Top tips for designing a successful live commerce campaign Share via

Livestreaming commerce has shown the e-commerce world what brands can achieve using this method to engage with shoppers. Around five years back, what started in China has quickly spread its wings across the United States and many countries in Asia and Europe. Experts believe livestreaming commerce will be the next big thing in the e-commerce space and will transform the way users across the globe interact and shop with brands. According to a study by McKinsey, sales in China through livestreaming commerce are expected to reach USD 423 billion by 2022, giving a glimpse of the channel’s soaring popularity. As brand marketers will look to encash this new sales channel, we list the top tips that will help brands to chart out a successful live commerce campaign.

Choose the right influencer

Getting the right influencer on board who can host your livestream campaign is of utmost importance for brands. Brands should carefully select an influencer who is an ideal fit for the brand and whose followers comprise the marketers’ potential target audience.  Businesses should also check the influencer’s engagement rate and influence on the followers. Finally, determining if they are involved in influencer fraud is also crucial for the campaign’s performance.  Depending on a budget of the marketer and the product category, brands can decide whether they want a nano-influencer to host the livestream who will have fewer but highly engaged followers, or they would like to rope in a mega influencer or a celebrity for the activity, who will be expensive and have a large following but with less engagement.

Select the right platform

Brands looking to run the livestreaming campaign can execute it in two different ways. Either, the livestream platform is integrated with the retailer’s shopping platform or host the campaign on third-party platforms like Amazon, Facebook, or Google. While hosting your live commerce activity on third-party platforms is a much easier task than doing it on your platform, brands will lose control of the overall customer experience. Whereas integrating the live commerce platform with your website will provide the marketers better control over inventory management, carts, customer accounts, and data, which will help brands serve their customers better with remarketing and personalization.

Make it interactive

The ability of livestreaming commerce to showcase the products closely from all angles while describing the goods in detail to the viewers is a strong advantage of this medium. Brands should make sure that their live commerce sessions are engaging and promote two-way communication, which will make it more interactive and impactful for the audience. In fact, one of the biggest strengths of this medium is that it enables shoppers to ask the host anything about the product and get their queries answered in real-time. The role of the host also becomes significant, as they need to know the product inside out to be able to answer the consumer’s queries satisfactorily.

Promote high potential  product

The products that a brand is showcasing during the livestreaming session should be one of the top products in their arsenal and should excite the shoppers. Furthermore, the goods should have some differentiation and USP in their category to drive instant sales during the event. Also, the item should have all those qualities demonstrated to the shoppers during the event. Otherwise, brands should be ready to face many returns and lose credibility in the eyes of the consumers.

Build excitement before the session

Marketers should start building the hype around the livestreaming on their social media channels and through e-mails and app notifications a few days before the actual webcast to get the maximum number of shoppers to join the shopping activity. In addition, designing a pre-event campaign can improve the overall impact of the live shopping event. For example, marketers can ask the influencers to promote the event amongst their followers and leverage the brand’s own platforms to build awareness. The success of a live commerce event depends mainly on the number of users participating and engaging with your initiative.

Giveaways and discounts

To entice the consumers to join your live streaming shopping, brands can promote exclusive giveaways shoppers can get their hands on. Like any other discounts and giveaways, marketers should consider these initiatives as an investment to more users know about your brand and its products. In addition, giving time-sensitive deals during the live event to create a sense of urgency works very well to convert the consumers who would like to benefit from that particular offer.

Livestreaming commerce is yet to become a very effective channel of sales for e-commerce companies outside of China and the United States, but there is no doubt that it has the potential to change the way people shop online in a few years from now. In the other regions, where it is still nascent, brands adopting it sooner and addressing their customers through this channel will have the edge over the competition.