How to Improve AOV of Your Online Business

Learn how to improve AOV the average order value to drive more revenue and make existing consumers spend more.

In looking for means to increase revenue, many small businesses only consider attracting new consumers without looking at making existing ones pay more.

One method to boost your revenue is to affect the average order value (AOV) and find ways to squeeze more potential value out of consumers who are already purchasing and spending money with you. To improve AOV, there is no need to add to monthly costs and plan pricey marketing campaigns.

Everything you might need to work on your AOV is already at your fingertips. You only need to decide with which approach to start. This article will help you with your decision. 

How to define average order value

AOV is one of the most significant but overlooked ecommerce metrics. It shows the amount of money people on average spend on purchases and helps to evaluate their buying habits.

AOV Formula:

Average order value = Revenue for a period / Number of orders for the same period 

As an illustration:

Your store had $5000 of revenue last month. This number made from 50 completed orders. It means that consumers, on average, spend $100 per order. Or 50 orders from last month brought you $2000, which means the AOV is $40 per order.

As a rule, the more the brand’s AOV, the better the final earnings. That’s why store owners try to improve AOV with the tactics described below.

3 benefits of improving average order value

Income increase. One of the most obvious advantages of improving AOV, as stated above, is getting an increased income for your type of online business. The more one order can bring you, the more your company earns in total. When consumers spend more money with your brand, you get a chance to reinvest in its growth.

Better marketing ROI. On the other hand, a high AOV can bring in a better marketing return. When you spend $25 for product promotion with an AOV being $30, it doesn’t get much in the end. Marketing expenditures will be more profitable once you manage to make people make orders for a bigger amount of money. To help with that, except for a well-structured strategy, you’ll 

Selling boost. Last but not least, by utilizing different ways of impacting AOV, you will be able to sell more. By creating bundles of two products for people to purchase or encouraging them to throw in more things in the cart and get everything shipped without charge, your brand gets things sold faster.

6 ways to easily improve average order value

Ship free (at least sometimes)

It’s a classic that still works well. 

Source: Upsellit

Free shipping makes people spend money and have their orders delivered with no extra charge. It’s a psychological thing. 

You can start by looking at the overall value of completed orders. If people normally order within the $40 range, set up free shipping on purchases starting from $60-65. It’ll allow you to improve AOV. However, a threshold analysis is required. You shouldn’t go up the free shipping threshold much, so don’t go more than 30% of your AOV. Otherwise, you won’t affect AOV but may worsen buyer experience.

For the majority of customers (based on your current AOV), it should feel accessible and worth the value to fill in the cart with extra goods for free delivery. Set up a notification in the cart so that customers planning to checkout would know whether they are eligible for free delivery and, if not, how much they need to add to receive it.

Never forget about discounts

Source: ReallyGoodEmails

We all love discounts. The latter encourages us to spend more, even if we just need to buy a particular item.

You can provide people with a 10% discount when they spend from a particular amount or add to the discount volume with the growth of the total check. An important thing here is to ensure consumers are aware of the offered discount.

To make it happen, place a banner on the main page. Inform people via email using a strong CTA. Alternatively, you can share a post about a discount offer on social media or send a promo newsletter. 

Make customers loyal

Source: ReallyGoodEmails

Think of a loyalty program. Such programs can assist you with making consumers order more goods. People can receive points for each purchase and use them to accumulate discounts on their future orders.

Loyalty programs stimulate people to get back to your store more often and don’t look at the competitors’ side. For instance, when someone buys a makeup kit for $50 and gets a 5% discount for the next order as a loyal member of the program, they will gladly come back for more.

You can have several tiers in the program, and the more people purchase, the higher the tier they obtain, the better their benefits. Discount volumes can grow with each tier, while you can also offer one-time discount coupons once consumers get a new tier. 

Such things do their magic. Once people complete a purchase and get a coupon, they will go browsing again, being highly excited to use a newly received deal.

Experiment with cross-selling and upselling

Source: Dollar Shave Club

Cross-selling is an excellent way of offering consumers items that will match the goods they are already viewing. If one is searching for a dress, recommending a pair of shoes or earrings to fit with it improves the chances of purchasing them all, rather than just a dress on its own.

You are solving the problem of the low AOV since there are high chances that customers will add recommended goods to the main purchase. At the same time, helping consumers find more things to their liking which fit each other perfectly.

A good way to experiment with cross-selling is the checkout stage. The main principle here is to recommend relevant and valuable items indeed. That’s why to implement this approach, you should analyze the previous orders and best-selling pairs of goods of your store.

The upselling approach focuses on encouraging people to purchase a more expensive product, either as a substitution to the one they are considering or as an addition to it. For example, when people are choosing pillows, show them more costly models in the recommendations, pinpointing their obvious benefits. Otherwise, offer duvets or bed linens to come along with the pillows.

Upselling might seem pushy. Hence it is crucial to make it look like a sincere recommendation rather than a way of swindling to spend more money.

Try upselling at these three stages:

• before purchase: recommend similar products on product pages
• during purchase: use pop-up windows
• after purchase: set email campaign to make customer purchase again

Check out the list of helpful tools that might help you streamline and automate your cross-selling/upselling efforts.

Sell products in bundles

Source: 3 Wise Men

Another fantastic way to make people spend more is advising products in bundles with a price significantly lower than if purchased separately.

Bundles serve as all-in-one consumer solutions that allow them to save money and get a complete experience. You can pair related products that are normally used together.

When people come for one thing but find out that an offered bundle is more saving, they will choose to get the deal in most cases.

Consider these tactics to bundle sales:

• Gifting – providing a complementary good with the main purchase.
• Buy 1 get 2 – when buying one item, a person can get the second item (same/similar).
• Cleaning inventory – do you need to clean up the stock or have items that don’t sell on their own? use this approach
• New product – bundle a good selling item with a new product

Establish an exclusive buyer plan

Source: ReallyGoodEmails

Think of launching a paid/exclusive buyer plan. For example, for $100/year, a customer receives free shipping to all orders, a set of discounts, small gifts to some orders, the opportunity to buy new arrivals first, etc.

In fact, you can think of different plans, so the bigger segment of customers can choose the most suitable option for them.

Such an approach will motivate people to get back to your store often and purchase more, positively influencing the AOV. The only tricky thing here is that you need preliminary research and indicate the plan feature and pricing very carefully.

Wrap Up

A great thing about working to improve AOV is that you are only to focus on those who know you and want to buy things you offer, people who come with a certain intent and might already have some things in their carts. Engaging with consumers spending money with you is far easier and actually more cost-effective than attracting new ones. 

Have you tried any of the mentioned tactics or prefer other strategies? Share your ideas in the comments section.