The 10 Biggest hacks to increase AOV for Ecom brands in 2024

what's up guys I'm gonna be talking about AOV or average order value in my video today I'll be breaking down 10 different hacks that are super relevant for 2024 and the way we're sort of browsing ecom sites today and it's gonna be massively increasing your average order value no matter what industry you're in if it's jewelry or skincare I don't care it's going to really really improve your AOV and I've also designed all these tips to be very practical meaning that you will be able to implement them sometimes I go as far as suggesting what app to use so pretty practical presentation I got for you right here and I also recently delivered this presentation at a mastermind in Amsterdam and I got really really amazing feedback a lot of people already implementing it so it definitely has been peer-reviewed and yeah let's dive straight into it if you're listening to this on Spotify definitely check out the video version on YouTube or on Spotify as well so that you can see all the visual implementations as well so let's dive in all right so I got my presentation here from and I just want to probably do this mode here so I can see the slides coming up because that way I'll actually be able to talk about it on a little bit higher level so first of all you know the topic but why are we talking about AOV right because AOV is not the same as conversion rate and it's not been discussed so so much honestly it's often being forgotten and everyone is talking about increase your conversion rate but for me AOV is actually king and there's a few reasons for that which I go over in the presentation as well but the main thing is that it's way it way easier to influence AOV and that's based over a thousand split tests first of my own brands and then like lately on Purple Fire we're just able to get that and the reason for that I'll come into that in a few slides but it's kind of obvious once you frame it and and think about it in a certain way but a lot of the brands we work with are from 100k up to a million we have clients that are bigger as well but this is just the most common stats I see they hover about a 2 to 3 percent conversion rate but the average order value is also if there's such a big span it can be all the way down to 40 bucks and then typically you see all the way up to 80 bucks and they're outliers of course but that's what I normally see and then sort of a gross margin of three thirty to sixty percent that's what we normally see here and the reason why I think it's so much easier to influence it is if you ask this question right to convince someone to buy it all or to influence someone to buy just a little bit more it's pretty obvious that it's way easier to get people to just buy a little bit more than to not buy or to buy at all right which is this is conversion rate and this is average order value so let's dive into the ten tips in a little bit but the final thing I want to show you it's not sexy but think about your business right there's so many things that are paid once per order right so when you order something when you ship a package to a client or a customer a lot of these things don't really change right you got one credit card fee no matter how big the average order value is of course it can be a percentage but the scale is so low right the pick and pack fees to add in one more item so usually any three PLS will have a order specific fee and then just a tiny extra fee to pick one more item so a lot of these things are the same shipping fees there are so many times away if you add in an additional item it doesn't even increase the shipping fees because the weight difference is so little that there's no extra cost affiliate Commission so if you rely on affiliates as well it doesn't change is the same thing so think about your your your cost per order that's not really affected which is why it would be is so powerful you're literally just adding profit to your order and also you know if you're scaling you're gonna be running into sort of this kind of curve so let's say you're spending a thousand bucks a day around here and you're seeing a really nice traction and you're thinking already in your head oh my god if I scale this to 10,000 a month or 10,000 days or I'm gonna see a 10x result but you're not gonna you're gonna hit a plateau maybe around 4,000 $5,000 a day and then suddenly you started seeing a dip the algorithm is just not able to find so many people because your audience size is limited and you're gonna see a lower return and also not just the audience size you're also gonna be reaching further and further away from your target audience your target ICP or USP and then basically no one's going to buy because it's not really what they're looking for so anyway with that in mind let's go a little bit deeper I'm gonna show you exactly how to increase your AV and here are 10 different tips so number one implement a multi-step progression for your car and this is where you give away certain tiers you give away certain discounts or freebies or anything like that in order to get people to spend more so here we can see an example of that from a true classic where and by the way I just want to highlight that when we do this for our clients we see a 10 to 20% AV boost if it's done perfectly and there are a few things it's very very very important you get this right otherwise it won't work at all and some of the key lessons is that obviously the first target you want to you want to highlight is free shipping that's usually the first one I will get into in one of my tips later on how to calculate the free shipping how you set that threshold in the first place because that might be a question but you need to add in additional thresholds I would say two to three more are really great so you have three to four in total and as you can see with true classic I had a t-shirt in my cart and they are going to give me a long sleeve and they're gonna give me a button-up shirt as well so those are different categories and I'm pretty sure they're going as far as saying the freebies you have here depend on what you have in your cart and that's very powerful because you want to make sure these are tailored now the big thing about the additional items you want to unlock we are trying to get people to spend more if the if the options are not desirable they're not gonna spend more so that's the first thing the other thing is in this specific case free shipping unlocks at about 160 170 bucks and then it's another hundred bucks to get it for a freebie and then it's another 40 bucks to get the next freebie so that can be tailored to a lot of different things and it really depends on the size of your business and your average order value and what you're selling so let's say you're selling your average order value is 50 bucks and you're selling things for 10 to 30 bucks then obviously your thresholds between each tier is way lower probably something about 10 to 25 percent between each tier so that's sort of a golden rule we've been able to work with in terms of categories if I was a fashion brand and I was selling as with true classic different things maybe socks as well and accessories and pants as well I would want to unlock as many categories as possible because I know if they get one of my products they will like it and it will come back for it so it could easily be free shipping then it could be socks here and then it could be a button-up shirt here so the first gift is a little bit less and then you get a really nice one on the biggest here that's something you will have to play with here but make sure it's desirable and make sure those other categories basically unlock something for you maybe just launched soaps in your skincare line and you're having a hard time selling soaps then definitely you want to add that in so I always say this is one of the easiest way to get one of your newer categories to become more popular likewise you might have a hero item you're sending a lot of your traffic to in terms of media buying and so forth and then you have other products that are secondary and you and you don't even have a profitable funnel well then maybe this could be a way to unlock that and get people excited about trying it and coming back again there are two major advantages of using this system number one you increase your average order value no doubt about it 10 to 20 percent as a cent the second benefit that no one talks about is the added LTV because people will if they like the products they're getting for free come back to buy more of those products so that's a easy way to increase your LTV and if you look at your cohorts after three months so how much have a customer spent after three months six months nine months twelve months you will see that those numbers will go up once this has been implemented successfully in terms of the the design that's also very big component here and the design really dictates whether you're gonna have success so what you should be looking at here is making sure you write exactly down to the last dollar or cent or whatever currency how much you have to spend to get the next tier unlocked if you're just saying the totals down here but not how much is left then no one is gonna do it because they cannot do that calculation and they don't know what to do to get that last bit of spend to unlock free shipping so that's a really important design and then obviously you want to have your progress progression design here so you can see how far away you are from the discounts in this case to actually have one up here and another one here which is confusing but basically they do a volume discount and then they do just a total discount where you unlock certain products so something to keep in mind is that that's a little much you can get away with this but you would want a progression bar or at least light up that you've activated this and this is how far you are from the next year right so consider that this is a bit over the top one thing and this is one of the biggest hacks is being able to show your progression when you're not at the card level which is something no one does here you can see that for Huel they are basically showing that they're about you're about to hit free shipping soon you have to spend 12 bucks more to get free shipping that's really really important otherwise you only gonna notice it in cart when and that's when you might be saying I'm ready to check out I don't want to look at anything else if you do it here before the card you're still open to it because you haven't made your mind up yet whether you should add more products so this is an absolutely essential thing no app currently supports this so you'll have to custom code it but this is a high high value improvement you can make going a little bit further is test a gold nugget number two which is test your free shipping threshold this one is big guys because with a threshold a free shipping threshold you can increase your AOV your conversion rate your revenue per visitor and we've seen some really crazy things we were able to add 18% higher AOV on one of our clients when we did it so there's some high outcomes but there's also a lot of technical things you need to understand in terms of being able to implement your free shipping threshold you can use help scout you can use intelligence those apps are on Shopify if you are on other platforms like WooCommerce and so on I don't have a particular app you can use but you can have a good developer set it up for you and then you can test it out the things you need to to think about here is 92% of the clients we work with they never tested that threshold so that tells you that your competitor is probably not testing this and it's a one way you can get a massive advantage over your competitors 45% of the time we were able to get a higher AOV when we did it and then it all boils down to is AOV being is conversion rate being sacrificed by going so hard on your AOV and ultimately what I'm trying to make you think about is will you get more revenue per visitor by increasing your threshold and that is an equation you need to do because otherwise it doesn't make sense so let me show you that as well so golden nugget number two is to test the threshold but what you need to understand is average order size after discounts X shipping is the metric you're looking at this is not AOV this is a specific metric you can only pull if you go into the Shopify backend and download your stuff download all your data and the reason why it's not AOV is that AOV will typically include shipping which is not part of the calculation when we want to find out what your three shipping threshold should be and obviously we want to make sure is after discounts as well because we want to know the truth this is basically a number that tells you the truth of what your AOV is if you don't include shipping right but you do include your discounts so let's assume that it's 68 bucks in this scenario and right now your three shipping threshold is set at a hundred and fifty bucks it's gonna be a very very very small amount of people that actually reach your free shipping threshold which means that you are not able to utilize this free shipping to reach anyone you're not gonna get a higher conversion rate you're not gonna get anyone spent more because no one is literally reaching it because of high how it is in this case in order to boost AOV you would test thresholds below the current 150 bucks but probably above this number you have here because we know this is what people are spending if we don't factor in shipping but we factor in the discounts and we want to nudge those people to just spend a little bit more 10% 20% 30% and that is our assumption that if we do that this free shipping threshold will actually make a difference and we're gonna get people spending more money if you think this by the way is too hard to calculate and the whole testing is too hard to calculate you can definitely reach out to me or to Purple Fire we can help you get set up either just consulting with you or just managing the whole test so that is a little shameless plug right there but anyway let's get back to it so we want to track AOV we want to track revenue per visitor and we are doing this doing the testing of these different thresholds and if we see that this one increases AOV massively but actually lowers our revenue per visitor so much then it might not be the best threshold it might be that this is the best threshold right and sometimes what we do is if we find a clear winner let's say the 20% wins then we might test you know 15% and and obviously 20% again and then 25% because maybe there's a number where we're getting more people so we will typically do double tests to double down on what we're seeing so that is a really big one I have another scenario here but this video is gonna get insanely long so I'm not even gonna go through it because I think you got the gist of it by now so nugget number three is to implement a loyalty program and this one is so underutilized I pulled 80 top income guys all doing seven and eight figures and they were all being pulled and two out of those people were saying they had a loyalty program so no one is using it this is another way you can get a massive advantage over your competitors here is one from True Classics where you can just see that if you become a member of the loyalty program you literally get a 10% off immediately and 20% of what you buy for gets stored as credits that you can use anytime you want you immediately unlock free shipping and when with the non members obviously you see that on the side which is really nice and then you get insiders access to sales and you can cancel it so they charge 12 bucks a year for it but one thing that is very powerful here is that you store so many credits you get free shipping you get insider access this is massively going to increase your AOV and also your LTV so some of the data here is that we saw that loyalty members spent 67% more than non-loyalty members over a six-month period if they're correctly activated through SMS and email flows and so forth but they also spent 70% more so that's because they feel a massive attachment to your brand if you activate them correctly you make them feel appreciated and of course they're going to be spending more because you remind them of their credits and the expirations of those credits and so forth some of the key learnings here in the loyalty program is that it should have real benefits to join the program and not just credit points so think about making a beta testers give them access to exclusive products so one thing we've seen work extremely well is you know doing a call away just for your membership for your membership people and also giving them access to drops before everyone else so like Friday they get access let's say 12 hours before everyone else or a day before you could even do meetups you could do a ton of different things to activate them you could give them free products once in a while and samples and so forth I love beta testers so if you have products you can test you could send it out to loyalty members that opt in and they can sort of test it and give critique and this is just a massive hack like I just can't tell you how much you can get out of creating a beta test program again no one is doing that so it's a massive advantage in terms of 20 to 10 to 20 percent is basically the sweet spot in terms of what you want to give so if someone spent a hundred bucks you're gonna give them 10 to 20 bucks in credits that might seem like a lot and I think 10% is more the norm here true classic is extremely aggressive because they know their numbers so well that it's better to give 20% in credit points than to buy the customer again so that's the thesis that when you get so many points you take away your competition because you're gonna give such a good value for your customers so think about that for a second credit points should expire and it's very important to expire I would say within every three months or every quarter they expire this is very important because then you can activate them by saying your credits are about to expire and then you will do that through email and SMS and another thing I just thought about as well is that I don't think it should cost money to join that's what they're doing here I think they should give their phone number if they want to join because that's more valuable than charging a client 12 bucks a year so something like that is it's going to be valuable because you can use SMS to target them and it also in everything else all your marketing so it's gonna be really really powerful other things to keep in mind here is that you can do a referral program inside of your loyalty program so you can get people to refer more and then finally if you want to make the customer earn more credits you can give them different ideas like I'll show the next slide like create an account place an order join our Facebook group join our Twitter so all that gives points and that is very powerful you can get a lot of cross promotion by doing that this one is really funny so basically if you celebrate your birthday you get a hundred points but then you also have to put in your birthday and everybody knows that if a client gives you their birthday you can do really good marketing specific messaging based on that so you can kind of be creative in that way the last thing is I have a one example of a loyalty program you can use I have zero affiliation with them but they're really good and you can set up all your benefits and all that in here so I just thought I would do that because it's it's pretty cool yeah you still saw the points as well so let's proceed it's pretty long video but I think there's just so much value in here honestly goal nugget number four is to highlight bundle options and collection pages so what you can see here is that the first image is replaced a hundred percent and instead it shows you what bundle options you have this is so powerful so consider implementing this on all your collection pages if you're selling products that go really well in bundles that would just be an easy AOV increase another one here on your PDPs, you should always have bundles, you can do that in all different types of ways. So you can imagine this banner could, could be displayed here in a nice, beautiful way. And then people mix and match different products in order to get those nice discounts. So set that up on your collection pages, that is something no one does. And on your product pages, we see that a lot, but often it's very far down, you want to put it right under that cart button if you can. So gold nugget number six is to create bigger bundles for your product range. I'll just show you an example right here. Immediately, it's easy to understand that this brand Bombass, they're selling, you know, products for 16 bucks. But immediately, they want you to consider bundles, right. And a lot of people are only showing the bundles when you click on the one time, this product here, and then you can see it. But it's way higher conversion rate to do a ton of bundles. So on your collection pages, you will see a lot of bundles where you eliminate the hesitations, because you don't have to pick the color, you just have to pick the size, and that's it. So you pre select colors for them. And that's a massive boost takes a bit more work. But if you're selling something with low AOV, this is an absolute game changer, honestly. Gold nugget number seven is to build an emotional connection with your clients before you ask for money. So we've had different examples. Here is a landing page we did for a client where we did a very emotional, deep connection with the customers. So they see this, we buy the traffic from Meta, and they see this before they see the actual product. And this is a personal story from the founder of her experience with the product and why she invented it and so forth. And it's meant to trigger a bond between the potential customer and the founder to make them feel like they're in the same shoes, that she understands the issues they have with their shampoos and so forth. And this is so powerful. The kind of results you can see from this is usually a 10 to 15% lift in AOV. This is very pessimistic, you can get way higher than that. But that's what we've seen just like for most clients. And the way you would do it is you run your ads through an advertorial and then to a powerful landing page where the sale, the product is presented with a lot of social proof and all that stuff. And then you want to set up email flows, you want to set up remarketing obviously to support my thesis of creating this emotional connection. But if you do that throughout your funnel, so if you do that through your ads, your remarketing, your email flows, you're just gonna see such a powerful lift. And it's very underutilized because people are only thinking about it maybe here, but they're forgetting about it everywhere else in their funnel. I have another example here where we also just did that just with a nail brand. So I just wanted to highlight like it doesn't limit itself to one industry. This is something you can do for basically most industries as well. Let's go a little bit further. Go to nugget number eight, which is where you build a segmented goal slash outcome email list, and write powerful content that you know, basically builds trust, connection, credibility. So you know how you see that 10% off pop up immediately when you land on a website, it's just super annoying. And I would definitely advise to never do that. Because no one wants it. They're not even hooked on the product yet. So don't even give them a discount code. Instead, what you should be doing if you want to be aggressive about a pop up appearing quite fast, is you should be asking them what goal they have, or what are their problem. So in this case, we're looking to understand a little bit about what issue they're having. So let's say it's, I'm having an issue with my immunity. Basically, if they click that, they will now know so much about them. Based on this cookie trigger, I could completely redesign the page now to basically fit the fact that I know they're looking to boost their immunity. In this case, also, we could send them a discount code that specifically is offered after we know their goal. And we could send it to their email. But now what we can do is in our email flows, we can 100% tailor the content to immunity, to the fact that she wants to boost immunity. So that could be powerful customer stories, it could be the products, the benefits, how they work, how they're superior, comparisons, and so forth. But no one is doing that. They're just asking for 10% off. And it's just not going to make a difference. The bottom line here is that we saw a 24.3% high AOV for people that are buying through automated flows, with over 10 emails passed over two months, where it's 100% goal oriented. So we know what they want. We send them content that makes them feel like we have the right choice for them. And that is such a superior way of collecting emails. First of all, you're going to get way more. Second of all, you're going to get way more that by and they could be spending more, because it kind of goes hand in hand with this kind of content up here is you're sending this kind of content, and your copywriting is sort of s tier, then you're going to see that people really, really, really identify with your brand and your products and they're going to be buying from you. Some key lessons from this is to pop up can be aggressive when you do it this way. You want to ask people about their main goals or their main problems, you can go either way, it doesn't matter. You want to start email flow immediately send an email per week, or two, the content has to be the best of the best. And you want to have CTAs back onto your website with whether products about immunity, for example, is presented. And one thing you can do really well is do a custom landing page where the whole universe on that page is about, for example, immunity or slimming down. So it's showing you different products and how they work together instead of just a cold collection page with five products that doesn't really invite them to begin their journey towards boosting immunity, right. So this is extremely powerful. No one is doing it as well. And goal not good. Number nine is relevant upsells. This one is pretty easy. But I see so many upsells that are so so bad, they have no meaning to have no sort of, like, they're just not relevant. That's the problem. They're not relevant upsells. So I'll give you an example of how to do it. And let me zoom in so you can see a bit more. Here we can see that all the dresses are solid colors, right. And here we can see all the products have a pattern. And this is something that AI can easily identify today. So when you have someone looking for solid color dress, show her more in the same style, instead of showing her, for example, these dresses, they're totally off compared to them. Like there's a high chance you will buy one of these. And likely, also, if you if this was the product you were browsing, you're way more likely to look at these products as alternative solutions or alternative products you want to buy as well. So this is something I'm seeing lacking severely on all ecommerce experiences. It has something to do with the fact that you're setting up some app and it's not good enough. So you definitely need to do better here. You also need to consider setting it up or not even consider you need to set it up on cart, you need to set it up on checkout. And in my opinion, also on thank you pages, if your brand can sustain it. So on the car, you also want to have relevant upsells. And you have to use that kind of smart AI understands what is relevant for whatever you have in the cart, same in the checkout. And always give a discount if you want a lot of people to opt into it. But if you don't give a discount, you can still sell some just by showing extremely relevant upsells. So definitely something you want to set up and it's not being done well. I like to use data. So I like to use apps to show me exactly how much is you know, conversion rate, I'm getting from it, how many add to carts, how much AOV I'm adding from my upsells and all that stuff. You can utilize these two apps, I'm not affiliated with them in any way, we just use them for our clients and they're really good. And they actually have decent AI in there. So let me show the last one. This was a very long video, but I saved the best for last, which is the quizzes. And quizzes are typically done very poorly. So you might have said I've done the quizzes doesn't work. I'll show you the way to do it correctly, that actually makes a massive difference. And the reason why it works so well is it eliminates dilemma, increases confidence in a product recommendations. And the one big reason I see all the time for low conversion rate is that you have a lot of things that are vague, which means are just hard to understand. So people are not sure what to pick, or if it's the right option for them. So increasing confidence and eliminating dilemma is going to be very powerful in increasing your conversion rate, but also the AOV. So let me introduce you to Jones Road. If you don't know them already, they're one of the biggest makeup brands in the world. And they have an excellent quiz, which you can look at yourself. So if you're looking for foundation, one of the biggest issues and dilemmas is you don't know what shade or what color to pick. And the reason why women are having a difficult time with that is because there's a billion different skin tones and complexities that makes it very hard to match the foundation with your skin. So to eliminate that massive dilemma, they basically show you the quiz and ask you to pick which color is more appropriate to you. And then you pick one. And actually, when you pick one, you're then introduced to the one you picked, and then the two next to you as well. That way, you can see them in a bigger image, they will basically be zoomed out. So you can really zoomed in, so you can really see the color. And that's a really cool way to double down, make sure you have the right foundation here. The next questions I ask is what kind of issues you're having. This also gives them a lot of data, so they can do remarketing and SMS and tailor what products you see in the future. Because if you're having issues with, let's say redness, it might also mean and they will notice better to me that you have certain allergic reactions, and everything in the future should be tailored to the fact that you have issues with redness, right? The second thing they're asking is what kind of skin type you have, if it's dry, and if it's dry, you can imagine that all makeup they will sell you in the future will be affected by your decision in this quiz. So even if you don't buy anything now, they might be able to get you later on because they're holding on and utilizing that data to the fullest extent. And then finally, at the end, there's a bunch more questions, but I don't want to show you everything. Then they ask for the email where you can now get your personalized recommendations. But the powerful thing is this button here, you can skip it, because a lot of people, they are just so allergic to email marketing, they don't want to subscribe. And if they don't want to, you still want to catch them. And those people can be caught. What I would have liked to seen here is that on the first order, you get product samples if you subscribe. So then there's some kind of flow that if you subscribe, you can put something in your cart, and you get like a bunch of makeup samples, everybody loves them. And that would be a way to get more opt-ins. But the skip button is key here. And I bet you're not doing that. And you have to remember, you want them to finish the quiz, and you want them to get to buy a product. And this is a massive conversion improvement. If you go a little bit further as well, we've seen, you know, a 35% higher conversion rate, and a 10 to 40% is a massive range in terms of AOV. And the reason why the range is so big is because some brands don't want to upsell a bundle at the end. But if you do, you can really get really good results. The reason why it also differs is because some brands, they see it working, they're sending a lot of their traffic, and they're highlighting the quiz on every page. And other brands don't really highlight it so well. The key thing is on the result page, as you can see here, you are basically seeing, obviously, first of all, you're seeing the results here. You can see the actual choices you made. This had a big conversion boost in a lot of the tests we did. And then you can see the product, which is now completely tailored to your choices in terms of the color, your skin concerns, and your skin type. And this makes your confidence in buying the product, you know, 300% higher. And the conversion rate is definitely going to increase as well. The big thing here, which you can do is, like, you see this, you see this, and then there's a little bit of copy and text. But then further down, you can see an upsell, where you can put in all your products. So you got your pencils, you got your mascara, and you got your your balm as well. Which is powerful, because all these, you now know what shades to pick, and you have so much more confidence that this is the right product. So key lessons for the quiz in the end. Octane AI has been the biggest quiz maker that we've been using. The reason why it works so well is that you can customize and make it look damn good, just like a Jones wrote here. The other thing that I really like is with Octane, you can make it a really, really powerful quiz. And if you just make it those stupid marketing quizzes that offer no insight and collect the email, then you're not gonna see the results. So you definitely need to make it useful. That's the key word here, if you want to succeed. Don't make them too long as well. I would say, like, three to five questions is ideal, because anything above that, you're gonna see a big drop-off. Show them how far they are in the quiz, so you could show them, like, the five steps, so they know why it's important that you're asking them five questions. You want to show the quiz results on the page, and then a product and an upsell. This is how you really do it. We have even seen some very powerful examples where you've got your result page, and under that, a video loads that explains how to, you know, apply the product and what other things to consider. And then what they did was, whenever it is this product, a video loads, and then if it's a mascara, another video loads. So they have one video per type of product, and that will just boost your conversion rate even further. And that's something you can definitely think about as well. So I just wanted to show you the quiz is extremely powerful. It will offer a much better experience to shop, and with Octane AI, it can be really, really easy to set up. Again, not affiliated with them at all, but I just think it's one of the stronger ones. But you can Google, and there's tons of other options if you don't want to use them for some reason. So anyway, guys, this was my ten tips on how to increase conversion rate and AOV. Definitely AOV was probably the main focus, but the funny thing is, when you increase your AOV through the things I suggest here, the loyalty program, the quiz, you're going to increase your conversion rate as well. So hopefully this was useful, and if you have any questions, feel free to email me, DM me on Instagram, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm always there to help. And yeah, hopefully this was useful. Talk soon.