Online businesses continuously battle with changing search
algorithms, growing customer expectations, digital developments and competitors,
all while trying to increase the conversion rate of their website. Doing so
takes time, patience and effort.
A simple way of boosting conversion rate is to encourage your
visitors to spend more on each order, otherwise known as increasing your Average
Order Value (AOV). It’s beneficial for online businesses to do what they can to
maximise revenue while they have the shopper on their site. In this post, we’re
going to share our five top tips on how you can increase your AOV.
What is Average Order Value?
AOV is one of the most important metrics an online business
can use. Not only is it an effective insight tracked by Google Analytics to monitor buying and product
trends, but it is also a great resource to persuade customers to spend more
with your business, optimising the value of each order.
Monitoring your AOV in Google Analytics is an effective way of
tracking buying trends. Here you can view different traffic sources, devices,
customer locations and more, giving you further insight into your customer’s
shopping behaviour. This knowledge helps to direct more spend into the areas
that work well or make improvements where they are necessary.
Why is Average Order Value important?
Understanding your AOV offers insight into your customers’
behaviour and how much, on average, they are spending. By knowing this, your
marketing strategies and pricing plans can be tailored to increase the AOV, in
turn, boosting revenue without necessarily increasing your marketing spend.
5 ways to increase your Average Order Value
Now that we have talked about what AOV is and the importance
of tracking it, we can get to the nitty-gritty: how you can improve it. There
are many simple ways to do this from upselling to cross-selling to free
delivery to bundles and these are our top five.
Offer free delivery over a certain cut-off
Take a look at your current AOV. Let’s say it’s £40. Why not
offer free delivery with orders over £50? This is the easiest way of increasing
AOV by slightly increasing the shopping basket value. Once you’ve decided on
your free delivery starting point, promote this regularly across your site to
encourage users to reach this figure when shopping. Beer Hawk implements this effectively,
promoting the offer across their homepage, product pages and basket.
(Source: https://www.beerhawk.co.uk/)
Upsell in the shopping basket
Got some leather cleaning products you could offer the
customer to go with their leather shoes? Customers will often look for smaller
purchases to bump their shopping basket up and get over the free delivery
threshold.
Nosto is an effective
way of doing this, delivering a tailored eCommerce experience through product
personalisation. Implementing pop-ups and customised messaging, Nosto can offer
supplementary products based on what the user has already shown interest in.
Bundle products together
Group compatible products together to create appealing
bundles, these can then be discounted offering them at great value to
customers. For example, a hair brand could offer the matching shampoo and
conditioner set as a bundle and discount 20%. Although it may seem
counterintuitive to offer a discount, these discounted bundles can help
incentivise a purchase and encourage customers to spend more.
Regis bundled some of their ghd products together reducing the set by nearly
£25 instantly making it a more appealing suggestion to take advantage of.
(Source: https://www.regissalons.co.uk/)
Promote personalised product recommendations
The personal touch is what
makes a customer feel valued and special. Using Nosto’s eCommerce
Intelligence Engine gives businesses
the ability to suggest highly relevant products to customers throughout their
shopping journey. These product recommendations are relevant and personalised,
based on user behaviour. They are the frequently viewed products or purchased
with another product the customer is currently considering.
Nosto analyses unique
browsing and buying behaviour of every visitor to your eCommerce website tailoring
their online experience. By recommending the most relevant products across your
website, the user journey is naturally much more inspiring. Using this tool generates
an average conversion increase of 15.5%.
(Source: https://www.supercuts.co.uk/)
Always put a limit on the offer
Finally, it’s important to
always put a timescale on the offer. Shoppers can be indecisive so promoting
your offer for a limited time only such as 2 days or 24 hours creates a sense
of urgency encouraging them to buy more within this timeframe. For example,
“30% off” isn’t as powerful a message as “30% off for 2 days only”.
(Source: https://harryhall.com/)
There you have it, our five
top tips to increasing your AOV. No matter how you implement the different
methods, we recommend testing the effectiveness of each. By encouraging your
customers through various discounts and offers, you will help to increase average
order values, conversion rates and gain valuable insight into what your customer’s
buying behaviour is too.
What are your thoughts on
increasing average order value? Speak to the team at Pinpoint to
discuss this further and find out how we can support you with your eCommerce
strategy.