If your goal is to increase your eCommerce store’s profitability this year, one of the best ways to accomplish this goal is by increasing your average order value (AOV). Average order value measures the average dollar amount spent per order and is a key metric for understanding your customer’s purchase habits.
How can you optimize your AOV to increase your online store’s profitability? With these seven smart tactics, you can drive customers to spend more in one order and increase your AOV:
1. Offer Free Shipping with a Minimum Order Value
It’s not a secret that customers love free shipping. A study by UPS found that 52 percent of consumers said that they added items to their shopping carts to qualify for free shipping.
To increase your average order value, offer free shipping with a minimum order amount—like Zoet Bathlatier does here:
This not only increases your AOV, but it also ensures that you aren’t hurting your business’s sales by offering free shipping.
2. Start a Loyalty Program
There are many benefits to setting up a customer loyalty program, one of which is that it can motivate your customers to keep coming back to your online store. Small and large eCommerce stores alike use this tactic to increase their AOV and jumpstart sluggish sales.
The key to a great loyalty program is providing customers with valuable incentives. Onnit, a supplement company, offers incentives in the form of early access to new products, freebies, discounts on future purchases, and priority shipping. It even sends rewards members badges once they reach a certain status.
It’s a simple, yet effective program that encourages customers to continue purchasing from their online store.
3. Target Customers by Purchase History
When you know the purchase behavior and history of your customers, you can use this data to send them highly-personalized offers and discounts to drive more sales. Not only is this technique effective for increasing your average order value, but it can also improve the user experience.
You can utilize this technique with our RFM feature, which allows merchants to automatically group customers based on order frequency, monetary value, and recency. Now, it’s easier than ever to segment customers and match the best offer for each type of customer.
4. Upsell Products
If upselling wasn’t already part of your marketing strategy, it needs to be if you want to maximize your online store’s sale potential. Examples include recommending a newer model or higher quantity of a product the customer already purchased. As many marketers know, upselling can increase consumer spending by recommending a product that is more expensive than the one they have previously bought or are currently considering to buy.
A good upselling strategy doesn’t swindle consumers to purchase products that they don’t need. Rather, it convinces them of the reasons why they need this more expensive product. Sell the customer on the features and benefits of the newer model, and you will have a happy customer who feels good about spending more on your products.
5. Cross-Sell Products
Similarly, cross-selling also maximizes your sales potential, albeit in a different way. Cross-selling offers customers products based on what they have placed in their cart or purchased in the past (i.e., recommending a belt to go with the pants they added to their cart).
Cross-selling is not only an opportunity to increase your average order value but also a way to improve the customer experience. Suggesting products that pair well with a customer’s previous purchase can be helpful to consumers and is often appreciated.
6. Bundle Your Products
When competing with the likes of Amazon, eCommerce merchants need to be strategic with their pricing. Bundling products can save customers money while also convincing them to purchase more than they originally planned.
Bundling is convenient for consumers, and most are happy to get their items from the same online store when the price is right. Beardbrand’s kits are a great example of this.
Their wash and softener kits are meant to be paired together and share the same fragrance of their beard oils and mustache waxes.
7. Use Live Chat to Encourage Sales
Live chat services can provide consumers with quick and convenient answers that help nudge them toward a purchase. It also provides eCommerce businesses with another opportunity to upsell their products in real time.
Once a shopper engages with a live chat employee and explains their problem, the employee can recommend a product that will resolve the shoppers’s problem. To get started, evaluate tools like Olark or Zendesk Chat (both have free and paid options) to see what capabilities will fit your store best. If your store is on Shopify, you can take advantage of Shopify’s new partnership with Facebook to chat with customers via Facebook Messenger.
What tactics have you used to increase your AOV? Let us know on Twitter or Facebook!
