Digital Horizons
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Digital Horizons
Mastering Live Shopping: Boosting Sales with Urgency and Engagement Strategies
Unlock the secrets to skyrocketing your sales strategy with live shopping—an innovative approach transforming online retail. Ever wondered how to harness the power of social media to democratize traditional sales channels? This episode is your roadmap, featuring actionable insights on crafting compelling live shopping events. From pre-event preparation to content planning and technical execution, we reveal the critical steps necessary to captivate audiences. With real-world examples and compelling statistics, discover how urgency can turbocharge conversion rates and drive sales growth. Prepare to step up your sales game with strategies like creating buzz-worthy countdowns and engaging interactions that keep your audience hooked.
Join us as we unveil the magic behind maximizing live shopping success with time-sensitive deals and exclusive offers that trigger impulse buys. We emphasize the significance of showcasing products in action and customizing discount codes for precise sales tracking. As we explore various industries, you'll see how live selling benefits both products and services while creating valuable marketing assets. Plus, get insider tips for leveraging live streaming during major sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With James eager to test these strategies, this episode promises a treasure trove of ideas to elevate your brand's live shopping approach. Don't miss out on this chance to master the dynamic world of live shopping and turn your viewers into loyal customers.
The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:
James Walker - Managing Director WHD
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous
Because that was probably going to be the most important part, because just switching on your phone and going live and deciding you want to start selling something is probably not going to go the way you want it. Welcome back to Digital Horizons. Today, we are going to be talking about five shopping strategies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think this is an exciting approach to generating sales quickly and engaging your audience, but it's a bit of a challenge for a lot of clients to figure out how to get into it, how to start doing it. So we're going to jump into some approaches of how you can start doing live shopping or going live on social platforms to display and share and show your products for sale.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean I can sympathize with people because that would be like us doing a live podcast. Yeah, and the amount of times we make mistakes and cut out, and go through.
Speaker 1:So I couldn't imagine being like, all right, cool, let's just sit and do this live, yeah, which we may try and do one day in the future, but it definitely would be a I guess it would be a bit of a daunting task to take on. So, by providing a bit of information about why you want to do it, potentially the upside could be worthwhile over the fear of doing it. So a few stats that we have here overall so $50 million was done in 2023, with the projection of 30% increase by 2025, by the end of 2025.
Speaker 2:So a massive volume of sales that are occurring, that's US dollars.
Speaker 1:So conversion rates up to 30%, with 23% of people who are viewed making purchases and then, following on that, 34% of people that are making purchases after the event and 35% of people following the page that they've come across that's doing the live sales event. So this sort of is showing that the power of what this live shopping can look like. And just on Black Friday last year that passed, there was recorded $100 million of sales that went through on Black Friday for the day. So just showing this is just a really powerful channel. But it's not going to be the easiest one to get going. So we're going to run through some strategies about how to get prepared and how you can go about it to make sure you get the most out of going live for shopping.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Some of those conversion figures you shared are really powerful and I guess should be a good incentive to give this a go. They're quite magic in terms of what we'd see from a typical e-com conversion rate from ads or a not a static but a single post of a video. So I think it's definitely well worth trying, and if you can crack the code of how to do it comfortably, then you might gain access to a lot of additional revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess the key to it is the urgency, Because when you're on there you're saying here is a code or here is an offer that is only available while we're live or for the next 24 hours or whatever it is. Typically, if you do your Black Friday sale or whatever kind of sale, normally it's running for a while.
Speaker 1:But if you're only running a sale that is only active for a while. People are watching. Right now you're going to see high conversion rates because there's a level of urgency that you just don't see in other channels.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and look, this isn't a new approach. It's just new to social media like Denos, direct and the live shopping channels and networks. They've worked for decades because of that offer buy now, call now and convert and you'll get this offer before it runs out and you're watching the product be showcased or used, so you're confident in what you're getting and you've got that push to buy now. It's just democratized that shopping channel by making it possible for you to go live on your own network and your own platform 100%.
Speaker 1:So looking at, I guess, getting ready. If you were looking to do your own one, we want to first look at what we're preparing for it, because that was probably going to be the most important part, because just switching on your phone and going live and deciding you want to start selling something is probably not going to go the way you want it. So, making sure that you are prepared, so you're going to be planning out your content, making sure that your setup is correct, like, do a trial, make sure that, yeah, everything's working, because the last thing you want to do, because the next point, is make sure you've got you're announcing it. That's going to happen as well. Yeah, so you don't want to go through the process of all right, cool, building a bit of hype and say, hey look, we're going to run this live sales event, it's going to be on x day, and then you go turn all the shit on and then nothing works.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1:So, having a bit of a plan, have a test run, trial it. Make sure the things are going right, plan the content that you're going to do, make sure you've got coupons, make sure you've got landing pages and links and everything else that you need to make sure you can capture sales, test them, make sure they're working and then for the lead up, build some hype around it. Make sure there are posts going. People know that, hey, on this date, at this time, be ready, because we are going to be offering something special to our customer base and ideally, that's going to give you the ability to actually attract people on there, because the more people that join, the more people that share it, the more people you're going to have join your overall live and generate more revenue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so one of the tips we've got here is create a countdown. It isn't ideal to just hope that the going live will attract everybody. You want to have people waiting for it or gearing up for it or ready to convert, but they're just waiting to see what offers are going to be promoted on this live stream.
Speaker 1:That's right, and we are finding, though, that the channels are really promoting live videos, because they are wanting people to do it more and because it's a really underused function of the social media channels. So if you do go live, you can expect to get so much more reach than what you would get on a typical campaign or typical post.
Speaker 2:One other suggestion for planning is it's going to be okay to repeat a bit of your demonstration, but don't just have two to three minutes worth of content or things to talk about. Practice and plan out how you're going to demonstrate it. Say, if it's a block of knives, let's say you've got different things to be using different ways of showcasing the product, and then create a series of client or customer questions that you can have ready in case no one asks you anything. So you can start sort of be hitting those FAQs and have your promos ready, your client questions ready, your sort of key product information ready to go, and then run through and see how long it takes you and then how you can vary it if you do another demonstration.
Speaker 1:That's right and from tests and from what the strategies we've seen, work is normally around 40 minutes or more is what you want to be hitting. You don't want to just be on there for three minutes because by the time you get on there, no one's just showing up and then you're done. Nothing's going to work there. You need to have an extended period because you need people to be on there. They need to be engaging, need to be asking questions and getting people involved, because this is what's then going to attract more people to watch and build the audience.
Speaker 2:No, that's good. Okay, so at least 40 minutes. The next one? We've hinted at it, but it's offers and exclusive deals that are only available for that period of the live stream, yes.
Speaker 1:So make sure it's time sensitive. Don't just go out with your welcome 10 promo code on your live stream because everyone is going to know that that's going to expire never. So make sure you have very specific offers that you are offering throughout and that are really going to end, because you want to have that thing. So if you want to do this again in a future time, you want people to believe that hey, I am only going to be able to get access to this, and this could be product bundles, it could be discount codes, it could be upsells, it could be all kinds of things that you can do to add value. But you need to make sure it's limited time and you need to make sure there is value and good value to your customers that they're going to want to purchase within a short timeframe. It needs to be an impulse buy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I think having a custom discount code allows you to track how many sales you got specifically from that live stream. So if it's like live 30 for a 30% discount, you can see wow, that's the outcome of the activity that we were just running online. Yes, the next tip is to showcase the products in action. It's really a demonstration and a proof that the product works, does what it says it'll do on the box, gives people the confidence in whatever your product is so that they can feel comfortable impulse buying it and this goes back to what you mentioned before about having some questions ready.
Speaker 1:but ideally you want to get people to engage and ask questions within your comments, because that's going to give you the ability to then, I guess, get in front of any objections people might have to purchasing. And if you've got them preloaded or you've got friends or family or whoever that can get on just to ask those questions, if you know that they are things that people may want to know about your product or may stop people from purchasing, make sure you've got them lined up so you can answer them and address them on the live feed.
Speaker 2:Moving into interacting with your audience. So this is a really important part of the live selling platform. You should have either an iPad or a laptop or the phone there, with the viewers, comments or questions popping up, so you can tackle those. In the moment I saw a really good live feed from a property buyer who was actually looking at everyone's comments and now putting in their ideal property investment address and asking him to grade it or judge it.
Speaker 2:Some people had just bought an investment property, others were thinking of buying an investment property somewhere, and he would get the address and go all right, I'm going to do this address first, that address next, and then he would go through and do his approach of here's what I think about that property. Here's its growth rate over the last 10 years. It's potentially maxed out. I would or wouldn't buy it, and here's why Next one. So it was very interactive. People are getting really excited. They're wanting to put their own addresses in there to see what he thought. And he didn't have an actual product to sell, it was services, but it was just showcasing how well that engagement with the audience can keep a live audience there and wanting to see what he talks about next.
Speaker 1:Well, when we're talking about live shopping here, whilst I guess the first thing think of is you're down as direct in any of these kind of shopping channel things, but this is definitely not the case, because anything from a service-based to digital products, to anything that can be sold on an offer in a short time period For example, for a digital marketing agency like ourselves we could be there doing audits of ad accounts, we could be doing website audits, whatever it is, and that's going to create some interaction with people, just as your real estate example there was, and then, at the end of it, have, all throughout the thing, have an offer of hey look, if you want to work with us, we're offering X deal for this period. Sign up now. This can be used for all different services or all kinds of businesses across social media platforms.
Speaker 2:And I think to reiterate that little bit of fear that I just got in my stomach at the thought of doing a live for my agency. I can imagine it's a really hard thing to overcome for, you know, people with products and wanting to try this thing. I just thought about going live then and going, oh God, imagine auditing something, live or yeah.
Speaker 1:And you spend a lot of your day doing a bit of sales. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's just my usual day-to-day job, so yeah.
Speaker 1:So once you've finished, once you've gone through your live process, you need to make sure that you're saving a version of this.
Speaker 1:I feel like it would be a big waste if you hadn't done this and being prepared to do that and make sure you don't just hit the button that deletes it, but then promote it Like this is something that you can use again and again, even for if you plan to do this again, you want to make sure that you have something to promote it. So you could be like hey look, this is our last one. Look at all these people that joined, Look at all this great offers and stuff that we went through.
Speaker 2:So that way you can use it as promotional material for your next one. Yeah, and look, and if you're starting out with lives and you don't get a huge volume of people on the live, at least you're going to have an asset that you can use for ads later. That's right.
Speaker 1:So you're to understand how did this actually have as a performance campaign? Because really that's what it is for generating sales for your business and then being able to learn all right, well, maybe we sold more of X, we spent too much time on this other product that no one even wanted, maybe this offer wasn't strong enough. But having a look and analyzing what it is that you did, what worked, what didn't, and then making sure for the second one or the following ones, that you are continually optimizing and improving, yeah, 100% agree.
Speaker 2:And I think having a custom offer code but also monitoring the uplift in sales. Like some of those stats you gave, people were buying well after the live had ended, you know, in the days and weeks following. So monitoring the uplift in your sales following that even not on the promo code because it would have expired and making sure when you can integrate your live platform, whether it be Meta or TikTok with your shopping platform, you do have that sort of cross-domain tracking or that ability to track. Tiktok Shop isn't live here in Australia yet, but you can still go live on that platform and do live shopping demonstrations. You don't need to wait for TikTok Shop to get that tracking integration. So definitely make sure you're ready to review the process and say, well, was it a success? But don't get disheartened after the first one.
Speaker 1:You've sort of got to build up the muscle of doing this live activity and you'll get better and better as you go on, I think, yeah, and being that when we're releasing this, it's currently February, but thinking about well, this Black Friday stats was unbelievable.
Speaker 1:So, I guess if you have the opportunity to be able to do it a few times in the lead up to the big sales events at the end of the year, this could be a really strong part of your strategy when it does come to Black Friday, cyber Monday, weekend yeah, really taking advantage of it and drawing the most out of that Black Friday weekend.
Speaker 2:All right, well, that's going live and selling with live streams. I wonder if we're going to try that soon.
Speaker 1:James, I'm definitely going to give it a go. I'll wait till you do it. I'll find something to sell them. We'll give it a go and we'll run an offer and see how it goes and we'll report back on that Cool We'll be back with brand news.
Speaker 2:That's it for Digital Horizons this week. Thanks for watching, cheers.