Unlocking the Power of Shoppable Video: Best Practices from the Gaming and Entertainment Industry

With conversion rates up to 10x higher than e-commerce alone, the power of shoppable video should not be overlooked. But what exactly makes shoppable video such a powerful tool, and more importantly, how can it benefit your specific business? In this article, we will delve into the mechanics of shoppable video, exploring the reasons behind its remarkable success and uncovering the formula that drives its effectiveness. By understanding how and why shoppable video works, you can unlock its potential in your own business. Let’s break it down next.

What is shoppable video?

First things first, let’s define what we’re talking about.

Shoppable video is a form of interactive video that revolutionizes the online shopping experience. It allows viewers to shop directly while they watch, creating a virtual storefront within the video itself.

Research shows that highly engaged consumers spend 60% more in each transaction.

Here’s why:

Compared to traditional e-commerce, shoppable video offers a whole new level of live interactive shopping offering inspiration, information and more, while facilitating interactive dialogues via chat and Q&A. But that’s not all — when you add gamification to the mix, the excitement and engagement reaches new heights. Livery offers a unique range of interactions and tools, giving you the ability to unlock this high level of engagement throughout your live show with ease.

How to apply this to your own shoppable video strategy

As you can imagine, we have a lot of experience turning viewers into customers and have boiled it down into a simple and easy-to-follow formula. We took what worked in the gaming and entertainment industries and created a blueprint for a show that maximizes entertainment, engagement, and conversion. By using best practices from these industries as a guide, you can transform your customers’ online shopping experience into an engaging and fun-filled adventure.

The combination of video, interactivity, and shopping creates a momentum that surpasses what static commerce can achieve. And when shoppable video incorporates limited-time offers, auctions, and exclusive editions, the excitement and urgency soar even higher. It’s a winning formula that amplifies the power and impact of shoppable video, leaving traditional methods in the dust.

With Livery’s out-of-the-box interactions and a scalable live video solution, you can create a live shopping strategy where you entertain, activate and trigger the audience into taking action in no time. Crafting the perfect mood to turn your viewers into customers has never been easier.

We fully stand behind this winning formula, which we’ve called the Livery Live Method. You can learn and harness the secrets of the Livery Live Method step-by-step through our FREE BLUEPRINT.

The advantage 0f having access to a big audience

One of the most influential ingredients for making your interactive live shopping strategy successful is having access to a big, or very well-targeted audience. While anyone can benefit from a live shopping strategy, it’s no secret that the biggest successes will come from brands, retailers, and media companies that already have a big reach or influence.

When we say, “big reach” we mean a brand or influencer with an existing customer base or following, which provides a ready-made audience for your live shopping events. With an established reach, businesses can tap into their loyal fan base, who are already familiar with the brand and its products, resulting in a higher likelihood of engagement and conversions during the livestreams. For smaller brands, we recommend partnering with aligned influencers (those that have your target market as their following) or well-established complementary brands to help boost attendance and interest in your show.

Live shopping through Livery for any brand helps to establish trust and credibility, enables effective product promotion, and facilitates data-driven customization. With the possibility of tapping into your audience on your terms, you can set yourself free from other (social) platforms and instead, keep monetization and data in your own hands. With an effective live shopping strategy through Livery, you create a win-win situation for both your business and customers.

What business goals do live shopping videos support?

A live shoppable video strategy is not just about creating engaging content and interactive experiences. Fully leveraging this new generation of technology creates a powerful tool that can support a wide range of your business goals, helping you build a better and stronger brand long-term.

Let’s explore some of the key objectives that a live shoppable video strategy can support:

Sales

The first and most important objective we’ve touched on quite a bit already: sales. By implementing an interactive live shopping strategy, you can engage viewers on a deeper level, driving them to make quicker (and bigger!) purchases.

But how does engagement turn a profit?

An object in motion stays in motion. Imagine someone clicking interactions throughout your show, and you pop a shoppable item into the mix. They’re already leaning forward in their seat, engaged in the content, & actively clicking, so it’s easy and natural to click on it too. The combination of interactive livestream events and Livery’s embedded shoppable elements creates a seamless buying experience, leading to increased sales and revenue for your business.

Brand strengthening

With live shoppable video, you have the opportunity to create amazing and unforgettable experiences for your audience. This is a hard-to-beat benefit of live shoppable video. By offering once-in-a-lifetime deals, exclusive products, and captivating content, you can strengthen your brand’s reputation and leave a lasting impression on viewers. It’s a chance to showcase your brand’s unique value proposition and build a loyal community of customers who have tangible brand memories to reflect on.

Customer acquisition and reach expansion

A live shoppable video strategy enables you to tap into your existing community and attract new customers. Through captivating and interactive content, you can draw in a wider audience and expand your reach with a warm audience over time. With the ability to showcase your products or services in an engaging way, you can capture the attention of potential customers, incentivize word-of-mouth sharing, and convert them into loyal brand advocates.

Let’s explain this using an example:

One of our customers offers their community weekly free-to-play bingo games. These livestreamed events drive engagement and give their most loyal customers access to exclusive ‘Super Deals.’ Their weekly players talk about their experience with friends, colleagues, and family who inevitably join the next stream, boosting their reach and active engagement.

In addition to attracting new customers and boosting sales, these live sessions strengthened their existing community and brand reputation. (Check out this video to learn more)

Data collection and insights

The benefits of your live shoppable videos don’t stop when the cameras quit rolling. The data you generate and get to keep is the gift that keeps on giving, making your long-term sales trajectory stronger each time you host one.

Interactive features like polls, votes, estimates, and product ratings create valuable data about your customers’ preferences and behaviors. By collecting real-time high-quality data through your live shoppable video events, you can gain deep insights into your audience’s interests, needs, and buying patterns. This data can then be used to enrich customer profiles, generate personalized offers, build loyalty programs, and improve conversion and retention rates.

Competitive advantage

If you live in the Western world, you’re still early to the game. This means implementing a live shoppable video strategy sets you apart from your competition. By embracing this innovative approach, especially when incorporating best practices from the gaming and entertainment industry (as detailed in our blueprint), your brand benefits from its perception of adaptability, creativity, and willingness to provide innovative experiences to your customers. This competitive advantage can help you attract and retain customers in a crowded marketplace.

LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW LIVE SHOPPING SUPPORTS YOUR BUSINESS GOALS IN OUR FREE BLUEPRINT

Who is shoppable video good for?

Genuinely, anyone can benefit from a shoppable video strategy. Whether you’re B2B selling conference tickets, software subscriptions, etc., or a B2C company selling consumer goods, there’s a creative shoppable videoo strategy out there for everyone. But there are definitely industries that will experience a higher ROI than others. Those tend to fall into traditional ecommerce categories.

Here are some examples of types of businesses that are particularly well-suited to leverage the power of live shopping with Livery:

Fashion and apparel

The fashion industry thrives on visual appeal and storytelling. Live shopping allows fashion brands to showcase their latest collections in an immersive and interactive way (maybe alongside an influencer or two). Viewers can see the fits in real time, ask questions, and make purchases effortlessly, enhancing the overall shopping experience.

Beauty and cosmetics

Live shopping is an ideal platform for beauty and cosmetics brands to show product usage, share beauty tips, and engage with their audience. Incorporating interactive elements like Q&A sessions and live demonstrations can help to rapidly build trust and encourage quick purchases.

Home decor and furniture

Live shopping offers a unique opportunity for home decor and furniture businesses to showcase their products in real-world settings without a public showroom. Viewers can witness the products’ quality, assess size, see how they fit into different spaces, and get expert advice live on air. This visual and interactive experience enhances customer confidence and increases the likelihood of purchase.

Consumer electronics

Another excellent fit — the consumer electronics industry. Live shopping lets them demonstrate product features, provide live product comparisons, and address customer questions on the spot. The interactive nature of live shopping helps build trust and empowers viewers to make informed decisions about their tech purchases.

Food and beverage

Live shopping can also bring a unique and engaging experience to the food and beverage industry. Especially those with shippable products. They can host interactive cooking sessions, wine tastings, or mixology classes. (One of our customers did just that, and you can see the results here). Viewers can participate in real-time, ask questions, and purchase the featured products without leaving the fun.

These industries just scratch the surface of what’s possible, but we hope they got your gears turning thinking about how to leverage shoppable video in your business. Next, let’s talk about how to make sure your live shoppable show is a success.

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How to craft a successful live shoppable video strategy

The businesses that succeed with their live shopping video channel will do so through careful strategic planning that considers things like:

Your mix of channels

Take a look at your current marketing channels to see how naturally live e-commerce will fit today, vs. how you can make it fit in the future. If your advertising is mostly through online channels like email, word-of-mouth, or social media, you’ll naturally have a great fit with live shoppable video commerce. If your advertising strategy is mostly based on foot traffic, in contrast, you may have a harder time getting people to show up for your live streams without careful action steps.

In summary, you’ll need to find the right balance and integration between various sales and communication channels, such as e-commerce, shoppable video, in-store, social media, and pop-up shops. Each channel has its strengths and weaknesses, and strategically incorporating a shoppable video channel into your omnichannel strategy can provide a significant competitive advantage.

Data and personalization

The next piece considers the content of the show itself. Customers today are looking for personalized experiences with the brands they love. Shoppable video will put you well on your way to that goal, as it offers insights into your customer profile you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

To lean into this mindset, you can add gamification elements like polls, trivia, and product ratings to incentivize each viewer to take strategic action. Each response they enter gets saved to each viewer’s individual profile. This allows you to better personalize your targeting for them in the future with interest-based offers and discounts. As such, to get the most out of the data you collect, you should consider carefully the content and composition of the show as you plan your video story/timeline.

Live commerce on social video platforms

You also need to consider your audience and how loyal and/or motivated they are. For companies that have limited access to their target audience, for example, leveraging existing audiences on social video platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook for live commerce may make sense. The paid advertising options on these platforms can attract a larger number of viewers.

The downside of that is that it comes with certain limitations in terms of business models, advertising rights, transaction costs, and data collection. If you have a motivated audience (for example, a good social media engagement rate, high email open rate, strong blog or click-through rates, etc.), having your live shoppable video on your own platform or website through Livery makes a lot more sense.

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How live shoppable video compares to brick-and-mortar

It’s no secret, brick-and-mortar offers advantages to retailers that are hard to match online. Namely that customers can feel, smell, or taste your product(s). With that said, it’s about as close as online customers can get to that in-person experience.

With Livery’s extensive list of ready-to-use interactive features, customers can interact with you in real time, ask questions you can answer directly, see and sense the product in a way photos can’t offer. They can also make impulse purchases and add-ons without leaving the stream. It also offers a quick way to make your audience feel informed, cutting down the research portion of the buying experience and improving/speeding up conversion. (Source) So if you’re looking for the closest possible thing to brick-and-mortar without the overhead, Livery’s live shoppable video is worth a try.

If you already have a brick-and-mortar location, don’t count it out. Live shoppable video also has the unique ability to amplify the benefits of physical stores.

While the physical store offers the sensory experience and instant availability of products and services, shoppable video can leverage the experience at a scale physical stores could only dream of. With our easy-to-use and end-to-end solution, you can reach millions in an instant.

Your creativity is truly the only limit to leveraging this new generation of technology. Feature experts and famous influencers in larger-scale events catered to your audience, or offer unique limited-edition products. By providing an exclusive and compelling shopping experience, you can create a loyal customer base beyond just those who live near your outlet.

Examples: case studies

We have worked with companies across the industry spectrum, and have pulled some of our favorite examples of how e-commerce companies have created events you can replicate for yourself:

1. Trade marketing: Create informative live sessions where experts share insights about new products or specific product categories. They can compare features, explain best use cases, and allow viewers to ask live questions through Q&A or chat.
2. Cyber sales unpacking event: Organize unpacking events during cyber sales events where you showcase new products, like electronic gadgets. The combination of product suspense and exclusive offers can create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) and make these events incredibly popular and effective (click here to get a feel for how that looks).
3. Big release party: Introduce “3–2–1 Launch!” — a worldwide live streamed release party format. This platform provides renowned artists, developers, designers, inventors, and creators with an interactive stage to connect with their global fanbase and unveil their latest work. You can incorporate in-stream shopping for unique limited edition or newly released items, and including special features or big names can further amplify the “fear-of-missing out” effect with your viewers.
4. Tasting games XXL: This interactive format combines online gaming and real tastings, focusing on discovery, knowledge, DIY workshops, and e-commerce. Participants receive a tasting box before the show, taste different products during the live event, and engage in trivia and rating games for a chance to win prizes. This format is scalable, making it enjoyable with thousands or even millions of players.
5. National Wine Quiz: Host a live wine tasting battle event between two in-studio teams, with the at-home audience actively participating by answering the same questions and tasting the same wines. This interactive quiz not only generates new sales but also helps improve the tasting profiles of customers (their quiz data is saved to their individual profiles), enabling better targeting and conversion in the future. You can apply similar quiz formats to other products like beer, cheese, and more. (Click to get a sense of how that could look for your business).

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The Livery Blueprint: pulling it all together

Are you ready to unlock the full potential of shoppable video events and take your business to new heights? We have a special resource that will guide you every step of the way. Introducing the Livery Method Blueprint — a free and intensive guide that reveals the secrets to creating shoppable video events that work.

Whether you’re aiming to boost sales, strengthen your brand, collect valuable data, expand your customer base, or enhance the overall customer experience, a well-executed live shoppable video strategy can be a game-changer for your business.

Download our free intensive resource, the Livery Method Blueprint, to discover the step-by-step strategies and insights you need to create shoppable video events that support your business objectives. It’s a guide that includes everything you need, from a cost calculator, to setup examples.

Download the blueprint now and unleash the full potential of your brand.