We started Prehook to help merchants create more personalized shopping experiences for customers.
Ask the shoppers a few questions, learn more about their needs, and recommend a product. Easy, fun, and helpful.
It’s an amazing solution, at scale.....
But there’s one way to get even more personal at scale: live video.
Live shopping uses live video streams to create a human connection in the buying experience.
According to McKinsey, live video shopping could contribute up to 20% of all ecommerce by 2026, if China is any indication of what is to come in the US.
Using existing social media platforms – YouTube, Instagram Live, Facebook, Amazon – potential customers watch people demo and use products in real time, and interact in a way that mimics the real life shopping.
And it can be highly effective from a business perspective:
HIgher conversion rates – up to 10-20% of viewers can purchase, per Shopify
Lower return rates - 40% less likely to return an item than other online shoppers. Livestreaming is an opportunity to educate the consumer, which is why returns are so much lower—they actually know what they’re buying
This week I had a great conversation with Sarah Williams, who is a Brand Educator for T3 Hair Tools, and has done over 100 hours of live streams in the past year.
One of the biggest challenges, and opportunities: if you can combine education, entertainment, and inspiration, you have found a way to connect with your audience and sell effectively.
As an experienced practitioner, Sarah shared her playbook for creating effective live streams:
- How she prepares content and frameworks to run multiple live streams every week - How she effectively tells the brand story and
product story to connect with customers - What tools and equipment she uses now, and what the beginner live streamer needs
With the void of customer data caused by the iOS 14.5 and reduced customer tracking capabilities, quizzes have come to the forefront of customer data strategies.
Essentially, gamifying the shopping experience with a quiz makes for a more fun and engaging shopping experience, while also gathering key customer data points.
DTC brands are using the quizzes to improve:
Data collection
Personalization
Product research and merchandising decisions
Capturing more leads
Simplifying the buying process and decision-making process
This is instrumental in making brands less reliant on advertising channels like Facebook.
Raul Galera is the Chief Advocate at ReferralCandy, the #1 referral program platform online. Referrals are the key for a lot of ecommerce brands, especially as acquisition costs and advertising costs
continue to skyrocket. It’s why brands like Harry’s razors have gathered 100K emails in a single week. In this conversation, Raul and I dive into the strategies that ecommerce brands use to create a good (or bad) referral program. What I loved about this is that Raul is numbers driven. In fact, referral marketing is all about numbers – understanding what profit margins are, what can be offered as a discount or incentive, and how to track the contributions of your referral marketing. Referral Candy has helped over 30,000 customers since its founding a decade ago, with over $10M in annual revenue. What’s even more cool is that
since then they’ve paid out over $300M in referral commissions to clients.
