Online underwear retailer MeUndies’ two-hour Facebook Live broadcast on Black Friday drove shoppers to click through to the retailer’s site and buy.
Those strong sales results weren’t expected, says Steph Young, director of brand marketing for MeUndies. “Our [primary] objective wasn’t sales,” she says. “It was to create energy and hype. We knew that people would be excited about exclusive discounts, but it wasn’t the primary reason we did it.”
MeUndies held the two-hour broadcast featuring a DJ as well as “cast members,” or people who were recruited to participate during the live broadcast, playing games and dancing to entertain shoppers on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. To make sure the broadcast looked good, the company worked with a production agency to come up with camera angles and programming. The retailer also generated four promotional URLs, each offering different discounts on select merchandise.
Because Facebook doesn’t allow retailers to include clickable links on screen, MeUndies displayed the percentage-off discount shoppers would receive as well as the URL to each promotion on the lower third of the screen. The retailer then included a link to the site in the comments section below.
“We were very excited to have a limited-time audience for a limited-time sale,” Young says. “That’s something we’re really interested in. If you choose to spend a half an hour with us on any given day, we can reward you with a code that will be live during that time. That’s something you couldn’t do with a normal Facebook video because you don’t know when people are going to be engaged with it. With this, we know how many people are viewing and that we can reach them at that particular time.”
To keep shoppers watching and drive engagement, MeUndies encouraged shoppers to comment using an emoji such as a snowman if they wound up purchasing a particular promotion. MeUndies then randomly selected shoppers who commented and rewarded them with a free gift, such as a pair of lounge pants or a hooded sweatshirt.
This combination of including a URL as well as keeping shoppers engaged throughout the two-hour Facebook Live broadcast paid off. Young declines to provide a specific sales figure attributable to traffic from the session but says “incoming traffic from the Facebook Live was converting at 15x the normal Facebook traffic.” MeUndies says the promotion garnered more than 13,000 unique viewers during that time.
“We saw a big boost in the velocity of sales during this [event],” Young says. “We are looking at it and saying this is an audience that’s choosing to sit here for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. They were a very, very interested audience and there to purchase products.”
The Facebook Live event’s success owes, in part, to the fact that it was held on Black Friday, a day when many people in general have shopping on their minds, Young says. “The moment makes a difference and the intention of a customer on that particular day makes a difference,” she says.