Increasing the average sales amount per order is a great way to grow your business. This can be done using coupons and cross selling techniques. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
A simple way to increase the average sales amount per order is create an incentive for customers to spend more. You can use a coupon that will discount a fixed amount or a percentage of an order when a customer spends a specified amount. For example, if your customers spend an average of $18 per order, you might try promoting a $5 off coupon for orders of $30 or more (before shipping costs). This might encourage some shoppers to add more items to their cart and increase your overall revenue. Of course, you’ll need to calculate your risk and see if you can afford to discount prices.
Another great way to increase the average sales amount per order is to present shoppers with cross-selling and up-selling scenarios. Cross-selling and up-selling are two techniques that are used to get a shopper to either purchase a more expensive product (up-selling) or to get a shopper to add additional products (e.g., accessories) to the order (cross-selling). These tools are built right into Auctiva Commerce so that you can let your storefront do all the sales work. Read the Up-Selling tutorial and Cross-Selling tutorial for more information.
Beware of using Free Shipping promotions for the purpose of increasing the average order amount as they generally take too much out of profit margin. In this way, you won’t actually boost average order amount after you calculate your cost for covering the shipping.
Feel free to leave your own examples in the comments section. We’d love to hear how your growing your sales.
Your loyal customers can be a critical channel of revenue for your store. Auctiva Commerce can help you retain customers by helping indentify the most valuable customers and encouraging them to continue shopping on your store.
Why Promote Loyalty?
Just because you have repeat customers does not mean that you necessarily need a customer loyalty program. Some stores may get repeat business because they offer hard to find products, or shipping to a region that no other store can provide. Before you start cutting your customers a deal, understand the risk and opportunities that are associated with promoting customer loyalty with coupons and other savings.
As a general rule, customer loyalty programs are focused on retaining customers who might otherwise do business with a competitor. The sole purpose is to help a business keep its current customers. Are you doing business in a competitive market? If so, you should strongly consider investing some time and money into developing a customer loyalty program that will help keep your customers coming back to you.
Even if you don’t have a lot of competition, you can always consider giving loyal customers something in return to show your appreciation. Just make sure that your promotion is in line with your business goals. If there is really no risk in losing a particular customer, you probably should not consider giving them a deep discount. That will eat up your profit margins. In this case, you may want to consider a customer loyalty program that simply adds value using means other than discounting prices with coupons. A simple Thank You email message is a great way to show your appreciation and it won’t take anything out of your profit margins.
What Customers Should I Target?
The important customers to target for loyalty programs are the most valuable customers that are at the highest risk of shopping somewhere else. Valuable customers can be shoppers who frequently make purchases or shoppers that have only visited once, but made a large purchase. Sales volume is usually the metric you’ll use to determine the customer’s value. In Auctiva Commerce, you can view a customer’s shopping history and see just how much that person has spent on your store. We’ll show you how to do that later in this post.
Read more…
