Tips to increase your sales with live shopping

Trying out new marketing models and selling techniques is always a good thing, but before diving headfirst into a new trial, it’s good to familiarise yourself with the things that have been proven to work.

Marketing and selling in the digital age is constantly changing, so you need to stay on top of the wave to stay relevant.

Keeping up with the trends isn’t the only key to success, it’s sometimes more important to find your niche audience that might like different kinds of marketing than the mainstream.

Figuring out your own way of hosting live shopping events on top of the upcoming tips, guarantees your success in the up-and-coming market of live stream selling.

Advertise your upcoming events

This might seem self-evident, but sometimes advertising gets swept under the rug. Holding a live shopping event to a crowd that is a lot smaller than planned might feel unmotivating, and the interaction with the viewers might feel hard and awkward. 

There are plenty of good ways to market your upcoming event, such as social media and ads on your online store. You may even consider email marketing for customers with former orders, who are on your email list.

When advertising your live shopping event, the ad needs to have something that catches the customer's attention, so they will be intrigued and will come to watch the event. These things can be, for example, new product releases or discounts tied to the event.

Interact with your customers

The greatest strength of live shopping events is the chance to interact with your customer base.

The chat feature is one of the most essential parts of live shopping events, right after the video stream of course.

Most, if not all services that offer live shopping have live chats have built into the system. Customers can use this chat to interact with the seller, by asking questions or just talking about their day. Stores with good and close relationships with their customers have much longer buyer-seller relationships.

How much you, as a seller read the chat and interact with the customer base correlates directly with the online conversion rate. Not only the amount of interaction, but also the way you interact with your customers will have an impact on the sales. 

If you the seller, or the people you hired for the job is gloomy and passive-aggressive, your store's reputation might crumble. Of course, every customer base differs greatly from each other, so before making a plan on how to interact with the customers, you should plan your approach carefully. There's no sense being trendy and flashy when you’re selling vacuums to house moms, or being calm and straight to the point when selling luxury fashion to younger audiences.

On top of the live chat feature, some live shopping applications, such as LIVEL also can highlight the products on show on the live event, allowing the customers to easily move them to their shopping cart, whilst they are being shown.

Preparing the highlighted products is a surefire way to help you gain conversions.

The bottom line is: interact, interact and interact.

Offer discounts & free shipping

As I said before in the advertising section of the post, giving discounts for your products during the live event helps the customers to stay interested for the whole duration of the event. For example, you could say in the advertisements, and at the start of the event, that you are giving away discount codes, etc, every 5 minutes or so.

The discounts you give out should be special to the live event, so the customer feels like they have gained something special from following the event.

Some have also started to make offers of free shipping to make the live shopping feel cheaper than normal ordering.

Hire influencers

Most popular live shopping events to date have always had a popular idol or an influencer of some sort presenting the products.

Seeing a “familiar face” selling a product and interacting with fans seems to always work in the favor of the seller. Hiring an influencer also helps the advertising, since you can plaster a popular face on the ads.

Events with influencers not only excite your customer base but also bring in new potential customers, in the form of influencers.

Influencer giants, such as Kim Kardashian, have been seen on many live events already, usually selling their product lines, but also the products outside of their catalog.

The lesson learned

If you were to think of the most important part of having a successful live shopping event, you wouldn’t have just one answer. Some may think it’s about getting the most views, while others think that interaction is most important. Sure having lots of viewers is good, but will they buy anything? Or are they watching only for the show? On the other hand, having a good conversion percentage, might not be all that great if 4 out of 5 made a purchase, instead of 100/500.

Whatever the case is, remember: use the tips given here and study your customer base, to make your live events look like you and your customers, and you will be sure to succeed.