You’ve invested in digital marketing to generate relevant website traffic for your eCommerce store.
You’ve spent hours going through your Google Analytics and Hotjar accounts to optimise your website’s conversion rate.
Sales are going great BUT the profit just isn’t there.
Should you increase your marketing budget to get more traffic?
Should you spend more hours diving into analytics tools to increase your conversion rate?
Would you be better off to focus more on SEO?
How can you generate more revenue with the same number of users, the same conversion rate and the same number of sales?
Increase the amount of money each customer spends on your website.
This is called the average order value (AOV) and is a great way to grow your profits when everything else is running smoothly.
Here are some tips for increasing your AOV:
Product Recommendations
Adding relevant product recommendations throughout your store can quickly increase your average cart size. These recommendations can be placed on product pages, on your cart page or during the checkout process.
Use this opportunity to cross-sell related products or up-sell to a higher value product.
The strategy around product recommendations is going to be very different from one eCommerce store to another.
If you run a Shopify store, there are a tonne of apps ranging from $0 to over $200 per month. Some need manual implementation while others use your sites order history to suggest products based on data models. You’ll need to find one that matches your store’s needs.
Product Bundles
Product bundles are a great way to increase your AOV!
If your store sells products that are commonly grouped, why not bundle them? Your customers will save loads of research time and are also less likely to leave your site without making a purchase. You’ll need to offer a small incentive but the increased revenue will easily cover this.
These bundles can be placed on your homepage, in your product categories and pushed out through your social and marketing channels.
Customer Loyalty Program
This one is pretty self-explanatory. It’s harder to implement than the other suggestions but will require very little maintenance once setup.
If your store relies on returning customers, this is a great way to increase your retention rate and build your brand.
Repeat customers won’t necessarily increase AOV but they will increase the revenue generated per customer. They’re also much easier to remarket to in the future.
Minimum Order Thresholds
Ever fallen $10 short of reaching the free shipping threshold? There’s a high chance you’ve added another product to your cart to qualify.
Most customers are happy to increase their cart size to meet free shipping requirements or to qualify for a discounted order.
The trick is where to set these thresholds. You don’t want to set them too high that no one reaches them but also don’t want them so low that every customer qualifies.
Free shipping is so common these days that most consumers expect it from their favourite retailers. Depending on your business, setting this lower than your current AOV is a good start. This will encourage the low spenders to spend more while not discouraging your medium-large spenders.
Discounted order thresholds can be set higher than your free shipping threshold.
With discounted orders, you can have multiple tiers to encourage customers to add additional items to their cart in order to reach the next level of discount.
Just remember to keep it simple for your customers. Don’t overcomplicate things!
Recent Items
Showing a user items they’ve previously viewed is an easy way to increase the AOV.
If you have a store where customers view loads of products in a session, it’s very easy for them to forget about something they were interested in.
Showing the customer their recently viewed products is an easy way for them to either click back through to the product or directly add it to their cart.
Most of the 5 mentioned methods are fairly quick and easy to implement on your site, especially if it’s built on a modern eCommerce platform (Shopify, WordPress etc.). Some may require a monthly subscription and others may be free.
It’s important to record any big changes to your site (and marketing activity) to accurately measure their effectiveness over time.
All the best on increasing your AOV and eCommerce revenue.
Author: Tyron Zeelie – Campaign Manager at Sprocket Digital
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