There are only 3 ways of growing your e-commerce business:

1. Generate new customers
2. Make customers buy more
3. Make customers buy more often

Before we dive into details, we want you to build the foundation on your website - maximizing the average order value of your online store.

Why?

Because you want to make as much money as possible with every visit, measured by something called Earned Per Visit (EPV), or how some marketers love to call it, Dollars Per Visit (DPV). Once you have it set up, then you can “blast” it with as much traffic as you possibly can, and to help you with it we will cover the best performing PPC platforms these days. We will guide you through one of the most effective things in the e-commerce world, that will help you to grow by making customers buy more – sales funnels.

Ready to increase your average order value?

Tech you need and why

For some, this part may be obvious, but we will cover it anyway. To be able to create, run, and optimize your sales funnel completely, you ought to be using some good CRM software, preferably included in the platform. For example, Gauss Box has one that suits all your needs.

Since the funnel has so many conversion (sales) points that the user goes through, you want to be able to track and have data on all of them, while at the same time being able to see how every customer behaved separately. That way you can find the patterns, easily calculate your EPV, and then focus on improving it as much as you can. Don’t worry, once we go through each part of the funnel, you should have a better understanding of what we are saying here.

What are sales funnels?

We can describe them as action/page sequences that are focused on giving the customer the full service around an initially bought product, giving you more profit per purchase. They are specially designed to create a customer journey, that will show them:

• how to get their results faster,
• how to achieve goals more efficiently,
• what problems they can face later in the process and offering them a solution beforehand,

and a lot more. These are just the most obvious ones. For example, if you are selling a night skin cream, you could offer them a day skin hydration serum, or a nice bath bomb, pilling, etc.

You get the idea.

In general, there are 4 parts, or rather categories included in the sales funnel. Those are:

1. Order bump
2. Upsell
3. Downsell
4. OTOs - one time opportunities

Order Bump

You can think of it as an order add-on. For example, if you are selling micellar water, you can offer a cotton pads pack as an order bump. It is displayed as a checkbox offer, enabling the customer to add it to the purchase by simply checking the box. This is shown to every customer that ads micellar water to the cart.

Upsell

Following the example for micellar water, your upsell can be a bundle that contains everything a person needs for facial skin care. This is shown to every customer who completed the micellar water checkout process, regardless of whether they checked the order bump or not. The reason why it is shown after the successful purchase is because then it is just an upgrade to their order, which is way easier than selling them the bundle initially. In the case where the customer agrees and buys the upsell, you just update their CC charge.

Downsell

This part of the sales funnel is only shown when the customer declines the upsell offer. This serves as an in-between product/offer. In our example, since the customer bought micellar water, and declined the face cleaning bundle, you can offer them a smaller package. It can be something like micellar water, peeling, and let’s say a hydration serum. The whole idea is based on a small, medium, and large pricing system. The micellar water is small, upsell is the large, and then the down-sell is the medium package and price.

OTO’s

Usually, these are used to promote not yet published products with great discount prices, or a cross-selling offer based on data. In that case, for example, if you are seeing that the people who are buying micellar water are often buying hair conditioners, you can offset that product with a special price for them if they choose it right now.

How to create one?

The obvious thing here is to look at and analyze the data you have first. If you are just starting with your e-commerce, that would mean testing out the market, or if you are already running an e-commerce business, your customer database. Once you have done that, you should focus on creating the funnel for one product only. 

Feel free to test different offers and included products to see what will perform best, such as rotating several order bumps, showing different upsells and down-sells, and mixing different OTOs. After you are done testing and have a clear winner (you have found the right combination for your sales funnel that is bringing the biggest EPV), you are good to go onto the next phase.

Next steps

The logical next steps are separated into two parts:

First, you should focus on as many traffic generating activities at this new sales funnel, and second, repeat the sales funnel creation process around the second product, completely unrelated to the first one.

Creating the new sales funnel around a different product should be much easier now that you have experienced the process and testing phase, and generating traffic to the first one we will cover in detail in the next few articles. These will all be PPC-oriented and cover the biggest ad platforms like Google, FB/IG, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

To recap what we talked about:

Out of the 3 ways to grow your e-commerce business, making people buy more on their visit has been very easy with sales funnels. It is a simple way to smoothly offer add-on products or just more of the product they have already purchased, which makes them happy, and gives you more money as well.

There are 3 parts of that:

• Order Bump
• Upsells
• Downsells

Applying all three of them to all or at least the most popular product, can and will grow your average order value in no time. This goes hand in hand with the way of creating an offer from a product because it uses the same logic and data.

If you think this is something you could use and benefit from, but are not sure how to start, just book a consultation with us, and we will get you going. Also, make sure to check out Gauss Box Web & e-commerce module, platform made specially for merchants.