The pressure is on for marketers and contact centre leaders to start delivering bigger and better results… with smaller budgets. When it comes to increasing revenues, you might immediately think that bringing more customers in is the best approach. But it isn’t the only way to grow and in fact, it could be costing you more.
Why? Because it costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to nurture your existing ones. If you invest in enhancing the customer experience and encouraging them to spend more money, either on individual orders or over a longer period of time, you can enjoy increase profits without the blood, sweat and tears required to draw in new customers.
In this blog, we’ll share four tactics (plus examples) of how to increase Average Order Value (AOV) in your contact centre. We’ll also discuss what average order value is and how to calculate it for your business, so you can start implementing these tips and tricks immediately.
Average Order Value (AOV) is the average amount of money spent on each customer transaction. AOV is an important key performance indicator for any business, as it helps set a baseline for growing sales as well as helping you manage inventory and create smart pricing strategies based on demand.
So, why is it important to increase AOV? Well, it’s just smart business. If you’re increasing the order value of your customers, you’re increasing profits and boosting your bottom-line without forking out extra acquisition costs. According to research, cross-selling and upselling – which focus on increasing the Average Order Value through clever tactics – can increase revenue by up to 30%!
Measuring AOV also allows you to improve other important business metrics. For example, when you compare AOV to your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), you can start to draw links between which kinds of customers and purchases present the most value for your business.
Before we dig into the different tactics that can help your business grow average order value, let’s figure out yours. To calculate average order value, you can use the following formula:
Total revenue for the month / the number of orders during that month
With your average order value in mind, you can start to work on increasing it month-by-month and set clear revenue goals as part of your wider strategy.
So, we’ve discussed what AOV is and how growing it can help your business, now we turn our attention to how to increase average order value. Here are four tactics to help you increase average order value, plus case studies of businesses successfully increasing AOV!
Mapping the customer journey clearly shows you how and where your customers interact with your business. Whether that’s through a Google search, a targeted PPC campaign or social media, identifying the source of each call – and being able to attribute value to each – can help you fine-tune which campaigns are delivering high value orders and where you might want to spend more budget and attention.
Internet Gardener may be an award-winning online retailer, but they noticed that orders placed over the phone tended to be their highest value orders, where customers require a personal touch to purchase big-ticket items. They used Infinity to track and record every call that came into their business, showing them what source led to the call and recording revenue per call. They were able to increase their average order value by over 30%!
If you want to get more granular about increasing your AOV, taking a closer look at your PPC campaigns can help grow sales and increase profits. Infinity’s call tracking software can give your Google ads the full tracking treatment, helping you cover the blind spots between online clicks and offline calls.
With tools like Smart Match, you can link those valuable calls directly to campaigns, allowing you to lower acquisition costs, identify underperforming activities and of course, increase your average order value.
For Southern Sheeting, Smart Match allowed them to connect transaction values to thousands of calls, giving them detailed insight into which marketing activities were boosting revenue and show clear ROI. This led to a 26% increase in AOV on calls driven from their PPC campaigns and a 12% rise in sales calls overall.
With the right tools in place, you can unlock real audience insight from every call, at scale. Instead of relying on a tiny sample of calls, use tools like Conversation Analytics to understand which keywords or questions in calls are likely to trigger conversions, and use these to create genuinely persuasive and useful sales scripts. It can also help you spot buyer trends that you may not have noticed.
For example, thousands of people book an eye test with Specsavers every day. They were keen to understand what was happening during calls. They knew customers would be offering up valuable intelligence that could be used to evolve and improve messaging. Thanks to Conversation Analytics, they noticed that due to changing needs more customers wanted home visits. They were able to refine their messaging and drive a 25% increase in home visit bookings!
What if you could identify opportunities to increase average order value of every customer? Good news, you can. Being able to effectively identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities can increase revenue, without fielding dozens of extra calls. One of the best strategies to increase average order value is to understand how your best agents are succeeding.
Use tools like Conversation Analytics and Agent ID to harness customer data and refine your most persuasive calls to action, based on the best calls going in and out of your contact centre. For example, Flight Centre wanted to focus on the promotion of tailor-made holidays, which required in-depth calls with potential leads. Conversation Analytics enabled them to set goals based on location, intent, and even brand words that they marked as high or low value. This led to a 46% year-on-year increase in conversions and a 44% increase in the number of high-value enquiries that led to a booking.
Ready to take your contact centre to the next level? Book a demo today.