Getting customers to spend takes time and when they do, it presents an opportunity for you to offer more irresistible deals that they can’t ignore.

The total cost a customer spends on your store before checking out is what we term as average order value (AOV).

The main benefit of increasing your AOV is you churn more money from your customers from each sale made. This, in turn, contributes to an increase in revenue.

In this post, we give you the strategies that you can implement to increase your average order value and help you scale your business.

Increase average order value

Here are the strategies to use to increase AOV:

1 | Understand customer persona

We can’t stress this enough. Having in-depth insights about your customer is the first step to increasing your AOV.

Think about it for a second.

If you want them to spend more, it isn’t easy to understand their innermost desires and tap into them.

How do you know what they actually want, what they’re saying about your product and the problems they face?

The first hurdle is conducting research to get offline and online word-of-mouth data. Online, you can also use social media listening tools like Buffer and CRM tools like Hubspot.

Offline, it’s a little trickier, but luckily that’s where we come in. Our data scientists at Herdify can take your sales data and highlight where offline word-of-mouth conversations might be happening.

With clever analysis, they can infer whether those conversations might be positive or negative, so you can start pivoting your offers to benefit the customer.

2 | Use a funnel

Customers love great deals, but often, when they have too many options to choose from, they can be indecisive and abandon a sale.

This is where a funnel comes in.

A funnel allows you to introduce products to a customer that are highly targeted to their preferences.

Your goal, especially for first-time buyers, is to make them say, “Yes, I want to buy!” One of the most popular software apps to help you create a funnel is ClickFunnels.

3 | Include order bumps and one-time offers

Using order bumps is an awesome way to offer additional benefit at checkout. Think of an order bump as the traditional low-priced items found near cashiers in supermarkets.

They’re intentionally placed there to get customers to spend more.

Rule of thumb for order bumps is they must be easily clickable.

During the checkout process, you can also include one-time offers and ensure you ‘create’ scarcity around them.

Allowing the customer to feel they’re missing out increases the chances of them spending more.

4 | Cross-selling and giving bundle deals.

One of the most popular ways to increase AOV is cross-selling. Simply put, it’s adding a separate but typically related product to a sale.

A good example is when someone buys a phone and you present a cute phone case to them. You can decide to give them a discount if they buy the two together.

Pair products that go well together and present them as discounted bundle deals. This encourages customers who were only looking to buy one item to desire to buy more.

5 | Upselling

This is simply recommending an upgrade of a product your customer is planning to purchase.

Based on behavioural science, a customer will deem the upsell product more valuable than the first. But it has to be done tactfully without turning off your customer.

Here are some tips:

• Recommend a product that is slightly cheaper than the product being purchased
• Allow the customer to see a side-by-side comparison of the two products
• Be very subtle when presenting the upsell

6 | Include free shipping for products

Nothing motivates customers to shop even more than a free-shipping sign.

Providing free shipping can be challenging if you’re trying to offer great products at affordable prices.

The simplest way to deal with this is to have a minimum product order eligible for free shipping. You can also have a subscription plan like Amazon’s Prime programme.

7 | Create a loyalty programme

On average, it’s easier to retain a customer than acquire one. One of the best ways to keep customers who will buy often is by setting up a reward programme for loyal customers.

Tips on loyalty programmes:

• Make it super easy to redeem incentives
• Prioritize branding your programme
• Ensure it’s highly visible to your customers

There you have it. These are the top ways to increase your average order value. Whichever tactic struck you, start with it and watch your sales grow.