15 Ways To Increase Average Order Value (AOV)

Business is changing. Shifting. Morphing. Things are no longer the same. The cost of goods are rising. Prices are inflating. And ad costs are swelling to all-time highs. Today, there is so much competition in the marketplace. It’s not business as usual. It’s different. So you must be different. Act differently. That means restructuring. Adapting. Moving through the storm. Not only to survive. But to thrive.

And to thrive in today’s marketplace everyone knows that your business must be profitable. But it’s not just about ensuring a high return on your ad spend (ROAS). You must get customers to spend more money. And get them to spend more money more frequently. But how? The answer is not to just increase the frequency of sales. The answer is to increase average order values (AOVs).

When you can increase the average order value and get customers to buy more frequently, you’re increasing the lifetime value of customers (LTV). If you can do that, you can maximize your return on investment (ROI). I know. I know. It’s a lot of acronyms to toss around. But I’m assuming you’re aware of these, right? After all, you’re in business to make money. Not lose money.

How To Increase Average Order Values

Everyone knows that you must spend money to make money, right? But you must also spend money profitably to stay in business. Bleeding costs and leaky ads can ruin a business faster than anything else. So you must stay on your toes. Be aware. Alert. So that you can discover ways you can increase your average order value fast. When you can get customers to spend more money, you can afford to spend more to acquire those customers. That makes sense, right?

So how do you do it? How can you get customers to spend more? How can you ensure those average cart values and average order values are sky-high? Look, it’s not rocket science. But at the foundation of this is your sales process. If you’re using a traditional website to sell, that’s the first major mistake. After all, websites are dead. They have been for ages now. Sure, websites can be pretty and snazzy, and all of that. But they’re useless.

If you have a website don’t panic. If you’ve spent thousands of dollars on that website making it look pretty, stay calm. It’s okay. Websites are fine and all. They provide information and knowledge. Even if they overwhelm people. Leave your website where it is and build a sales funnel. A sales funnel averages conversion rates that are 137% higher than traditional websites. Yes, it’s that high.

Building a sales funnel isn’t complicated. It’s actually easy. It’ll help you make more money online because sales funnels convert better than websites. That’s because they lead people down one distinct path. They’re not like websites. They have only one way forward. You either take that route or you don’t. And you don’t need a web developer to build one. You can use premade templates and a drag-and-drop editor to create a sales funnel fast.

How To Increase Your AOV Using Sales Funnels

Your AOV is not going to increase itself. And it’s certainly not going to increase itself in the framework of a traditional website. It’s just not going to happen. Sorry. But sales funnels are different. It’ll help you optimize and tweak your landing pages and offers to dramatically boost the average amount of money that people spend. And when you can boost the AOV, you can boost the average LTV.

Whether you look at business and profitability in the short term or the long term, sales funnels help. If you’re thinking short-term, you’re spending ad dollars against an AOV. However, long-term thinkers look at the bigger picture of the higher LTV. Either way you look at it, an increase in a customer’s AOV will naturally lead to a higher LTV.

There’s no better way to optimize for all of this than to do it with sales funnels. You can move and shift pages, add offers, and be fluid in your approach. This way you can increase sales, maximize revenue and crush those AOV and LTV numbers. You can easily split-test headlines, try different images, and test call-to-action buttons with sales funnels.

#1—Order Bumps

Ever visit a grocery store and seen select items in the checkout line? These are designed to get you to spend more money. When you spend more money what happens? The grocery store can increase its average order value. Grocery stores employ many tactics to get you to spend more money. This is one of them. And the best part? You can implement this in your store by using order bumps.

An order bump is something that compliments the purchase. It’s available in the cart as you checkout. Typically, you’ll see this as a checkbox that easily adds the complimenting product (or service) to the cart before checkout. Order bumps are easy to add inside of a sales funnel. However, manually configuring an order bump might pose some challenges.

Using sales funnels, you can quickly add an order bump that will help increase the average order value and ensure that you remain profitable on your ad spend. That’ll increase the ROAS and ROI of your ad spend. For example, on this free-plus-shipping book offer that teaches you how to grow your business fast, you’ll see two order bumps. One order bump is for the audio version of the book. It’s $37. The other Can you see how this compliments the purchase of the physical book?

#2—Product Bundles

To maximize your AOV you can bundle products together. This can include multiple physical products all combined into one. This increases the price of the overall price of the product that’s added to the cart. And those purchases naturally increase your AOV. You can also bundle digital products with physical products. You can also add physical products to services and combine them into one.

Think about ways that you can bundle products to create more value. If you sell a replenishing item, you can add multiple packs. For example, if you typically sell a one-month supply of something, consider adding a two-month bundle or a three-month bundle. The higher prices can help you make more money from each customer.

#3—Upsells & Downsells

What’s an upsell? If you’re not using an upsell in your business, you should consider doing it. Why? Because upsells are the fastest way that you can boost your AOV. Especially when that upsell is for a high-priced product or service. To understand why upsells work so well you must understand human behavior. We thrive off of a uniformity principle. Meaning that we like to stay aligned with the actions we take. So if we buy something from a vendor, we like to continue buying.

That principle of uniformity applies heavily during the purchase process as well. Once someone decides to purchase from you they are far more likely to add on products during that purchase process. And even if they don’t take that upsell offer, you can present them with a downsell offer. Downsells can offer an alternative version of an upsell or be something entirely different.

Implementing upsells and downsells can be done on an e-commerce website running Shopify using specific apps. However, you must test that furiously. But to really implement upsells and downsells with ease, you should use our sales funnel software. It offers one-click upsells and downsells. And customers don’t have to re-enter their card details and it makes the entire process simple and easy.

#4—Search Engine Optimization

One of the best investments you can make in your business is to leverage SEO. Behind email marketing, SEO is the highest ROI marketing activity. Why? Because to succeed with SEO your content must be relevant to a search. And higher relevancy leads to better conversion rates with people spending more money with those businesses.

When your business is relevant enough to dominate the search engines, customers take notice. And they buy whatever it is that you’re peddling. However, SEO isn’t easy at all. So don’t think for a moment it is. But on average, you can expect to gain about $22 for every dollar you invest in SEO. It leads to better customers who spend more money and buy more often. That increases your AOV and your LTV.

#5—Subscription Offers

Subscriptions offer recurring revenue. That helps you make more money and not have to worry about constantly finding new customers. Subscriptions keep the lights on because they bring in income on autopilot. That’s the beauty of subscriptions. And subscriptions naturally boost the LTV of a customer. And depending on the monthly price of your subscription, they can increase the AOV quickly.

Consider adding a subscription offer to your sales funnel. You can do this as the primary offer, as an upsell, or as a downsell. Your subscription offer can be a membership piece where content is regularly dripped out to customers. It can also be a newsletter like this one. It can be a subscription box that’s sent every month to the customer. And any number of other things.

#6—Risk Reversal

To get customers to spend more money, sometimes you must reverse their risk. Make sure that there is a powerful risk reversal there to give them peace of mind. Risk reversal can be a 30-day no-questions-asked refund policy. It can be a 60-day return policy. Or longer. The more risk reversal you bake into your offers, the more likely you’ll be to increase the average amount of money customers spend on their orders.

Risk reversal can also be combined with social proof. You can provide third-party reviews or video testimonials of customers right next to your refund policies. This will heighten the chance of a customer spending more money in your storefront. This puts the customer at ease, knowing that what they’re buying has a high likelihood of solving the problem they’re experiencing.

#7—Free Shipping With Minimum Order Amount

To get customers to spend more, you can always offer free shipping with a minimum order amount. This works well on Shopify stores. Especially when you have lower-priced items, implementing a minimum order amount for free shipping helps quickly increase the AOV. Why? The answer is clear. Companies like Amazon have trained customers to expect free shipping. So when they’re forced to pay for it, conversions free fall.

The truth is that people don’t want to pay for shipping when it’s a physical item. They simply don’t. Except maybe in the case of a free-plus-shipping offer where they’re getting the product for free but agreeing to cover the cost of shipping. Whether you’re running your offer from a sales funnel or you have a Shopify store, consider implementing free shipping with a minimum order policy.

#8—Thank You Page Cross-Selling

Another way to increase your AOV is to cross-sell on the thank you page. This isn’t about the upsell or the downsell during the purchase process. It actually happens on the order confirmation page. This can be in the form of an offer wall that suggests other products that the customer might be interested in. Once someone has completed the purchase process they are still in the buying process, albeit at the end of that process.

If they see a product that piques their interest, it could add more money to the overall purchase. This helps you liquidate ad costs and increase the ROAS because you’re getting the customer to spend more. This increases all of your metrics across the board. You can do the thank you page offers with Shopify too. Several apps enable this to happen.

#9—Email Marketing

Email marketing helps you increase the likelihood of converting browsers into buyers. However, to email market to prospects you have to first get their contact details. That’s why you need a lead generation funnel with a powerful lead magnet. Lead generation funnels increase the likelihood that you’ll grab the prospect’s details before they click away and leave forever.

You can use the power of story-selling through a soap opera sequence to build rapport with a prospect. This way you can get them to spend more money with you. Building rapport isn’t difficult. It simply means that you’re sharing stories that engage and entertain them while also delivering hope that the solution will solve their problem.

#10—Sell High Ticket

High-ticket products and services naturally allow you to increase the amount of money customers spend. High ticket can take on many forms. This can be a high-ticket coaching service where you offer one-on-one coaching or even group coaching. It can also be a mastermind, consulting or some other high-ticket product or service.

You can sell high ticket by using an application funnel. You can sell it to existing customers or sell them to new customers. And you can also sell high ticket using webinars, which are longer presentations specifically designed to get customers to buy high-ticket products and services. To learn more about selling high ticket through webinars, make sure you read Expert Secrets.

#11—Loyalty program

If you don’t have a customer loyalty program, consider implementing one. You can do this with most selling platforms. For example, Shopify has several apps that you can install that feature customer loyalty features. Customers can earn points for every dollar that they spend. And you can set up reward tiers for customers based on their spending.

Loyalty apps on Shopify can also reward customers for taking other actions. For example, some apps can be configured to reaward customers for sharing products with friends, posting a review, or adding the product to their social media channels. Find a way to implement customer loyalty so that you can squeeze the most value out of each paying customer.

12—Use Scarcity & Urgency

Scarcity and urgency are powerful drivers of human behavior. We humans want what we can’t have (or what we can’t have soon). For example, every Black Friday there are a set number of the “best deals” at retailers. These are snatched up incredibly quickly. Why? Because of scarcity. You also see scarcity during housing crises where people clamor to buy or rent property.

Urgency is another way to get customers to spend more. You could put your highest-valued product or service on a promotion that expires soon. This creates urgency. You can also use a product launch method to open the cart for a new product or service for a limited period. This forces people to buy before the deadline ends.

13—Exit Intent Popups

Exit intention is when a customer is leaving your website from a desktop browser. The browser can detect an exit intention when the mouse moves to the header of the page near the search bar. An exit intent popup displays a message to encourage the customer to continue with their order. This does two things. The first is that it helps ensure you don’t lose that customer. The second is that you can display an offer that encourages a higher-priced purchase.

Exit intent popups are powerful drivers of action. If anything, your exit intent can at least collect the customer’s details by getting them to grab a free lead magnet or perform some other action that allows you to get their information. This way, you can market to them later on using your email marketing platform to eventually sell them more stuff.

14—Retargeting

Retargeting is the act of following a customer around the internet to remind them to purchase from you. However, retargeting is more challenging today. That’s because of Apple’s new privacy rules on their devices that hide much of your information from prospective advertisers. This makes it harder for them to follow you around on the web.

But retargeting is still a very powerful way to ensure you get a customer to spend money with you. And retargeting your highest-priced products allows you to ensure they are purchased. Consider an omni-channel approach to retargeting. Use social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, while also using Google ads for retargeting. This way you can increase the chances of appearing all over your prospect’s feeds.

15—Payment Plans

Payment plans allow customers to break apart larger purchases into smaller payments. This can easily increase the average order value because it puts a smaller financial burden on the customer today. They can take two or three payments (even more) to pay the purchase price. This is helpful when you’re dealing with higher priced products or services.

Payment plans can be implemented through most payment gateways. You’ll need to be clear about the terms with the customer. Payment plans can also be incorporated through third-party processors like Klarna or PayPal Credit. You can also promote your payment plans to help sell more expensive products to your existing customers.