Your Average Order Value is one of the key metrics you should be tracking in your ecommerce store, here we discuss what your average order value really means and why it’s important! We also have some top tips on how to increase your ecommerce AOV to grow your brand quickly and profitably.
What is your Average Order Value or AOV?
Your AOV is the average of your total order value, for example, if you had 10 orders totalling £200 that would mean your average order value for those 10 orders would be £20. This means every person on average has spent £20 in your store.
Your AOV only gives you a partial indication of your users behaviour online, it doesn’t represent the full picture, so it’s best to use the three metrics below to properly track your AOV.
Mean Value – This is the average value of all orders, it’s the mean value of your orders (the average order value)
Median Value – This is the middle value of all your orders, if you put all your orders on a line in order value & the median value is where would the middle be.
Mode Value – This is the most frequently occurring value, this tends to be the best indicator of the user behaviour on your site. If 20 people checkout for £10 each and then one person for £150 that’s going to skew your mean order value, but with mode you can see clearly the average. Looking at your mode order value is really important.
Top Tips for increasing your AOV
Create a free shipping option or extra giveaway – If people spend a certain amount, offer an incentive, you need to think about what you’re trying to achieve with your AOV and what you are trying to push it up to!
For example, if you’re looking to push your AOV to £30 at checkout, if you offer free shipping over that amount it will encourage people to spend more. You can use giveaways in the same way.
Bundle your products together – This works really well if you have a low value product, like £20 or less and you want to increase the AOV at checkout. By bundling products together that you know will be useful to your customers to use alongside a product will increase the user experience and create a positive effect.
You can also include a small discount incentive by bundling things together so people feel they’re getting better value for money, but ultimately all you’re doing is increasing your AOV at the checkout.
Upsell and cross sell products – This is similar to the bundle offering, but less contrived, for example, if you’re selling a camera, if someone adds an extra lens to their order at the checkout you could cross sell them a camera bag for the lens.
Or you might try to upsell and offer them an even better lens with a discount off at checkout. You persuade them to up what they’ve already put in their basket and buy a more expensive product. Cross selling and upselling are a really clever way of increasing your AOV.
Set up a loyalty programme
This is a great way to incentivise your customers to spend more with you in order to gain points. For example, for every £10 they spend they could get a point or a gift voucher/discount code to ensure they spend more at the checkout. They will be incentivised to spend that little bit more to get over the threshold to gain more points. This creates their loyalty value, a great way to increase your AOV.
Why is AOV so important?
It always costs money to acquire a customer, whether you’re paying for Facebook Ads, you’re paying to optimise your site for SEO or paying for Google Ads. You will always be investing something, whether that be your time or money to get that customer to your site. The best way to make a return on that investment is to get them to spend more, it’s as simple as that!
By increasing the AOV you’re making sure that when somebody clicks on your ‘pay per click’ Facebook Ad and then they purchase at checkout that you’re getting the maximum return on that click value advertising or any other form of web traffic to your site.
We hope this brief overview about your Average Order Value and how to increase it has been useful. To find out more about email marketing tactics that can increase your AOV and lifetime customer value check out this video on our Youtube channel.