Today, in our concept, live streaming has basically become “no live streaming without influencers”. For example, Taobao Live has Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, Kuaishou has Simba and Sanda Ge, Douyin has Luo Yonghao, and there are countless Internet celebrities and stars...

Among them, Huawei's official flagship store achieved a transaction volume of over 100 million yuan 5 days after the opening of the 618 event. The year-on-year growth of the entire product series exceeded 100%, and the sales of products such as tablets more than tripled.

During the Taobao "Live Shopping Festival" on March 21 this year, Estee Lauder's live broadcast room broadcast for 15 consecutive hours, and the transactions brought by live broadcast exceeded 30 times the daily volume. Suning flagship store saw a single-day month-on-month growth of more than 700%.

The Youzhuo flagship store, which sells food products, broadcasts for 15 hours a day. Currently, 25% of the sales of its main products come from the live broadcast room. When the live broadcast effect is good, the daily sales can reach 15,000.

A specialty store selling high-pressure water guns for car washes increased its single-game transaction volume from 10,000 to 13,000 through live streaming.

It can be seen that both brand merchants and small and medium-sized merchants have achieved breakthroughs in sales through live streaming. It can even be said that these live broadcasts by merchants are the real competitors of Li Jiaqi and Viya.

Therefore, in today’s article, we will focus on the Taobao live streaming platform to see the different ways for merchants to sell goods through live streaming.

1. How do businesses get live streaming traffic?

Compared to finding influencers to sell products through live streaming, the biggest advantage of merchants doing their own live streaming is that they can keep the traffic in their own hands, reach out to the audience repeatedly, and make multiple transactions. But at the same time, traffic acquisition is also a major difficulty.

So how do businesses get live streaming traffic?

1) Activation of private domain traffic

The first step is to activate the existing private domain traffic, including on-site and off-site traffic.

① Inside the station

The main purpose of the site is to reach fans who follow the store. Generally, merchants will use the following channels:

First, the various modules of the store. Contains the mobile homepage warm-up poster and the product details page banner preview. At the same time, if the store is broadcasting, the live broadcast entrance will be displayed on the mobile homepage and product details page.

Left: store homepage, middle right: product details page

Second, Weitao. Merchants can post Weitao before and during the live broadcast to activate users who are following the store status.

Third, Taobao group chat. Many businesses will establish their own fan groups or live broadcast fan groups, and they can also reach users through these group chats before live broadcasts.

Left: Weitao, right: Live Fan Group

Fourth, private chat with customer service. As the name suggests, the customer service sends the live broadcast information to the users. However, this method is quite intrusive, and merchants will only use it when they have a major gimmick.

Fifth, fan push. During the live broadcast, merchants can push live broadcast reminders to fans who have subscribed to the live broadcast preview. (However, only 1 reminder can be pushed every day between 8:00-23:00, and each user can receive a maximum of 2 live broadcast reminders per day)

In order to ensure the traffic of the above channels, many businesses will guide the audience to pay attention to the store during the live broadcast, and provide welfare incentives to encourage them to join the live broadcast fan group or become members.

② Outside the station

In addition to reaching fans within Taobao, merchants can also activate fans from private traffic outside the site, including WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou, etc.

Many businesses will guide users to add WeChat accounts and follow official accounts/Weibo accounts. In the past, this may have been for direct conversions in private domain traffic, but now there is an additional way to divert traffic to the live broadcast room.

③ Offline stores

Finally, some merchants with offline stores will attract offline traffic to the live broadcast room.

For example, a tile brand conducted a live broadcast on the day of the exhibition. At the same time, it placed the entrance to the live broadcast room in its offline stores across the country. Offline consumers only need to scan the QR code to directly enter the live broadcast room to receive coupons.

2) Public domain traffic to attract new users

For businesses that do not have enough fans from private domain traffic, public domain traffic is very important.

In fact, even for a store with millions of fans, it is difficult to reach its fans every time it broadcasts live, and it still has to rely on Taobao’s public domain traffic.

There are mainly the following ways.

① Fission

The Taobao live streaming platform provides merchants with a "fission coupon" gameplay. Users who watch the live broadcast can share the live broadcast room. While they themselves receive large coupons, the people who share the coupons can also receive discounts.

The drainage effect of this method is quite good. According to official cases, during this year's 618, Unilever used large coupons + anchor guidance, and the fission traffic accounted for as much as 85% of the total traffic in the live broadcast room.

More importantly, small businesses can also afford this kind of gameplay, so it has basically become the "standard configuration" of merchants' live broadcast rooms.

Including when the operator is live streaming in the WeChat ecosystem, although the platform does not have a function like fission coupons, it can also guide users to share the live streaming room by saying "a prize draw will be held when the number of viewers reaches xxx".

② Live Broadcast

Based on the fission gameplay, merchants can also connect with stores that have similar profiles to their target audience but are not competitors to divert traffic to each other.

By doing so, on the one hand, it is possible to supplement product categories; on the other hand, it is also possible to use live broadcasts to increase the number of viewers in the live broadcast room and other data, thereby obtaining more official reward traffic.

There are many cases of gaining more exposure through live broadcasts. For example, after Master Kong connected to the Honor live broadcast room, the number of viewers of the live broadcast room increased by 260%, the number of new fans increased by 320%, and the store sales increased by 180%.

Image source: Ebang Power

Not only Taobao Live, Douyin and Kuaishou also have the function of live broadcast pk, but it is mainly used to direct traffic to each other.

③ Get free official recommendations

In addition to fission and live broadcast, merchants can also use official rules to obtain official free exposure traffic.

Therefore, merchants need to take various actions to find ways to increase the weight of recommendations for their live broadcast rooms. Including but not limited to improving the anchor level, improving viewing data (live broadcast room clicks, visitor stay time, number of online people, number of likes, number of shares, etc.), improving live broadcast room conversion data (product link click rate, product conversion rate, etc.), etc.

For example, in order to increase the click data of the live broadcast room, merchants will work hard on the live broadcast title and the cover of the live broadcast room.

On the cover, brands with spokespersons will directly use photos of celebrities as the cover.

When it comes to the title, it comes down to copywriting skills. Merchants will generally highlight the benefits directly, or use "dry goods" titles to attract users.

The benefit title is similar to:

Summer New Benefits

0:00 start, 20% off for 3 items

Last day of Summer Craze event

More gifts for ordering in the live broadcast room

A “dry stuff” headline would be something like:

Tips for keeping your makeup long in summer

Recommended must-have shoes for summer vacation

A must-have for oily hair in summer...

For example, in order to increase the number of likes in the live broadcast room, basically all businesses will play the "Like Lottery" game: if you get xxx likes, you can participate in a screenshot lottery.

The anchor of the merchant will repeatedly guide users to like:

We are only 1,000 likes away from 270,000. We will be able to participate in the lucky draw soon, so please like it quickly.

What’s even more clever is that some businesses will take this opportunity to adopt some strategies to increase fans’ loyalty to the live broadcast room.

For example, many businesses’ “likes lottery” offers different gifts for fans of different levels. In this way, core fans can feel more "dignified" and thus be more "loyal" to the live broadcast room. In addition, it can also motivate low-level fans to improve their levels.

④ Paid promotion

Finally, some wealthy businesses will directly spend money to buy platform promotion, and the same is true for Douyin and Kuaishou.

Kuaishou allows users to directly purchase “live broadcast promotion”, while Douyin drives traffic to the live broadcast room by promoting short videos.

Taobao Live can not only gain promotion during the live broadcast, but also release short videos (live explanations) introducing products after the live broadcast.

2. How can businesses achieve live streaming conversions?

In order to increase transaction volume, in addition to paying attention to traffic during the live broadcast, merchants must also find ways to improve the latter two data according to the formula of GMV = traffic x conversion rate x average order value.

So in these two modules, what are the tricks used by merchants in live broadcasts? In fact, we still cannot avoid the three dimensions of "people, goods, and place".

1) Finely segment products and optimize pricing strategies

For most businesses, there is no way to select products in various categories like in live broadcasts by experts or organizations. Most of the time, I sell the existing goods in my store.

Even so, there are still some live broadcast details in terms of goods, rather than simply lowering prices.

Many merchants will divide their products into new models, main models, flash sale models, live broadcast room exclusive models, traffic-generating models, profit models, and even lottery models, and adopt different promotion strategies.

for example:

Traffic-generating products have low prices and high click-through rates, and can be used to attract traffic to your store and boost sales of other products.

Flash sales are used to increase user time (similar to limited quantities of thousand-dollar products with only two-digit prices);

The new models are mainly used to stimulate old users of the live broadcast room, etc.

…

The lottery items are quite interesting. I have seen some merchants offering lottery items by likes before. These items can only be won by lottery and cannot be purchased. The comments are all asking “Can the prizes be purchased?”, which greatly increases the scarcity of the lottery items.

In addition, as we all know, another value point of live streaming sales is "cheapness". In this regard, if merchants blindly lower prices during live streaming, it may affect the normal sales of products.

Therefore, many businesses will offer "discounts in disguise" by giving away additional gifts (especially brand businesses), and repeatedly emphasize during conversions: including the value of the gift, this product is equivalent to a 30% discount.

2) Enhance user trust through live broadcast room layout

In addition to goods, merchants’ live broadcasts can also play to their strengths in the “field”.

For example, in terms of offline scene layout, when brand merchants do live broadcasts, they usually choose the brand logo wall as the live broadcast background, and then put a bunch of their own products on the table, which gives a very strong sense of brand.

Some merchants will choose to broadcast live directly in their own stores, wholesale markets, or even factories, allowing users to see the "source of goods" and enhance users' sense of trust.

3) Marketing tool kit to increase conversion and customer orders

In addition, in terms of the selection of marketing tools, live streaming by merchants is not inferior to live streaming by experts. They can use various strategies to encourage users who have never purchased something to place their first order and encourage users who have purchased something to buy more.

For new fans, merchants generally set up new coupons with no threshold. Some stores will also guide newcomers to follow the anchor and set it as favorite, giving them a larger coupon with no threshold, thereby promoting the first order transaction.

For old users, they will give large discount coupons (including sharing fission coupons) to increase the average order value.

In order to encourage users to shop and bring more traffic to the live broadcast room, some merchants will also use the platform's "10,000-person group" gameplay - the more people join the group, the lower the price of the product.

According to the cases provided by Taobao officials, some merchants used this method to increase their live broadcast transaction volume by 5 times compared to usual.

There are also some clothing and cosmetics merchants who will considerately mark the model's figure, skin color, etc. in the live broadcast room, and use small tools such as "online makeup trial" to help fans make decisions faster.

4) The anchor is professional and considerate, which improves user retention

Finally, there are people, that is, the anchor. Compared with live broadcasts by experts, the presence of the hosts in live broadcasts by merchants is relatively weak, and users are more likely to go to the merchants rather than the hosts.

So in this case, what can the anchor do to help store conversions?

I found that the most important point is that the anchor needs to demonstrate familiarity with his or her own products and enhance his or her professionalism, thereby increasing the trust of fans.

In addition, compared with super influencers such as Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, the number of viewers in the merchant live broadcast room during non-promotional periods may only be a few thousand to tens of thousands, and the interactive messages will not flood the screen.

Therefore, in order to capture every person who may convert, the merchant anchor will interact with fans in a very timely manner.

Including but not limited to:

Welcome new fans when they enter the live broadcast room

When a loyal fan enters the live broadcast room, he/she is welcomed to interact

When there are questions in the barrage, explain carefully

…

After this wave, it is easy for users to have a better understanding of the product and feel that the anchor is professional and approachable, which will make them more favorable towards the brand, and placing an order will be a natural thing.

3. Conclusion

A brief summary of today's article:

At this stage, live streaming e-commerce is no longer a hot topic for many people like it was last year or at the beginning of the year. It is even constantly looked down upon because of problems such as fake orders and big bosses' failures.

However, through this period of "undercover" in the live broadcast rooms of merchants, I found that many merchants will have multiple anchors taking turns, broadcasting from morning to night. Even if there are not so many people watching the live broadcast room, they will persevere in broadcasting live.

From this point, we can also see that even though there are a lot of fake and inflated bubbles in live streaming sales, for merchants, live streaming sales is still something that must be done (and it is also likely to be something that improves efficiency).

It is a tool in the 5G era that allows businesses to reach consumers in a new way. In the near future, live streaming may become a standard way for consumers to learn about products.

Therefore, instead of over-praising or slandering the live streaming sales of goods, it is better to understand it better first.