It’s safe to say that e-commerce companies always have to get creative with their marketing. From managing ad spends to influencer campaigns, the marketing team a D2C darling stays busy.
Every marketer’s dream is to find the one channel none of their competitors are using to create scalable campaigns that will convert customers at profitable margins. Enter live selling.
Live selling uses video live streaming technology to produce online shopping events that allow companies to create unique digital shopping experiences for their customers.
Its popularity started to surge in the U.S. during the pandemic and it’s only getting bigger. Here are five companies currently doing live shopping events and actionable insights you can take from them.
1. CAIA Cosmetics
As with any event, promotion and build up is key to a successful live shopping launch. You can’t just go live and have no agenda, script or advertisement of your live events. You need to train your customers so they know there is a specific time to experience the event that can’t be missed. FOMO is real and you need to heighten that.
CAIA Cosmetics knows this, and founder Bianca Ingrosso embodies such by leading scheduled makeup tutorials. Go to their website here and you will see a page dedicated just to the day and time of their next event.
Insight: Treat your online event like an in-person one.
2. Mallows Beauty
When you are a B2C company, your first marketing goal should be to figure out where your target customers reside. Is it in community forums? Is it at a retail mall? Is it on social platforms? Whatever the answer is, once you figure it out, you now know where to distribute your marketing efforts.
Mallows Beauty, a cosmetics upstart founded in 2020, figured out early on that their vegan, body-positive product line would align with the Gen-Z audiences who scrolled TikTok and Instagram all day. A quick scroll of their social content immediately demonstrates their understanding of the type of content their target customers want to see. The success is evident. Founder Laura Mallows recently shared that her company earns more revenue during a 2-hour live shopping event than her retail store earns in a week.
Insight: Identify the type of content your customers would enjoy.
3. Snug
E-commerce is hard. There’s no debate about that. Because you can’t see your customers face-to-face every day like retail stores can, it’s easy to forget why someone is most likely online. It’s to be entertained.
Snug, a DTC sofa brand, has embraced social commerce from the get-go. They know that having a strong brand identity and producing live shopping events can’t just be seen and treated as a sales tactic. Consumers want to be entertained, and they’re more likely to purchase an item from you if you entertain them than if you share product information.
In fact, Snug went so far with that mindset that a recent live shopping event included performances from iconic 90s British boy bands Blazin’ Squad, Blue and 5ive. That event generated over 700,000 live views.
Insight: If you want your brand to stand out, make sure your live events do as well.
4. Quivr
Goals are important and so are making sure they are in sync with the tactics you are employing. You wouldn’t run Facebook ads to increase retention just like you wouldn’t buy email lists and employ email marketing strategies for top-of-funnel awareness. The same concept is true for live shopping. You need to identify who your event is for, what you are trying to achieve, and how you are going to measure the campaign.
For Quivr, a Boston-based tea and coffee producer, their goals for live shopping events were always for sales conversion. Experimenting with IG Live and TikTok, they found Amazon Live to be the place where that goal would be met, which makes sense since Amazon users are generally looking to purchase immediately on the marketplace giant’s website. Quivr co-founder Ash Crawford shared that a live event hosted by him on Amazon Live will directly increase sales by over 150% for 24 hours after the event concludes.
Insight: Align your live shopping event, goal, and platform to make sure each event is a success.
5. JCPenney
In today’s digital world, relying on just one channel to acquire customers is nearly impossible. That doesn’t mean it’s undoable, but omnichannel strategies tend to work better as a group of levers that support each other in a company’s overarching marketing strategy. Live shopping easily integrates with other channels such as social and influencer marketing to create comprehensive campaigns
Retail giant JCPenny embodies this mindset in their live shopping tactics. As a seller of many categories, they recognize that certain influencers are stronger for some than others so they alternate live shopping event hosts dependent upon the category of products being sold.
Insight: Live shopping can be used to enhance other marketing strategies already being employed.
Hopefully this article gave you some inspiration on how to bring your company and live shopping together.
As the behavior of consumers continues to shift, brands’ marketing plans need to shift with them. Live shopping brings the retail floor to your customer’s computer or cell phone.
If you would like any questions about live shopping, please reach out to us at sales@reactive.live.
