Five Minute Friday: Why Your Boutique Needs Live Selling (and How to Start Today)

Hi, guys, it's Sarah with the Boutique Hub again. And I'm here today to answer probably our number one most asked question that we get asked at the Boutique Hub. And it's how do I go live? How do I do live? Selling? Well, guys, my big mission on this video today is to tell you to just do it. Be vulnerable, be exposed. Just put yourself out there. Your customers enjoy you and they want to see the real you. They want to support you. But they can do it even more if you come to them on a different type of a platform than your traditional website, where they look at pictures or coming into your brick and mortar during specific hours of the day or night or weekend that might not necessarily align with their lifestyle. Right? Plus, live sales are just a heck of a lot of fun. And it's a time to engage with your customer in a different way. It's a time to kick back, relax, meet them where they're at, right? We talk an awful lot about the fact that the world is changing, people's needs and their livelihoods are changing. So to expect them to be able to patronize with you from 10 to 6 during the week and maybe a 9 to 3 on a Saturday, that doesn't necessarily fit in with their schedule. And if it doesn't fit their schedule, it's hard to pay the bills on your end, right? So let's have a little fun before. Boutiques across the country are doing this and are having a tremendous amount of success from a shopping standpoint, it's almost like a competition, right? One, it's very convenient and you can pop up on their phones at any given time. Two, the competition part is they see other people buying things and they almost feel like they're going to miss out. So they better jump in and get their hands on one of those items as well. It's fun. They see that really fashionable, beautiful boutique owner in a kind of a vulnerable state, right. Handling all sorts of products, you know, trying to decipher comments. It's just maybe not the most organized way of doing things. And that's entertaining for the consumer. That's okay, right? It's engaging. That's the big thing. That is the big thing. It sets you apart from everybody else. It allows you to interact with your customers on a personal level. It's just fun. So I hope I have sold you on the fact that you should be doing live sales and you should just go ahead and put yourself out there. Don't stress about it. I can tell you the best live that I ever did. Was when I had an earring actually hanging out of the bottom part of my hair. It wasn't even in my ear and I did the whole video that way and I got more engagement and interaction and people related to me because of that. Something silly as an earring. Right? Be raw, be vulnerable. Okay, so you're going to do the live sales. Awesome. Now let's educate your customer on how to do them. Right. You can't just show up and say, hey, I'm going live in 15 minutes. Everybody be there and buy my product. That sounds pushy. Ease them into it, educate them on how it's going to work. What exactly do they need to do? If they want to buy the top that has the hang tag that says number five on that and they want to buy it in a medium, do they say number five? Sold. Medium. How do you want to run your live sale? If you use an app like we like to partner with comments sold, they walk you through this whole plan. They have a specific app that you can link in with your social platforms that does all the invoicing and everything for you. There's a registration link that your customers would sign up with to walk them through that onboarding process. But you don't need the app to go live and sell. You can start out very organically. Right. But you have to make sure your customers understand the process. So if you are just going to have them comment the number of item they want, the price or the size they want in words sold, and then you invoice them through PayPal, that works very easily. It's a little bit more work on the back end for you to send the invoice and then print off the packing label and all that kind of stuff. However, it's a sale. So now that we've educated them on exactly how they're going to get to purchase something, right, you want to make sure you educate them on how and where you're going to be doing these sales. Is it going to show up in a group, on a page, in an event, on Instagram? Let them know where you're going to be and when you're going to be there. Very important that you do this so you can do it through text message, email blasts, teaser posts on your group or page. But if you say you're going to be there at 8 o' clock on a Thursday, don't be there at 8:05 on Thursday. Be there 7:58, 7:59, be going at 8 o' clock because nothing's worse than the customer sitting There thinking, I think they were going to be here, maybe I'm in the wrong spot. It'd be no different than if they showed up at your brick and mortar store when it says you're going to open at 10, you don't show up till 10:15. They're probably not still waiting for you, are they? So be there when you say you're going to be there. Right. How do you know when the best time to go live is? Well, you can look at your Google Analytics, you can look at your Facebook analytics and kind of see where are you getting the most traffic, when are the most people coming to your pages or to your site if you don't, if you're not interested in all that, ask, say, poll your audience. Say, hey guys, I'm going to do a Facebook Live. What works best for you? Right. These are my three times that work in your favor. I love to just pull the audience and listen. Okay, so now we have told them what we're going to do, right? We figured out a time. We know all these things now. What do I need tool wise to do a Facebook Live or a live sale of some sort? Well, I highly recommend a tripod to hold your phone. Hold your phone nice and steady. Obviously you need a camera phone or some sort of way to be on your platform and take a video at the same time. Highly recommend a nice camera phone. Good lighting is huge, Huge, huge. So whether you can be near a natural light like a window or you use a ring light, very cheaply able to be purchased on Amazon. Right. You need good quality Internet. Good quality Internet. Test your Internet. Test these lies first before you get 100 people all on board to show up for your live. And then your Internet's not good. And then the last tool that I think is very important is those hang tags I was talking about. If you're going to be selling 50 some items and you're going through and just saying the next item, the next item, the next item, you need a way to decipher which item is which. So I highly recommend you pre ticket them one through, say 50. And when you pull out the product on that hanger, there's a hang tag that says number one, number two. So that way say Sarah at Hotmail wants to comment on the navy blue blazer that was number five. I would say number five sold medium. So that way when Susie does all the invoicing and Sarah at Hotmail wants this blue blazer, she knows exactly which blue blazer it was. It was blazer number five. Simple the last thing I guess I should say that would be very helpful for you to have is an assistant. Whether that assistant is somebody that can just hand you items, hand back, do hangbacks for you, or maybe she's a fit model and maybe you can even go a step further and have two different fit models, maybe like a size 24 and a size 14 16, to show the products. The one thing we want to do, no matter where we're selling, whether it's on a flat lay on the website or in your brick and mortar or in this live sale, you want to reduce any, any question in the mind of the consumer of should I purchase this product, is it going to fit me? What are the features and functions? Right. You want to reduce any of those confusion. Any of that concern. You want to make them feel like, yes, and I need that now. That's exactly what I want. That's going to fit me. And hurry up. I want to be the first one to write sold on that item. So an assistant, I think is very important. All right, so talking about marketing, we mentioned this a second ago. How are you going to get the word out to your consumers that you're doing this text marketing, email, teaser posts. Right. You can make numerous posts about it throughout the week on your social channels leading them up to it. Right. The other thing I highly recommend is the first few times you do this, call in some favors with your friends and say, hey, Beth, Hey, Ashley. Make sure you're on the call with me tonight and please be commenting. Get the ball rolling. Maybe they put sold on something and it's actually not something they're going to buy, but it's just a way to them to build engagement and get teasers out there. Right now, keep in mind in this marketing, after the Facebook Live or the live sale ends, you can repost this. You can open it back up as a watch party or have somebody open it back up as a watch party. So it goes back through numerous other news feeds. It's an awesome feature. How long should your live be? Well, the longer the better, honestly. Aim for, aim for about an hour. Anything that's short, just, you know, ten minutes or less. They really don't get much engagement. They don't live very long. So a good recommendation is shooting for at least 60 minutes. I know you're like, 60 minutes. How could I possibly do that? Well, it goes really fast, especially when you're engaging with this audience and the more fun that you have with them, the longer they're going to stay on. The longer they Stay on, the more money they're going to spend. Just like if they came in your brick and mortar or you got them on your website, the longer they're there, the more they're going to spend, reward them, play games, have giveaways, do all sorts of fun engagement things. Get creative. Now granted, the first live sale you do is probably going to be a bit bare bones, right? And you're going to push finish on that and you're going to say, oh my gosh, I can't believe that was my first live sale. That's okay, it's going to get better, right? A couple other things that you can add in, especially if you use like a comment sold app for your live sales, is customer service tips like Sezzle that can break those payments up. Anything like that, that is a little bit extra customer service to your customers I think is really going to set you apart from everybody else doing live sales. Okay guys, I hope that gave you just some ideas on how to do it, some simplicity on how to do it, the tools that you need. But at the end of the day, decide you're going to go live, make a plan, let people know, commit to it, get your arrivals, new arrivals, your old inventory, whatever it is you're moving, introduce those with some excitement, have some people there to help you do fit videos, talk about the features and the functions, continually update them on the process, how to go about the commenting to sell it and engage and have fun. Be alive in your community, be relevant and be somebody that they want to spend time with. They want to spend time with you on these live sales. So for more information, we have a ton more information about this on our Boutique Hub website and if you have any other questions, please leave them below. But we'll be back again with answers to more frequently asked questions from the Boutique Hub. Y' all have a great day.

That's it for five minute Friday, you guys. I hope you found some quick, actionable steps you can put into play in your business right away. As always, if you're not yet a member of the Boutique Hub, I would love to personally invite you to join us. It's where all of the daily conversations happen. The up to date, what is working now in the industry conversations, the latest trainings, trend reports, discounts, resources and of course access to thousands of wholesale brands that you also know and love. So please take a minute to follow the link in the show notes and we would love to invite you to join us inside of the Boutique Hub.