Whenever someone completes a transaction at your online store, it’s something to celebrate. But purchase amounts can vary wildly—do most of your customers buy a $2.99 trinket, or a $299 cartload of luxury clothes? It’s impossible to know how well your marketing, advertising, and social media strategies are paying off unless you know your site’s Average Order Value (AOV).
The higher the figure, the more worthwhile each conversion is for your bottom line. This is why understanding the ins and outs of boosting average order value can help you ensure your return on investment (ROI) is healthy and your store is maximizing its profits.
Why Raising AOV Is Economical
Driving new traffic to your site takes time, effort and a significant chunk of change. However, influencing customers who are already on your site to buy more doesn’t take as much; they’re already interested in what you have to offer. It’s just a matter of how much they’ll purchase. After all, it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Following this principle, you can easily see how focusing on AOV is an economical way to boost revenue.
'It costs 5 times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.'Click To TweetStrategies for Boosting AOV
Aiming to increase AOV for your online store is one thing. Putting it into practice is another. After all, you want to avoid scaring away shoppers with aggressive sales tactics. Here are some relatively simple strategies for convincing customers to make the most of every visit. It’s all a matter of experimenting to find what works best for your website.
- Bundling for Convenience
Consumers enjoy bundles when they can save on products they were already planning to buy. Kissmetrics provides an apt example of a pet store bundling cat food, litter pans, and food bowls together in a convenient “Kitten Starter Pack.” The order value, in this case, improves from $100 to $140 and customers save 20 percent ($10)—plus the hassle of rounding up the items separately. Even better, you can still give shoppers choices (color, size, pattern, etc.) on bundled items so they get convenience along with their personal desires.
- Cross-Selling and Upselling
Anticipating customers’ wants and needs lets you employ cross-selling and upselling to increase AOV. Cross-selling involves offering items complementing those already in shoppers’ cart (like suggesting five-pound weights for a customer buying home workout DVDs). Upselling consists of offering similar, but upgraded versions of items a visitor is already considering (such as offering a piece of technology with more features that’s in the next price bracket up). Modern enterprise e-commerce platforms like Shopify make it possible to promote these forms of selling seamlessly without disrupting buyers’ navigation and checkout processes.
- Raising Free Shipping Threshold
Want to get customer’s attention fast? Roll out the phrase “free shipping.” Instituting a free shipping threshold is a smart way to give shoppers what they want—if they buy enough from you to make it worthwhile. Playing with your free delivery threshold usually ups AOV. For example, Target just increased their threshold to $35 (up from $25) while Amazon recently lowered its cutoff to $25 (down from $35). It’s all about what works for your business, based on industry practice and typical shipping costs.
Customers are already on your site and interested in your services or products, so it’s in your best interest to learn the ins and outs of boosting average order value. By intuitively suggesting items shoppers should consider, creating enticing bundles and raising your free delivery threshold, you’ll maximize your AOV.
