Many different online companies try heaps of techniques to get you to buy again from them. It is important I say again. You need to remember there are two methods when it comes to increasing online revenue (They may apply offline too but that isn't my gig.)
Increase the number of customers or increasing the average spend per customer. This is being very black and white, for example adding offers to get someone to buy more at once falls into the later category as it is about increasing the amount people spend, whereas mass indirect advertising would be increasing number of customers (However an email campaign to existing customers falls into increasing average spend).
I will be talking about making your customer spend more and turn into repeat business. If you have a steady conversion of around 3-2% and get over 1,500 customers on your site a day, then increasing average spend should be your focus. If you are not getting that number of customers you need more business as your figures can change too much, thus harder to spot trends, alternatively if you do not have a good stable conversion to monitor changes by you need to think about your website's flow and why people are dropping off the cart.
We are going to talk about an interesting study with is commonly known as "BF Skinner's Box". Basically rewarding an action, in the study a rat was reward with food for pressing a button. This is the basic idea behind action reward.
What happens when a customer adds something to the cart? Are they rewarded? Here is an interesting idea for you. Let's say all your orders get free shipping, you have a few adverts around the website telling them so. However in my personal experience most people over look such large important adverts unless they wanted to know about shipping. Some people want to know the shipping before they get to the cart so it is important to publicise your costs. What if when your customer adds something to the cart you tell them they have now qualified for free shipping. So if you have an overlay there is a banner image before the confirmation, telling them they qualify for free shipping, or if they go straight to the basket a larger full width banner with the same information.
What is important here is the customer has received a prize. They did not have free shipping before, now with these items they do. Now in the example I just gave, this is more geared towards increasing your conversion rate, however it is the underlay for all examples and ideas I will give, action and reward.
People like to achieve things, personal achievements make a person feel good and unique. There is a fine line between every time someone clicks a link they get an award to spending ten times the average amount in one go. You need a balance between possible and not common.
Let's say you give free shipping on order over 50. If you have Google Analytics linked in with your ecommerce store you can easily find out your average customer spend. Your best bet is average spend is 52 or something like that. So what do you do? You raise the free shipping to 60, basically increased it by 10-20% with hopes of your average spend increasing.
Now it is not just good enough to keep on pushing that number up. You need to reward people for getting to your free shipping. Products that are over the free shipping threshold need to have that displayed, clearly. Make a big deal that "Buying this products means free shipping anywhere in the United Kingdom!" For products that do not get free shipping simply show the shipping cost are per normal. However I want you to change the basket page. Work out the difference between their cart total and the free shipping threshold and tell them. "Spend another $7.30 and get free 2 working days shipping." Now you have this displayed you need to make getting that reward as easy as possible. A good idea is to then show related products under this notice. Alternatively, depending on your market, you could show more expensive alternative products that do qualify for free shipping.
Let's move onto another idea as we have covered that one a lot. Reward points, now I am not talking about the bullshit every 10 you spend you get one point, get a thousand points and you can have a free yo-yo. I means every item has a custom amount of reward points. When your account gets to say 300 points your next order gets free shipping. Leave a review for an extra point, leave a video review, if approved gets 100 points. Get your users to treat your website like a computer game. Actions equal points. Buying more than five items? Double points on this order. The best way to use this technique is to only tell them about the basics to getting points. Here is my example.
Buy this shirt and get 150 XP. Leave a review of this shirt and receive 20 XP. To get to level 2 you need 190 XP, your award for getting to level 2 is free shipping.
In this example the points are XP and getting a set amount of XP levels the customer up. Each level comes with perks that are exclusive to that level. Also note that simply buying the shirt and going back to leave a review will leave the customer just short of the next level. This is a rough idea that can easily be improved based on your market. Let's say you have a website that sells watches, you don't really want to advertise points and repeat business can be extremely hard. This idea is far more complex than the free shipping and is also limited to what markets would react well to it. However you can use the principle in other ways.
Every customer has a customer level. This level can be standard, regular, loyal and executive. You need a number of points to get to each one, 0 (simply register), 3, 5 and 20 respectively. If you place an order you get a point, if you click a link from an email campaign (the first time) and you are signed in you get another point. If you place an order over 70 you get a point. A customer is told these simple rules to their customer level. A customer can very easily get from standard to regular within a single order, their next order will easily see them level up again, however each level from that point on will get a little harder. The idea is it starts of stupidly easy but slowly gets harder. Now how do you use this? Well the highest level will get emails and offers of all levels however the lowest only gets the basic email. If you are a loyal customer you may get an email that says for loyal customer level's only etc. Also you can one day send them a free small gift in the post and simply say free gift for loyal customers. This idea is not so much to make them spend more as a really good reason for you to stay in contact with your customer. We have some stock we need to sell this week, let's email everyone. Now becomes we have some stock that needs to sell this week, target these customers only and tell them they have 4 days left. Then 2 days later send an email to everyone including the selected levels from before and tell them they have 2 days left. If you make it clear in both emails that the selected level's got it first (even better if you can show the stock has decreased) it will motivate customers to act quicker to your deals and to give your marketing emails more attention.
Hopefully this gives you some ideas on how to increase your customers spend. I might write another piece depending on the reaction to this one. If not I will move on top another topic. Maybe another list of websites doing things I hate. As always any questions about anything I have written, just use the comment section or get directly in contact!
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