Ways to Boost Order Value for your Online Store

According to IRP Commerce, the average order value is $115.45 USD for a typical online store. When your conversion rates are frictionless, growing your business when your audience is engaged needs to look into how to maximize the basket and what incentives exist to boost order value while maintaining customer satisfaction.

Leading by customer experience

To optimize your marketing budget, focusing on returning customers is key to improving your basket order value. While reaching new customers is important for growth, bringing your customers back to engage further through loyalty programs, promotions, seasonal events, and social media engagements is part of the strategy to drive your sales. Email marketing is a crucial communication tool when used alongside promotions, new products, and reviews. When your brand is perceived to be part of their lifestyle and is a key component of their personal and emotional well-being, they will engage at a 306% higher lifetime value, and an average spend of $699/yr can be expected as ongoing revenue. Regular satisfied customers would only spend $275/yr, a case study from Motista. Customer experience leading to customer satisfaction is a crucial component for an online business to drive returning customers - here are some tips:

• Customer Service Excellence: 24/7 Support, Live Chat, and rapid response times.
• Personalization: Understand your demographic, and your type of customer profile and have their details on hand when interacting with them. Product recommendations should be based on their selections, their wishlists, and their survey inputs. Email marketing should be based on these profiles, follow-up Emails on surveys and asking for their reviews should be followed through.
• Offer value: Offer free shipping over a certain order value, and provide useful services at Checkout such as warranty for their products, shipping tracking, shipping insurance, and loyalty points. But there is more.

Adding value to your customer journey

The shopping cart can be enhanced further right from the start of the journey. Shoppers look for opportunities in engaging in purchasing from your online store, much like they would from the brick-and-mortar store. Incentives throughout in products and combinations and schemes are key.

• Multiple ways of checking out - Digital Wallets, PayPal/Venmo, Credit/Debit cards
• Bundled discounts on Products and associated product recommendations.
• Loyalty Program that promotes inviting friends and family.
• Offer free trials when engaging with your audience.
• Free gifts or samples are to be included in the box by having vendors promote their brand.
• Birthday Rewards/Gift cards are to be considered.
• Product Warranties at your checkout are to be available when dealing with mechanical/electronic products.
• Include shipping insurance at purchase, especially if customers are concerned about porch pirates, or have difficulty with deliveries in their area.
• Reviews of your products and services to encourage others to purchase.
• Offer the purchase of gift cards in your online store
• Add Wishlisting in your online store if you create an account.

The above combines the start of the journey that might originate from marketing automation such as Email marketing, all of which is aimed to sell products, and growing your marketing channel. If you are a small business you can still offer these programs and it is available to all eCommerce stores via the App Store of your platform. This is much more challenging at the brick-and-mortar retail level since communication and reach can be physically limiting - but combined with an online store and better yet, having a POS you get the best of both worlds. A physical location is advantageous for BOPIS (Buy Online Pick-up In Store) and can support a good conversion rate as a bonus, when saving on shipping the customers can at times get a "rebate" on their free shipping when it comes to their shopping basket.

The returning customers

There are challenges to keeping customers interested in your brand. New products can be new categories, seasonal colors, or the calendar/event-based activities, all of which drive interest. Product cycles in technology, or product lines in clothing, it all takes effort in communicating and driving catchy images/words to get the customer to take note. It is almost like a polite interruption. How it is taken from there, catching their eye, and allowing their mind to get curious on what you are offering at that moment - it can be a new offer, a promotion, a new collection, or just new media. Your marketing tools are being put to the test, and you have to be crafty with your marketing campaigns to capture the interest in prompting a return to the online store.

A returning customer already has had the full purchase experience and with a good customer experience will have some level of engagement when seeing your email campaigns. In improving your conversion rates for returning customers, finding out what they are looking to obtain next is a critical piece of information you must have. Was there something they looked for but was out of stock? Then an "Out of stock notification" App might come in handy. Or are they waiting for a new product release and they registered for the "Pre-order notification"? Mapping out the customer journey, and giving them expectations of what is coming up next is all as important as it is with the above-mentioned tools.

Summary

Boosting the order value is a combination of experience, brand, journeys, announcements, loyalty, locations, and various other tenets when it comes to the desire to obtain what you are offering. Brand loyalty is a big part of the basket size and the repeat customer experience - therefore understanding their motives with their engagement, and offering what they are seeking with an excellent experience is where it all begins. The information is hard to analyze at times, and with disrupted supply chains, it can be hard to execute as well. However, considering your customers' journeys and their full experience will ensure that you are covering all the bases. When it comes to the online tools, if you need help setting these up in your online stores, give us a shout at wish@thegenielab.com - we are happy to help.