What is AOV?
AOV or Average Order Value is an ecommerce metric measured by the average amount spent each time a customer places an order.
AOV is an important performance metric that online store owners must track regularly. It can tell you the gaps in your ecommerce marketing strategies as well as your store’s profit.
According to Statista, the average order value globally in 2019 was $128.08 on orders placed from desktop and $86.47 on orders placed from mobile devices.
How to calculate your store’s AOV?
It’s quite simple. Here are the two steps you’d need to follow to calculate your AOV:
Step 1: Add up the revenue for a certain period of time, say 1 year.
Step 2: Divide that revenue by the total number of orders for that year.
Example:
Consider that you got $200,000 in revenue and a total of 16,000 orders in a year. So your AOV is,
AOV = $200,000/16,000 = $12.5
Why is AOV a significant metric for your ecommerce business?
AOV is important for a multitude of reasons. For one, it provides insights into your customer’s purchasing behavior. Depending on the amount of money they spend per order, you can categorize your customers and plan your marketing campaigns accordingly.
Additionally, AOV has a powerful correlation to profit. It’s usually seen that if your store’s AOV increases, your profits tend to climb up as well.
Finally, this pesky metric can inform your pricing decisions. Should you increase or decrease your price? How much discount should you apply? Should you consider clubbing your goods into one package? Calculating your AOV and thoroughly analyzing it can help you answer these questions and more.
What can you do to increase your Average Order Value?
There are a dozen tactics that can be used to uplift your AOV. We’ve picked the 3 most important ones here:
1. Social Proof
What’s better than to let other customers espouse your product? This is why you should use social proof. Studies show that customers are influenced by the thoughts and experiences of other customers who have already purchased the product.
2. Upselling & Cross-selling
Upselling & cross-selling are two well-known techniques to increase your AOV. In upselling, you show customers a better, more advanced version of the product they’re looking at. However, cross-selling dictates that you show products your customers might buy in addition to the product they’re already planning to buy.
3. Loyalty Programs
Customer loyalty is crucial and designing a program around it is of paramount importance. If you sell products that your customers would use occasionally, consider setting up a loyalty program. This can be in the form of memberships, reward points, product discounts, etc. This not only helps you retain the customer for a longer period of time but also increases your AOV as they’re inclined to purchase more.
Now that you have a better understanding of what AOV is & how to increase it, there’s another caveat to this. If your customer satisfaction score is low, none of this would matter.
A platform like DelightChat can help you enhance your customer service experience and ensure that you delight your customers at all times.
