study the possible extensions for your CMS.
If you have a woo commerce or even a Prestashop, many add-ons exist to improve your site, you will often find them on the marketplace of your CMS.
If you are on Shopify, you will also find plugins on the app store, that's where you will find our app. With one click, you can install it and then you just have to launch your own live events!
4. Leverage the power of influencers
An influencer often allows sales to take off in a business, while giving a certain image of the brand. The live is the natural habitat of the influencer (!) who most often addresses the community live or slightly delayed, in his/her stories for example. It is therefore not useless to think of influencers to leverage in a live shopping strategy. These influencers will allow their community and yours to meet and will also support the brand image you want to strengthen.
5. Capture emails before the live selling event
Live selling also allows you to strengthen your e-mailing strategy. If you have an effective marketing strategy, you already have adatabase in which you have all of your customers and their contact details.
These contact details are practical for informing about the status of orders but also for transmitting a whole set of information, about new collections, promotions, back in stock, etc.
Signing up for the newsletter has long been known as a means of collecting emails, but customers are no longer as willing as before to give their email to receive the newsletter.
They would be much more so if it is a question of receiving an email alert before the start of a live event or if you have to enter your email to attend a VIP live! Live selling therefore allows you to recover a whole set of emails to enrich your database!
6. Use live giveaways to boost the reach
You certainly know giveaways! Giveaways are also a good way to make more people want to attend your live events.
You can even combine the contest and the collection of email addresses, by asking the people present during the live to send you an email to participate in the contest!
Also : give a limited time of participation, during thelive only, and this, in order to motivate the spectators as much as possible!
7. Engage customers to get traction
Most companies that start live streaming sales often wonder how to create a snowball effect in and out of live. In the live event, how to engage people and afterwards, how to make sure that viewers come back to attend new live events.
The answer is simple: create engagement. How ? Ask the viewers questions, ask them if they like the product showed, how they would associate it with others (for example, for clothes) or how they would use it (for example for cosmetics).
It is very important to create this link to create a traction effect in your strategy.
8. Scale sales via live stream shopping
Here it is a fact that we are going to present: we are Live me Up, a live shopping platform embedded on your site and downloadable in one-click on the shopify app store. And we have observed this with absolutely all of our customers: some are in the sports, horse riding, fishing accessories, fashion, beauty, creative leisure sectors.
Absolutely all witness, as their live events progress, a scale effect of their sales. They have more and more sales, more and more viewers, more and more people talking in the chat, more and more people liking their products.
There is a real scaling effect. It is visible during the live shows but also on the replays: it is not uncommon to see, more than 6 months after the broadcast of a live, 9 times more views on its replay! Which is great foryou, because your content continues to earn you sales without any extra effort on your part.
9. Embrace shoppable streaming across platforms
Now that you have all the elements at your disposal, test an app that will help you achieve your goals!
