Live streaming and chat – How interaction drives sales conversion & user engagement
Live streaming has exploded. And to tap into the immediacy of the live event, live streaming has created a strong synergy between chat and messaging.
It is now standard for live streaming to pair live video with real-time messaging to bring one of the most authentic ways to connect with customers. While the main attraction of live streaming is definitely the live video element, chat and live interaction can have a huge effect on the outcome of a successful and unsuccessful live stream.
The live streaming industry is estimated to reach over $70 billion by 2021 and continues to expand to different verticals, sectors and use-cases. With the service becoming more ubiquitous, brands and tech giants have followed suit in creating innovative ways to take advantage of live streaming to grow engagement, increase traffic and capitalize on live streaming’s popularity.
For Nexon, the chat is displayed to the right of the live stream because it tends to complement the live eSports event. Chat for live events like this tends toward user reactions and commentary, increasing engagement and retention.
In the case of TMON, chat is displayed over the live stream because the questions and answers are as compelling as the video. The messages and how the show host interacts with them can pull viewers into buying the product.
In-app live streaming made easy.
Growing user engagement and increasing conversions through chat
Live streaming and messaging is creating a huge impact in different industries like eSports and e-commerce. Nexon and TMON are two great examples of how adding rich messaging and powerful chat features to an existing live streaming platform helped boost audience engagement and sales conversions. Nexon is one of the top 10 gaming publishers in the world and hosts an eSports league for FIFA Online 3, and TMON is one of largest e-commerce companies in Korea.
Plugging Sendbird’s technology into Nexon’s live streaming eSports platform, Nexon increased user session time by 150% and increased the number of viewers for each event. Enabling in-app chat accomplished two things:
- it provided a passive audience with a more interactive experience
- the mass communication element brought eSports viewing to a more communal level.
With more than 60,000 viewers chatting at the same time in a single room, Nexon needed to manage chatrooms, monitor conversations, and throttle the speed of messages, so that the audience could follow the conversation.
While many live streaming platforms like Twitch, Periscope or Ustream offer chat functionalities, many do not have the depth of features and scalable infrastructure to properly support chat on a massive scale. Without chat features like moderation tools, auto-partitioning and smart throttling, there would have been challenges that Nexon, or any other company, would face when managing an audience of this size.
Sales Conversion and TMON’s live-commerce
Like Nexon, TMON enabled Sendbird’s Chat API and Messaging SDK to provide a more interactive experience and grow user engagement, but the e-commerce company’s live commerce service was able to accomplish an unbelievable 21% conversion rate and 130x increase in sales revenuecompared to other e-commerce channels. And also like Nexon, the e-commerce company used related features to help manage, monitor and offer chat to thousands of their customers. But for live commerce, the chat functionalities allowed TMON to provide real-time customer service and answer any questions viewers had on the spot. This amount of real-time information sharing and gathering provided a huge boost in converting viewers into customers.
Conclusion: Getting creative with chat and live video pays off
Whether chat drives sales or it complements your app’s primary business, it’s difficult to ignore the potential for audience engagement and sales conversion. Nexon and TMON succeed with chat because they thought carefully about its integration into their applications – how to use it to interact with users and pull them into the live video.
