How To: Increase Average Spend Of Your Shoppers

This weeks article as part of the current series on increasing revenue and tripling sales is; how to increase the average spend of your shoppers.

The figure I quoted in the second article was to increase average spend by 20%. So this doesn’t mean getting more customers, it means getting higher value individual shopping baskets. A great way to increase revenue, and hopefully profit long-term and possibly even short-term.

Here are 5 ways to increase the average spend of your shoppers:

• Increase Prices – the most obvious one. You may think “oh god no, all the customers will realise and never buy from me again!”. That is just wrong. For a start if you are a small and fairly new business I bet the vast majority of your sales are currently from new customers, not returning customers. And if your product is really good and still represents good value for money existing customers won’t be put off by the increase. The amount you can increase will vary product to product and the nature of your business. If you are high-end, with big price tags you should get away with raising your prices, but if you compete purely on incredibly low prices then you are going to struggle.
  
  
• Cross Selling or Add-On Sales – ‘Would you like fries with that?’ I know you’ve heard that before, but never thought about it hey? That one line is worth millions of pounds per year, without it you may not have had fries with your meal, but instead you just say “erm, yes please” and bang, the fast food restaurant has increased its customer spend and profits. This is called Cross Selling, or sometimes referred to as Add-On sales. You go to buy one thing and are recommended/asked/promoted another product on top of what you already want. Do this on your ecommerce website and you will increase average spend. For example; below existing product listings you can put ‘Customers who bought this item also bought these’, or you could just put ‘Similar items we also recommend’.
  
  
• Offer Bundles or Packs – putting together products in ‘bundles’ or ‘packs’ will mean higher value baskets. In the short-term you make a lower profit per product, but overall the profit you make on that individual basket will be higher. I think this is an especially good strategy for smaller retailers. For Example; it is much better to be making £10 profit on a £50 order, rather than £7 profit on a £25 order that the customer was originally intending to place. And by providing better value for money you should have happier customers who will then come back more often!
  
  
• Clever Customer Service – if a customer queries a product you could give them a quality answer on what they wanted. And at the end of the email you could also say, “or maybe you could go for the ANAME Model which costs a little bit more but you get these extra features; blah, blah, blah. Which would mean you get better value for money.” This will draw the customers to the more expensive product, do this on a regular occasion in a polite and genuine way and you should see the higher sales coming through as a direct result.
  
  
• Special Offers & Rewards – offer rewards for high value baskets. For example, free postage if your order is over £75, I’m sure you’ve seen offers like this before and taken advantage (or been suckered in, depends how you look at it!) of them. Or you could offer 10% off orders where the checkout value is more than £100. Other types of offers also work EG buy 3 items and get the cheapest for free.

So there you have 5 ways to increase average spend. I’m sure there may be other ways but at the moment I can’t remember any/think of any. If I do come up with any more I will be sure to post them up here.

In the meantime put all of the above in to action and watch your average spend increase!