by
Colin MacDougal

With algorithmic changes across the search engines becoming nearly a weekly occurrence, it’s been a perpetual hell for businesses this past year, especially when it comes to getting targeted customers to buy from them. When you’ve lost your organically grown traffic resources due to faulty content or linking incidents, the creative side of increasing the average order value needs to come out to play, and level the losses which occurred because of Pandas or Penguins scolding your content. Here we’ve taken into account that normal traffic flows have slowed, whacking part of your organic sales, and have provided you with some creative ways to increase the net profit without increasing the COGS (cost of goods sold). By working on ways to increase order values, you’ll improve overall sales once your organic placement has been successfully arbitrated by Google upon completion of content overhauling or other improvements, which previously prohibited natural sales without upselling.

Ship ‘Em Free

On the surface, one may believe that offering free shipping would decrease overall profit margins; you’d be happy to know it’s actually the opposite. Temporal sales can increase to epic proportions if you offer free shipping codes across your sales pages, social media drives and search engine marketing ads. Consumers have been known to ditch $1,100 shopping carts simply because the cost to ship goods floored them. With ingenuity and logical pricing, you can leverage free shipping offers in numerous ways, including:

• Time-sensitive offers: Historically works well with seasonal shopping items which you wish to unload. Offer free shipping on certain items you wish to clear out of your warehouse to make room for the next shipment or season.
• Flat rates: Provided your customer meets a certain purchase threshold, offer flat-rate shipping costs which are slightly less than you’d normally charge. This increases shopping cart sizes and allows you to eat shipping costs you’ll never miss.
• Free shipping IF: One of the greatest, and easiest, shipping methods to increase AOV is forcing the overall dollar amount spent to rise where you want it, in which then you’ll slap free shipp.ing on those items. Works well with small items which can be slammed into one flat-rate box via USPS
• Eligible products ship free: Here you can concentrate your sales pushes on higher margin items by offering free shipping if “x, y or z” is purchased. You can do the same with items which go well together (free shipping on coffee and coffee pots, etc.).

The costs of shipping goods become arbitrary when you push the overall consumer spend to more comfortable thresholds, allowing the profit margin to exceed shipping rates.

Up-And-Cross Selling

Ever shopped for some service or product and seen that to get what you really want, the next package higher needs to be purchased? Sure, it may cost $10 extra, but the value merited the increase expenditure. The keys to making an upselling or cross selling campaign happen effectively is clearly identifying items which can be placed in higher categories along with accessories to inflate the worth to your customers. Once clarity is witnessed in what each customer will receive, through a warranty, extra customer support, or free music downloads, the upgraded purchase is normally made. Inhibitors to sales that aren’t made are directly related to the lack of value in the next package or product above the one that is desired. Purchases that increase self-efficacy through larger purchases are also historically effective, especially when customer support is adequate enough. There are definitely some don’ts that come with suggestive upgrading, which include:

• Suggesting products outside of customer’s chosen parameters;
• Black boxing items which would have little companion use with products in shopping cart;
• Offering extended warranties from outside companies which, inevitably, mean the customer must spend more money elsewhere.

The goal of product co-suggestion and upselling is to provide increases in value and tangible receivables; if companies suggest unrelated or non-plausible items, the customer will more than likely ditch the cart and move onto the next vendor or service provider.

Find Strength In Volume Priced Items

Another highly effective AOV tool at your disposal is offering volume priced items in groups that appeal to customers based on historical visitor interests. This is generally accomplished by offering two similar items, grouped together, and tossing in the third one for free, or something similar in nature. You’ll still profit from all items, regardless of how you accomplish the volume pricing model. Other useful ideas to propagate sales though volume pricing include:

• Kitting: This simply means putting several items together which increases value and can be sold with slight discounts; when broken apart, the customer can see they are getting value.
• Bundling: This usually takes a kit and throws in accessories to increase the usefulness of the kit. This could be extra clasps for necklaces, creamer packets with coffee, etc.

Volume priced items can still proffer excellent AOV during times when organic search traffic has severely halted natural sales.

Offering Free Gifts

This, by far, is the best way to introduce up and coming product or service innovations: give sneak peeks or free goodie bags when “x” amount of dollars are spent. You accomplish several key business ideologies simultaneously: first, you are selling and profiting off regular items and second, you are offering your new product lines a showcasing before new customer eyes, which can bring them back for more purchases, or even bring new buyers to your storefront. You can also give away free eBooks with site subscriptions, giftcards with larger purchases and more; the possibilities are nearly endless when you seek innovative free gift giveaways as the means necessary to increase AOV. The free gifts could have been ‘throw-away’ items that sales representatives left for you to sample; they may even be eBooks you’ve been dying to give away.

Multichannel Lead Capturing

Now that you have multitudes of ideas to begin your quest for AOV leveraging, you need to harness the power of social suggestion to push these offers along. You can accomplish this through Wildfire contest application integration, Tweets, Facebook fan page pushes or anything you feel would spread the word about your freebies, gifts or shipping values. Once it becomes viral—if the deal is excellent, it will—social media will naturally circumvent your offer and increase your AOV immeasurably.

Test Them All First

Since so many different methods work for different brands and business models, you may find it easier to test various AOV methods on smaller scales before throwing down the gauntlet in an all-out media frenzy. Test which offers seem to work better than others, especially during periods when you are relying on anti-search traffic to appear on your website. You aren’t losing any more or less revenue by testing various offers since organic traffic has slowed down. While you are waiting for solvency of these issues, take the time to put up some great deals that would attract a social following. Once several dozen people have purchased items and left testimonials, they’ll naturally share that purchase with others and grow your AOV without the assistance of search engine optimization. Heck, you may be able to slow your aggressive SEM efforts if your deals are consistent, worthwhile and value-packed.

Photo Credit: Flickr

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