Top 4 Tips to Make Your Livestream Shopping Channel a Success

As the biggest new trend for online retailers – first gaining popularity in China and quickly spreading through the western retail sphere – livestream shopping events are set to become a staple of online shopping.

Driving brand engagement and loyalty while making the online shopping experience more seamless for customers, livestream shopping channel are helping brands boost revenue and grow their relationship with their customers.

You might have decided to implement livestream shopping events into your online sales strategy.

Here are our top 4 tips to make your liveshopping channel a success.

Work with a professional host.

Whether you’re doing a one-off livestream shopping event or kicking off your long-term strategy with a bang, getting a professional host or influencer involved is a great way for people viewing your event to have a good time.

Employing an influencer can also allow your brand to access their follower base and drive traffic to your livestream shopping event. Although in our view, instead of choosing a creator for their follower count, consider their ability to resonate with your brand and audience.

If viewers enjoy the stream and like your products, they’re likely to keep coming back, become loyal followers of your brand, and make purchases during your livestream shopping events in the future.

Entertain and engage.

The most important component of a livestream shopping event is that it’s entertaining and engaging to watch. Otherwise, viewers probably aren’t going to purchase your products and they definitely won’t attend the next livestream.

A good way to engage with your audience is to pick a theme and develop a narrative arc for each livestream. This makes the experience specific and targets a particular consumer need/interest, while ensuring there’s an engaging story to keep them invested in the livestream.

For example, a clothing brand could host a liveshopping event about holiday outfits and take the viewer through the process of choosing their airport outfit, from beachwear to summer nights out and coming back home again.

To boost engagement, you can add interactive elements such as quizzes, Q&As and other gamified experiences to build your customers’ positive associations with your brand.

Offer incentives.

To entice more people to attend your live commerce events, it can be effective to offer incentives, ie a potential reward for viewers to cash in on if they attend the livestream.

This could be a competition, whereby viewers compete in the livestream to win a prize. You could gift them a new product to get them hooked on your merchandise. Or, you could offer viewers a discount code which you can advertise as being revealed in the event.

Alternately, you might decide to reward your livestream’s ‘top engagers’, to encourage viewers to share the event, comment, like and take part in any other interactivity during the livestream, helping to publicize the event and build a sense of community between your customers and brand.

Be consistent.

While a one-off livestream shopping event can help people to find your business and develop positive associations with your brand (as well as boost sales during the event) many businesses are choosing to make live shopping an integral part of their sales strategy.

After all, many believe it’s the future of online shopping. Livestream shopping events are helping online retailers stay competitive in an increasingly saturated market.

If you don’t hop on board, you risk your brand being outdone by competitors who’ve worked to build their community with consistent livestreams that strengthen their relationship with their customers.

To get the most out of livestream shopping, you need to be consistent: give your customers a regular show to look forward to, where they can be entertained, educated and/or excited by the release of new products, all while making purchases with a single click.