Businesses looking to grow their online store can use visual merchandising to increase the average order value or AOV. While a good AOV varies from business to business, these 5 simple tips can help you maximize your visual merchandising opportunities and, in turn, experience positive growth.
AOV, or Average Order Value, is the average amount of money your customers are spending on a single order and is incredibly valuable for increasing your online store’s bottom line. Average order value gives you an idea of what your customer’s shopping patterns are, their purchasing trends, and helps you visualize the return on ad spend.
What constitutes a good AOV varies from business to business, but the average eCommerce order value is around $128. To calculate your AOV, divide the total order revenue for a defined period by the number of orders placed in that same timeframe.
Looking to grow your online store? Here are five ways to use visual merchandising to increase average order value.
1. Offer Incentives for a Minimum Purchase
By studying the average order value your eCommerce store transacts, you can begin to implement strategies to raise your store’s AOV. If your store consistently averages $45 per sale, try implementing offers that psychologically influence customers to order more.
Free shipping for orders over $55? Now your customers have a reason to add that extra item to their cart! Offers like this can drive the fear of missing out (FOMO) factor into your customers, and FOMO, as you know, is a powerful tool for closing sales and growing your average order value.
You can also offer discount codes for customers who leave reviews or subscribe to your email marketing campaigns. Loyalty programs are great for building long-lasting relationships with customers and it shows them you appreciate and value their business.
2. Improve Mobile Shopping Experience to Increase Your Average Order Value
As of 2021, the number of digital buyers active in the world is around 2.14 billion. For perspective, that’s over a quarter (27.6%) of the global population!
People are increasingly on their phones, so it’s important to streamline your mobile shopping experience for this important and potentially lucrative buyer segment. Building an app for your eCommerce store can drastically improve conversions too, with mobile apps converting 157% more than mobile web sessions.
To enhance the mobile eCommerce experience further, consider integrating Apple Pay or Android Pay into your store. This makes it more convenient for customers to make purchases and can contribute to converting more sales and, yes, you’ve guessed it, raising your AOV.
3. Offer Personalized Recommendations
Personalized shopping recommendations are simple but powerful drivers for your web store.
Machine learning algorithms can track and study customers’ buying habits, search patterns, and more. Leveraging this data, you can recommend products your customers are likely to buy without spending to advertise or market the product.
Building unique customer recommendations from their browser and purchase history, location data, and other sources of information allows you to maximize your average order value. Customers are more likely to add products from their recommendations to their cart as they shop, steadily growing your store’s bottom line.
4. Leverage the Use of User Generated Content
93% of marketers agree that consumers trust content created by customers more than content crafted by brands. Showing proof of your product or service builds trust with your customer base. It shows that you’re delivering what you say you will deliver. With higher ticket items, this can be the difference between closing a sale or losing a potential customer.
Your business can use this to its advantage by providing rewards for customers who leave reviews on your site. You may consider offering rewards such as discount codes, limited-time bundles, and more. Some businesses even offer rewards to customers who leave negative reviews!
User-generated content (UGC) is great for growing your store’s AOV and increasing conversions because of the trust it builds with other customers visiting the site. They can see others’ experience with your product or service and will be more inclined to make a purchase too.
5. Push Bundles to Customers to Increase the Average Order Value
Bundle products and add suggested items to your eCommerce store to grow your average order value.
If you are selling coffee on your website, for instance, bundle a pour-over kit with a bag of coffee, or suggest a coffee scale at checkout with customer orders. Placing items together in bundles allows you to sell more for less and capitalize on moments where your customer may not need an additional item, but chooses to add it to their cart anyway because it makes sense with the item they were already planning on purchasing.
Avoid focusing your efforts on people who aren’t already planning on making a purchase. Tailoring bundles for customers who are ready to buy is important. Why? You help them get everything they need in one click while raising the store’s AOV at the same time.
Catering to your customer’s buying habits and piecing together items that frequently sell at the same time is a sure-fire way to grow revenue for the business. You’ve probably seen the many different bundles on Amazon. Camera manufacturers, for example, will bundle together a camera, battery charger, SD card, and lens cloth. Product bundles like these are effective ways to move multiple products at once, increasing AOV with each sale.
Product comparisons, recommendations, and post-purchase emails are great reminders that you offer additional product bundles too.
Boost Your eCommerce Business With Smart Merchandiser
Growing your business’s average order value using eCommerce merchandising is an effective and affordable strategy for driving sales and growing revenue.
Sequencing your product catalog effectively and building a storefront with social proof, bundles, discounts, and more are all going to strengthen your web store. Optimizing your storefront no longer requires complex tech and pages of cumbersome data. Driving eCommerce sales doesn’t need to be a time-consuming or tedious process.
Smart Merchandiser empowers you to take complete control of your storefront by streamlining the visual merchandising process, placing popular products first, and bundling frequently bought items together. Simply drag-and-drop products to arrange them on the web page or sort products through advanced business rules.
By automating this aspect of your store, you can free up time that is better spent on other aspects of your business while continuing to grow your average order value.
Ready to experience a possible 70% increase in productivity and a 20% boost in revenue? Schedule a Smart Merchandiser demo now!