How to Conduct a Successful Live Stream for Your eCommerce Business

Live streaming is basically as the name suggests streaming a live video over the internet to your potential consumers for buying your products. Consumers understand the product well when it is seen in a video as opposed to pictures. It is becoming crucial that live streamers need to plan appropriately before going live on any platform. So, here we have curated a customizable checklist that will help you plan your next live stream perfectly. Whether you are a beginner or a live streaming expert, this checklist will surely help you while planning your next live stream.

As live streaming is gaining popularity, more and more eCommerce brands use it to engage with their customers. Moreover, with features like selling and shopping during live streaming, the number of live streamers is only going up. The Live streaming industry is expected to be a $70.5 billion industry by the end of the year 2021 by this reference. This checklist covers different points that you should keep in mind while planning a live stream:

1. Deciding the goal and platform for Live stream

This could be done by checking your business’s statistics and confirming whether which platform would yield the most numbers of viewers. Some viewers tend to prefer some applications or services over others. For instance, people might be more inclined to buy your product if you are conducting a live stream on Facebook and the majority of the audience also has access to Facebook. One might get overwhelmed with the number of live-streaming platforms available out there and need to think twice before selecting one because choosing the wrong one might result in many consumers missing out on the sale. Some examples of platforms are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch.

2. Marketing your stream

This is a very crucial part of the successful launch and status. This has a fairly straightforward principle if people do not know that you have a live stream on a particular said date, how are they supposed to show up. Hence your other platforms, such as the FaceBook page, Instagram page, and the official site, should announce it everywhere about the live stream way before the actual date. The actual ratio where people know about your stream to the number of people who actually attend is going to be particularly thin, at least for new franchises aspiring to be big businesses.

3. Essential equipment required on the day of Live stream

Make sure to test out the equipment you will be using for recording and streaming. You do not want to mess up and take up more people’s time just fixing bugs and not showing the actual products. This could be quickly done with anyone, viz. a family member, a friend, a co-worker even. Also, check for the quality of the streaming as blurred-out video of the products will not prove very fruitful in the customers carefully examining the products. The last thing you would want to do is scare away consumers which is very likely to happen if the quality of your video is too poor, or customer support is not on point, etc. Thus, just as actors rehearse before a play, you need to rehearse the entire live stream with someone you know so that on the stream day, everything goes well.

4. CTAs to be taken after the live stream

Call to Action (often abbreviated as CTA) are necessary prompts that can be multi-faceted and can be used not only to complete the buying process but as well as try to take reviews from people who attended the live stream. This would help them understand the statistics as to whether or not the audience liked your live stream or not. It is crucial to keep increasing the quality of your live streams with all the constructive criticism.‍

Hopefully, these pointers help you put your action items in proper perspective and create a successful live stream that proves to be helpful for your business. If you want to dive into the world of conducting live sales on Facebook, check our blog on A Guide to successful Facebook Live Sales.

Originally posted on raftlabs.co