It’s no secret that live selling has emerged as a retail game-changer. As easy as setting up your live sale is, simply showcasing products on a live sale might not yield the returns you’re after.
The secret to higher conversion and revenues lies in human connection, understanding what drives your customers, and insights from those experiences to foster stronger relationships.
This article delves into five proven strategies that can help you optimize your live selling shows to generate more revenue. We’ll guide you through creating hype around your events, enhancing your on-camera presence, engaging with your audience, and much more. Whether you’re new to live selling or looking to elevate your retail game, this is your definitive guide to unlocking even more revenues with live selling.
Proven Tips to Boosting Live Selling Revenue
- Tip #1: Hype Up Your Live Shopping Event in Advance
- Tip #2: Enhance Your On-Camera Presence
- Tip #3: Interact With Your Audience
- Tip #4: Keep It Fun With Games, Contests, and Giveaways
- Tip #5: Go Beyond Your Live Selling Events
Tip #1: Hype Up Your Live Shopping Event in Advance
Your live sale is an event, like a TV show, and you should aim to promote it as such. Market the live sale as if it were a sidewalk sale, Black Friday sale, or a grand-opening event. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, use signage and flyers to tell people when you’re hosting a live sale and where to watch it.
Use the following marketing tactics to build hype for your live sale online:
- Send email blasts and text messages inviting your customers to join the live sale. You can even automate such marketing for better results while saving resources.
- Send push notifications alerting customers about the live sale through your mobile shopping app.
- Use your social media channels to make static posts and stories teasing the sale. Utilize graphics, videos, captions, and hashtags to get more eyes on your content.
- Tease a new product, discount, or giveaway on your social media pages with a promise to reveal it during the live sale.
- Broadcast your live sale to multiple selling channels simultaneously for maximum reach so your followers have multiple ways to shop with you.
Tip #2: Enhance Your On-Camera Presence
Creating a magnetic on-camera presence is much more than just looking the part; it’s about designing a sensory-rich experience that keeps your audience engaged. An engaging host and inviting ambience will get more online and social shoppers to stop scrolling and watch your live streams.
Thus, ensuring your stream is high-quality and inviting is essential. Here’s how to do it right:
- Dress Up Snazzy: Think of your host’s outfit as part of visual storytelling, your products, and backdrop. They’re also the visual embodiment of your brand. As a host, wear clothing that aligns with your brand’s style and personality.
- Create A Beautiful Backdrop: Eliminate clutter, display your products, and dress up your set to align with your brand’s aesthetics to add visual appeal to your live sale. You can even match seasonal holidays to your live selling calendar, too!
- Use A Ring Light: Makeup gurus and TikTok stars know the key to a flattering shot is to distribute the light evenly on the product they focus on. Ring lights diffuse shadows and make videos look more high-definition, enhancing the appeal of both, your live sale host and products.
- Think About Sound: Pick an environment with minimal background noise. Many live sellers also play music during their videos to set the mood.
Note: Choose royalty-free audio to avoid being muted for violating social media and web guidelines.
Tip #3: Interact With Your Audience
The more the host works with the crowd, the more comments will roll in, which helps boost organic engagement on social media and promote more products being sold. Whether it’s the face of your brand, an influencer partner, a hired host, model, or multiple team members, whoever is in front of the camera during a live sale should frequently engage with the audience.
We recommend one team member monitor comments through the chat box and relay questions and responses to the live sale host. This way, the live seller can focus on showing and talking about products while answering questions or giving shout-outs.
Here are a few ways to interact with viewers during the live sale:
- Ask General Questions To Start Conversations: Warm up your audience by asking things like, “What shows are you binge-watching?” or “Who has fun weekend plans?” Encourage viewers to comment, answer questions, and read out funny or standout responses.
- Wait To Start Selling: Don’t start selling until your viewership builds. Start your live sale by introducing yourself and engaging with viewers. Once you have enough viewers, re-introduce yourself, answer questions, and instruct them on how to register and shop before showcasing your products.
- Respond To Product Related Questions: Questions like “Do these jeans have any stretch?” or “Would this look flattering on a girl with curves?” are a great gateway to demonstrating your products on camera. You can share anecdotes that help answer the question or even crowd-source responses from other viewers.
- Keep An Eye On Product Count: You can see the real-time inventory if you’re selling through a live selling platform like CommentSold. When a product count starts dwindling, think of the old home-shopping television show strategy: “There are only a few left!” Letting your viewers know that supply is scarce will encourage more purchases.
Tip #4: Keep It Fun With Games, Contests, and Giveaways
You can see revenue multiply when you provide shoppers with engaging, interactive, and compelling buying experiences across your live selling channels.
Live streams are fun because they’re an effortless way for people to feel connected from a comfortable place. Marrying the fun of shopping and the excitement of competition during your live selling stream can be a winning combination.
Here are a few ideas for incorporating fun activities into your live selling streams:
- Limited Quantity, High Demand: Offer a limited quantity of high SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) items to create a sense of urgency and trigger FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) among viewers.
- Begin with Affordable Options: Start your live selling show by showcasing cheaper items first, allowing viewers to make a purchase without a significant commitment.
- Tempting Discounts: Sprinkle in items with discounts strategically throughout your live selling show to keep viewers engaged and excited. Tease these discounted items to maintain their interest and encourage them to keep watching.
- Fresh Inventory: Ensure that around one-third of your inventory consists of new arrivals to keep the content fresh and captivate your audience with exciting and exclusive products.
- Upselling Opportunities: Curate products that naturally upsell themselves by demonstrating how they can be paired with other items to create outfits or complementary sets. Showcase the versatility and value of your products to encourage viewers to add more to their carts.
Tip #5: Go Beyond Your Live Selling Events
Keep making money and stay connected to your customers, even when your live sale has ended. As your live sale draws close, remind customers to follow your social media accounts, download your mobile app, and visit your website to shop even when you’re not live.
Remind viewers of the date and time of your next live sale, and develop a consistent live-selling schedule to keep products moving.
Here are a few ways to keep generating revenue even after your live selling sessions have ended:
- Repurpose Your Live Streaming Content: Reuse snippets from your live sale for social media, web, and mobile ads to engage and capture new and existing shoppers. You can even advertise the content on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok as entertaining shoppable reels or posts.
- Add Product Previews: You can also turn your live sale product demos into product previews. A cool feature of CommentSold’s platform is it identifies when you show a product on stream and auto-generate product videos you can use on your mobile app or website.
- Post Shoppable Replays: Consider posting shoppable live replays on your website and mobile app. This helps boost engagement and revenue by allowing your viewers to continue watching, browsing, and shopping just like they would on your live sale, even when you’re offline. Shoppable replays always show your current inventory count, so you never have to worry about overselling.
- Incentivize Shoppers To Come Back: Use insights and data to effectively retarget customers with coupons, complimentary gifts, or other special offers on social media, email, and SMS. Integrate marketing automation into your strategy to turn viewers into shoppers, and greet first time customers with enticing offers to turn them into repeat shoppers.
- Keep Your Shoppers Updated: Continue the momentum by holding more live selling events and building up the hype for your upcoming live sales. Use social media posts and stories, or consider going live on social media to grab your shoppers’ attention.
Practice Makes Perfect
Live selling gets easier with practice. The more you do it, the more you understand what makes your shoppers tick, helping you build your online community to attract more customers.
Remember to be consistent with your live sale schedule. Stream at the same time and days to build a viewing habit in your viewers, much like they would for a TV series. Keep an eye on your insights and data analytics to make informed choices about what strategy works and what needs changing. Utilize email and marketing automation to increase your reach on social media, web, and mobile to recapture cart abandonment and incentivize first-time buyers to become repeat customers with minimal effort.
Combined, these strategies will boost your retail revenue and help you engage and capture more customers.
