While using inbound marketing and advertising (including PPC) is a great way of driving visitors and revenue, there are other things you can do as an e-commerce operator to increase conversions. Here we look at five activities you can use to increase your average order value. These sales techniques will add value to your e-business.
- Special deals for abandoned carts: this must be done sensitively but for first time customers you might want to give some kind of enhancement to get them across the line. But be careful - you don't want to develop a reputation for rewarding bad behaviour. Another way to do this is to offer a time limited enhancement.
- Special discounts page: rather than have loyal customers go elsewhere for better deals, why don't you group them all in one page so they can browse them. You might want to keep that relatively private and only allow access to your best customers?
- Bundles: this is a way of mimicing the 'three for two' deals that are found in shops across the high street. It offers better value to customers but it does get sales moving. You can also bundle products that naturally fit together and offer them both at a better price (torch and batteries, for example).
- First time discounts: a good way of getting contact details from new customers is to exchange that for something of value. A good example is a discount voucher for registering. Not only can you increase your base but you can benefit from social sharing after the fact as happy customers tell their friends about the discount voucher.
- Free shipping: whilst it would be expensive to offer free shopping across the board, it is a sensible approach to offer free shipping over a certain value of order. Another approach is to offer discounted or free shipping to the best repeat customers. Repeat customers are the lifeblood of good performing sites but you need to have integration with the ERP system to see that at time of purchase.
Whilst some of these can be seen as inbound marketing activity, the reality is that these are sales operations which are done at the point of sale within an e-commerce site. You will need to have some analysis of your base to be able to do this properly.
There are other approaches which could be taken but these are the most simple to implement and make the biggest difference to sales volume and ecommerce basket value. You do need the marketing tools in place to be able to do that.
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