Why Your Ecommerce Brand Needs A Weekly Live Shopping Show

As with many things in life, consistency is key when building a name for your brand in the live shopping arena. The world has known for a while now that there is serious selling power in live commerce. The numbers don’t lie—live shopping increases sales and engagement. 

Yes, there is power in running live events centered around sales, launches, and other one-off events. But when you apply that concept to a weekly—or bi-weekly, or even monthly—live commerce show, you give yourself a chance to build a loyal customer base that tunes in time and time again. 

We spoke with our friends at luxury sleep company, Bamblu, to hear more about their experience hosting a weekly live shopping event and learn how they turned going live on Thursday nights into a 6% increase in their gross sales. 

Educate your customers

When owner and founder of Bamblu, Angela Hawkins, decided to give live streaming a go, she knew she wanted to be able to do two things for her customers—educate them and give them an easy way to make a purchase. 

“I wanted to use the opportunity to educate them on the products,” explains Hawkins. And so her weekly live show does that. Yes, Hawkins sells her products during her weekly live shopping shows, but she sells through education. She teaches her customers about her products—from how to use them to how they can help improve their sleep. 

Hawkins even goes so far as to add engagement tactics to her educational content. “I see this as our opportunity to inform and educate our customers and at the end of shows, we take the time to ask comprehension questions. We even use those questions for giveaways. Our audience loves it!”

Build a loyal customer base

Giveaways are a great way to start to build an engaged, loyal audience, but it needs to go deeper than that.

And with an audience that shows up week after week, Hawkins has perfected this. From shouting out customers by name to asking questions, “we make the customer feel like we can see them, even though we can’t actually see them.”

Hawkins and the Bamblu team make a point to engage with their customers by asking them personal questions they can answer quickly in the chat. It centers the customer in the conversation and directly engages with them.

Next time you go live, try out three of their favorites:

• Where are you watching us from?
• How did you find out about today’s show?
• Is this your first time watching?

Hawkins recognizes the importance of showing her customers how much they are appreciated. At the end of every show, Hawkins says, “We are so glad you came, you guys could have done anything else on a Thursday night but you showed up here.”

“Making the customer feel engaged and like we’re glad they’re here is one of the most important things we can do,” shares Hawkins.

Get the word out at the right time

When Bamblu started live shopping events, they leveraged their existing customer base. How? By re-engaging them through emails and text messages sent at the perfect time.

“We create a link to the live show that we share through our text message platform and we send out email campaigns with the same information in it. And we set those to run at the time of the live so that people don’t have to remember to go back. Instead, as soon as their phone buzzes with the text message or the email, that link is live and they can join in the festivities!” 

Your customers will come to expect your events, but as you are getting off the ground, sending your campaigns minutes before you go live is a great way to stay top of mind and increase your event attendees. 

Make purchasing as easy as clicking a button

“I saw a lot of people doing live streaming on social media and then sending the customer to the website. To me that was a prime opportunity to lose the customer. If I was going to go live and give them a path to purchase, I wanted it to be easy,” Hawkins explains. She wanted to make the process seamless—no need to move from screen to screen.

And that’s when Hawkins found Stage TEN and the ability to stream directly on your website and allow customers to purchase right in the video player. Hawkins and Bamblu also go live to Shopify’s Shop App—with Stage TEN easily giving merchants a way to set up a live commerce channel in Shop that notifies your followers when you go live!  

You aren’t worrying about redirecting people from your social to your website to the exact product page. They don’t have to fumble with promo codes. Instead, as Angela says, you give them an easy path to purchase right on your website. “I’m just telling them to click a button tied directly to a sale that I’m talking about. It made it very simple.”

“From the very beginning, [weekly shows] created a consistency with our customers. People were excited to be a part of this new live concept for Bamblu,” says Hawkins. Whether you are a small brand or an internationally-known mega brand, Bamblu is a prime example of why it’s time to create your own weekly live shopping show. 

If your brand is ready to go live and sell every week through conversational commerce, we’re ready to help! Stage TEN is the only platform you need to make an impact in the live commerce space.

Contact us today and let our interactive live commerce experts help you create the best live shopping channel for you—directly on your site!

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