Taobao begins testing "selected live broadcast rooms"

Recently, clothing merchants can have multiple store live broadcast rooms on Taobao. The newly opened live broadcast rooms are still based on stores, but what changes will there be? This article analyzes the changes and coping strategies of the selected live broadcast rooms, aiming to further understand more strategies and develop differentiated operations. Let's take a look.

On Taobao Tmall, clothing merchants can now have multiple store live broadcast rooms.

The newly opened live broadcast room still uses the store as the carrier, but uses a new account. Merchants can make differentiated operations in product configuration and live broadcast content, and take on traffic in public domain locations such as search and recommendation, thereby increasing fans and transactions - this means that merchants will have multiple ports to reach consumers in a layered manner, and multiple live broadcast rooms can deliver traffic to flagship stores through high-quality content.

E-commerce Online interviewed Qiao Qiao, the general manager of Taobao Tmall's industrial development and operation center, who revealed that many new live broadcast rooms have emerged in the Taobao Tmall apparel industry this year. "One type is the live broadcast room for the middle-aged and elderly, which has certain entertainment attributes, such as Yunbaba and Zulijian; one type is the personalized live broadcast room, which is more related to the product itself, such as the fabric and material direction, which is a part of a certain degree of professionalism; the other type is the new model we are trying: the selected live broadcast room."

Qiao Qiao explained that this is a "1+1+N" strategy: the first 1 is the brand flagship store, the second 1 is the brand's current store broadcast, and N can be understood as N, or NEW, which is the latest selected live broadcast room in the industry. Its positioning is for the brand to acquire more new customers through diversified methods such as direct discounts on popular products and content seeding.

E-commerce Online learned that the selected live broadcast room started testing in October last year. In the early stage, it adopted a targeted invitation system for merchants. In less than 3 months, the transaction flow of selected live broadcast rooms opened by merchants exceeded 10 million. This model has been confirmed to be replicable in the industry, and more than a dozen merchants have signed up to open it. Why can opening an additional live broadcast room on Taobao Tmall make the business grow so fast? For the platform, when "store broadcast" has become the standard for merchants, why should a new "selected live broadcast room" be promoted?

1. Taobao Live Tests “1+1+N”

"Good evening, everyone! Today is the launch of our new account. As a recommendation officer, we will give you the most favorable benefits and prices, which will be lower than our cat store (list price). This is our exclusive welfare price!"

On October 11, in the D'zzit live broadcast room, anchor SASA was introducing a rainbow sweater to consumers. Because it was a new account, during the live broadcast, SASA used a strong voice to show the audience that the price was "really good", and the shopping links were all products from the D'zzit Tmall official flagship store. The reason for such a good price is that this is the first time that the Douyin team has come to the Tmall store (live broadcast) and tried a new way of playing. At the same time, she mentioned, "Because I am here as a recommendation officer to broadcast to everyone, SASA will give personal subsidy coupons."

Whether it is constantly showing off her style and outfit during the live broadcast, or as SASA herself, initially building up her anchor persona by constantly giving benefits to consumers, it is significantly different from the traditional Taobao live broadcast room - if the traditional brand live broadcast room is still centered on "goods", and the interaction between the anchor and the consumer revolves around issues with customer service attributes such as size and color, then the selection live broadcast room is more like centered on "goods + content", with a faster live broadcast rhythm and the anchor style is more inclined to "planting grass".

The target group is more focused and targets new customers. This is not only the characteristic of the selected live broadcast room, but also the reason for its birth.

Qiao Qiao said, "Most of the live broadcasts on Taobao were originally based on store broadcasts and old customers, and the style of live broadcasts was relatively slow because it was more customer service-oriented. Old customers have many needs that need to be met through live broadcasts. But in fact, for a carrier like clothing, we need to talk about clothes in a more professional and three-dimensional way. So, we are thinking about whether we can use the method of new customers and use live broadcast rooms to undertake conversions. In this case, we created a selection live broadcast room. The selection live broadcast room is a sales method for zero accounts and new customers. Then we found that when merchants use the sales method of pure new customers to sell clothing, the conversion and performance in all aspects are very good."

Left: Brand live broadcast room. Right: SASA as a recommendation officer in the selection live broadcast room.

The reporter learned that D'zzit's live broadcast room, which was a completely new account with 0 fans, had sales of over 10 million in a single month after it was launched for only one month; TeenieWeenie's live broadcast room, which premiered on December 1, had over 1 million viewers per day after it was launched for 12 days from its launch as a completely new account with 0 fans.

In Qiao Qiao's opinion, clothing is an industry with high-frequency repurchase, but the live broadcasting methods for attracting new customers and repeat purchases are completely different, which is the core logic of selecting live broadcast rooms. "We used to serve both old customers and new customers in one live broadcast room, which was very difficult to achieve. In this process, Taobao did face great challenges in traffic distribution, because this live broadcast room is inside the store, and it is mostly old customers. Old customers have a lot of conversion opportunities, and you can't not serve old customers. So through two live broadcast rooms, user diversion, we believe, is an effective way to improve merchants' live broadcast capabilities."

2. Conversion rate and content capabilities are important

What kind of merchants can open a selected live broadcast room? What kind of support will be provided for opening a selected live broadcast room?

Qiao Qiao told the reporter that in the first/second phase of the test, merchants were invited from within the industry to open selected live broadcast rooms, but Tmall has already opened registration. "For the time being, we will mainly target brand merchants, because the selected live broadcast room requires merchants to have a certain SKU width. Everyone already has a live broadcast room, which is equivalent to opening a new one. We currently require the goods in the two live broadcast rooms to be separated. The old live broadcast room is mainly for new products for old customers, and the new live broadcast room hopes to use the method of old products for new customers. In other words, the products here need to be suitable for new customers, and it is a product separation strategy."

Qiao Qiao also explained that content-based capabilities are very important. "Merchants need to express themselves in a matching way, including product selection. They not only need to do a good job in live streaming, but also need to know how to do a good job in clothing live streaming. On this basis, we will provide brand traffic support. Of course, brands must present the best content, make use of the PV (page views) given, and convert fans." To put it bluntly, this will also determine the growth rate of the selected live broadcast room. The stronger the merchant's ability to retain customers, the more attractive the stickiness and conversion rate, the greater the support the merchant can get, and the more efficient the growth rate of the selected live broadcast room will be like a snowball.

Many styles in TeenieWeenie's live broadcast room are sold out

The reporter noticed that distinguishing between new customer operations and old customer operations has more far-reaching value for Taobao merchants.

"Our live broadcast team, strategy team, and Guess You Like team all follow the logic of new customers when selecting the target audience in the early stage. Of course, our audience is expanded according to the original audience of the brand, because Tmall itself has a crowd model for AIPL, which has a logic of crowd assets. Under this logic, when we do live broadcasting, we also have circle logic." Qiao Qiao said. Switching to the business logic of brand merchants is also a pre-strategy for refined operations.

By splitting the original brand live broadcast room and the latest selected live broadcast room, brands can more accurately select the target audience in the early stage of launch, allowing old customers to continue to see new products, big promotions and other activities, and allowing new customers to also see matching and seeding content.

Unlike beauty, digital and other categories, the apparel industry currently does not have an absolute top vertical anchor, but it corresponds to different circles of consumers and higher long-tail value. Because the industrial chain is closely related, the supply side, channel side, operation side and other links of the business penetrate each other. Major brands and industrial belt merchants, offline clothing wholesalers, and Internet celebrities are all selling clothing live. The anchors and brands are quite diversified, which also brings users with different consumption abilities. To meet these multi-level and diversified consumer needs, it is difficult to use the same venue to undertake all of them - just like the matrix live broadcast room and category live broadcast room that are popular in this year's expert live broadcast. At the store live broadcast level, diverting customer demands will also be an important means to improve the efficiency of traffic utilization.

3. Taobao Tmall’s verticalization strategy for the apparel industry

In September 2021, Taobao Tmall established a new business model and announced that it would become a DTC platform. At the Tmall "TOP TALK" Merchant Conference in May last year, Dai Shan, President of Alibaba's domestic digital business sector, explained Taobao Tmall's new strategy for the first time: from transactions to consumption. However, when it comes to different industries, different industry characteristics determine that the verticalization strategy will also be different. As a core category of Taobao Tmall, clothing has always been a pathfinder for new strategies.

For brand merchants, the new live broadcast room means new possibilities. "Whenever there are new changes on Taobao and Tmall, the brand merchants who are the first to actively embrace the changes will most likely get good results." Some industry insiders said that in the past, the clothing industry and live broadcast sales have actually brought rapid growth to the brand merchants who were the first to test the waters.

Last September, Taobao Tmall Fashion announced at the Merchant Conference that it would upgrade its vertical operation strategy, and in the future it would be driven by the dual wheels of "users + supply" to promote business growth. Qiao Qiao explained at the time, "From the era of commodities being king, I hope everyone will move to the second era of consumer-centricity. (Consumer-centricity) is also divided into two levels. The first level is to transform existing commodities into content so that consumers can better understand the commodity; the second level, in fact, I extended it to industry collaboration, which is to operate the relationship between PLVM (product life cycle) and CLVM (consumer life cycle) well."

Vertical product “matching” in the apparel industry

On this basis, the "Selected Live Broadcast Room" launched for vertical live broadcast is actually one of many changes. This year, the apparel industry has also launched a number of vertical products that focus on the apparel industry itself and aim to solve specific problems in the industry:

• In order to explore new opportunities, in the previous "New Power Week", nine trend tracks such as "Workwear Hotties" and "Career Elites" were launched through style digitalization capabilities, and "style" products were launched at the same time. Sign up to become a style merchant and have the opportunity to appear in the first recommended style book, the main search style encyclopedia, and ifashion's trend express and other public domain locations;
• In order to improve the efficiency of products, especially new products, we launched new product launch and display experiences such as XR New Show, and launched "series" of products. Products can form a synergy with consumers through unified style, function, tonality, usage scenarios, series interpretation and content packaging, and appear in the private domain of merchants' stores or even in the public domain in the form of "series";
• Regarding the contentization of commodities, by "matching" products, we help commodities complete the basic contentization in the form of pictures, texts and short videos.

"We have also noticed that, for example, after the launch of the pairings, the average number of page views per person has been increasing. Currently, each person can view about 11 to 13 pairs. Our supply is also increasing, and pairing products have begun to appear in search and recommendation positions. These are some of the better areas we have seen.

Next year, we hope to make content the most basic capability. For example, in the Detail of the store, we will improve a lot of basic content expression capabilities and standardize the content, which will be our focus next year. "Qiao Qiao also said that due to the richness of the clothing industry and the differences in types (whether merchant types or product types), the industry span will be relatively large. In the future, in addition to selecting live broadcast rooms, different types, directions, and sales methods will be explored to bring consumers better and better consumption experience.

Author: Wang Yaqi; Editor: Si Wen

WeChat official account: E-Commerce Online (ID: dianshangmj), see sharpness and insights, and focus on innovative media on the Internet and new business.