$27.4 BILLION - this is the amount of money that American’s alone spent on Valentine's Day in 2020!
This date alone brings a massive opportunity in 2021 to all eCommerce stores. Add in the fact that Brick n Mortar stores are still struggling due to Covid and we have on our hands an opportunity similar to last year's BFCM weekend.
Don’t just think this is an opportunity for products that would make romantic gifts for someone’s significant other. Consumer spending on friends, family, classmates, teachers, co-workers and even pets each exceed more than $1.5 Billion in their own right. Basically, any product seems fair game as a gift to anybody this Valentine’s Day.
So, who celebrates this day? 55 out of 100 people do! That means that 1 in 2 people you can target will actually be looking to purchase gifts for this holiday.
What is Average Order Value (AOV)?
You AOV is, simply put, the average cart size in monetary value that a customer spends with you when shopping on your site.
You can calculate this by dividing the total revenue by the total order count. So if you have had 1000 orders in the last 30 days and your total revenue was $70,000 you would have an AOV of $70.
$70,000 (total revenue) / 1000 (total order count) = $70 (AOV)
How can you increase your AOV?
1. Bundles
A very simple tactic and one that is great for the lazy shopper, like myself, would be to make some product bundles specifically for Valentines Day, which could include complementary products all bundled together. The motivating factor for the bundle doesn't even need to be a discounted price if purchased together. You could simply add value by gift wrapping it and improving the presentation to be a convenient hamper gift.
You can either use a bundle builder app like https://apps.shopify.com/search?q=bundles or you could ask your developer if they could build a specific product template that will automatically add all the products to cart.
Here is an example of custom build bundle solution: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/products/easy-fertilizer-package
*disclaimer, if you go the custom route you will need to be on Shopify Plus to discount the bundle or have an inventory syncing app to use duplicated products that are already discounted.
2. Upsell/Cross-sell
The other, and more obvious way, to increase your AOV is to offer product upsells and cross-sells.
Upsells are offering a similar product at a higher value in exchange for the product they just added to cart. Essentially, a product switch. A great example of this for Valentine's Day would be if you are buying a beer-lover some beer, the user could add a 4-pack to cart, after which you can then show them a special offer to upgrade to a 6 pack for a limited time discount. Be sure to change the copy and messaging around this time to focus around gifting.
Cross-sells, on the other hand, are where you offer complimentary products to those already added to the users cart. The typical, “would you like fries with that” offer to get users to add more products to cart.
Offering a discount would be the main way to sway the user to do so but it isn’t the only way. Convenience offering such as offering a gift wrapping option for an additional $ value is a great way to cross-sell and increase the AOV at key holidays like Valentines Day.
Other than custom coding solutions for upsells and cross-sells, the app we recommend is Ultimate Special Offers, Ultimate Special Offers also now has the option to offer the upsell post purchase with one click.
3. Gift Subscriptions
For Christmas, I purchased a gift subscription of brownies for my wife. She loves the brownies sold by an online store which is located not too far from where we live. On various occasions I have bought her these. I was planning on just purchasing 1 box again for Christmas, but when I was browsing their website I noticed that they offered these as a gift subscription. I could pay now, for 3 months worth of brownie deliveries, at a heavily discounted price. The gift that keeps on giving. My wife now can’t wait to receive her January brownies from Hetty’s Kitchen!
This is a great way to upsell. My order went through at probably close to 3 x their AOV. The merchant has received an advance payment on something they only need to fulfill at a later date and which has probably really helped their cash flow in December.
ReCharge payments is by far the best tool for subscription and they have a handy guide on how to use their app to setup a prepaid gift subscription - https://support.rechargepayments.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008683714-Configuring-a-prepaid-gift-subscription
4. Bonus Loyalty Points
Loyalty points don’t have to be only for customer retention. You can use your loyalty program to motivate customers to spend more by offering bonus points if they reach certain thresholds of dollars spent. For example, if you spend more than $200 you will get loyalty points plus the additional bonus points for reaching this threshold.
So, in this example, if you normally offered 1 point per dollar spent, the customer would now be able to earn the 200 points for their $200 spend plus 50 points for reaching the $200 threshold.
The app we recommend for Loyalty and Rewards is LoyaltyLion - https://loyaltylion.com/ and you can read more about this strategy/campaign here - https://help.loyaltylion.com/en/articles/3092155-aov-bonus-point-campaign
5. Free Gifts and Free Shipping
Last, but by no means least, would be to offer Free Gifts or Free Shipping at different cart totals.
The easy one here is to offer Free Shipping at a value around 33% higher than your current AOV. So, if your AOV is currently $75 you could set your Free Shipping threshold to $100.
The above coupled with strategic placing and progress bars, could really assist with customers pushing to get to that Free Shipping point.
A Free Gifting strategy is more tricky, where customers can see that the higher they push their cart value the better the free products that they qualify for are. A company completely nailing this technique is Chubbies.
If you are not on Shopify Plus, you can implement a tiered gifting strategy with the app we mentioned earlier called Ultimate Special Offers.
If you’d like to talk to us about a custom solution to increase your AOVs this Valentine’s Day, please get in touch. We would love to help you maximize your VDay Sales.
