How to Improve Average Order Value and Conversion Rates - 2 Ways

Hi everyone, welcome to the Ad Hacks podcast. I'm your host Rod Bland, and in this podcast, I talk about how to get better results from your Instagram and Facebook marketing and the many lessons that I've learned from being in the e-commerce business for the last 20 years. If you are frustrated with the results that you're getting from your advertising, because you believe that is the road to success, then I've got some bad news for you. It's not.

Advertising is really just one aspect of your business that you need to get but it's not the only one, and there are many other strategies that you're going to need to deploy and use in conjunction with your advertising to help you achieve success in your business. So today I just want to cover two strategies, which are some of the most effective that I've ever seen and I've used with clients over and over again. They always work well, but they're ones that are quite simple and often ignored.

So let's get into it. Hi there, I'm Rod. I'm the owner of Rod Bland agency. We primarily help people build, create and optimize Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns. We also help people optimize their entire business, so those campaigns work well. I founded my own e-commerce business about 16 years ago, built that to about $4.6 million in turnover. Sold that to my competitor a couple of years ago.

And now I take all that experience and help other people with building their own businesses. So in today's video, I want to give you quick methods or strategies that can help you grow your business, get better results from your advertising, and in fact, get better results from whatever source of traffic that you currently use . Now my first tip is one that is relatively

easy to implement, but I still see so many businesses not using this at all, and I really don't know why. So for example, Moiz Ali founded the natural deodorant brand Native in 2015. He then sold that business to Proctor and Gamble in 2017 for $100,000,000. He's been interviewed a lot of times, but one of the things that he talks about he did early on, which he stuck to was to provide an incentive to new customers to purchase.

So he offered a small discount in return for someone's email address, and that led to a lot more people purchasing, and it's something that he did right from when he first started all the way through. Now why is this such an effective strategy? Number one, people love a good deal. So if you've got a new customer and you offer them a discount off your usual prices in exchange for their email address most people are pretty happy to provide that.

You can also remarket to them with abandoned cart emails if they don't complete their purchase, once you've actually captured their email address and that program has dropped a cookie on that person's computer.

So let you jump on the computer and I'll just show you a couple of examples of how this is done.

So, here's Pony Rider where if you go to exit their page after a short while, the little popup appears where you can be part of their journey. They don't offer any explicit discount there, but that's one way to capture people's email addresses, and also offer them something so that they can improve conversions. Here's another example of a more specific offer. So this is from Mask. They offer 10% off their first order when you go to exit the page.

The second tip is to call out your free shipping offer. Now, a lot of e-commerce businesses will have a free shipping offer, say if you order over $100, order over $150 that you'll get free standard shipping, and you might have that on your website, but you really need to make sure that it's absolutely clear how much people will need to purchase in order to get free shipping.

It's one of those things that's definitely worth investing time in, it's not difficult to program into your website, and I think you're crazy if you don't implement it as soon as you can.

The first example I want to show you is from pacamask.com. If you go to their website, add something to the shopping cart, it's really easy to see how it works. So they've got a couple of things going on their cart page, but I want to specifically talk about the free shipping call out. So essentially their free shipping offer exists at 30 pounds or more. Up until that point, they have this very clear call out which is in a contrasting color.

So it's very obvious to whoever's doing the shopping that if they spend some additional money, they'll get free shipping. In addition to that, they've got a little link to continue shopping, so it's easy for people to continue. So now, if I change the quantity here up to 30, you'll see what happens. There you go, so that's now changed to free shipping and then you can continue to check out.

So that's really easy to implement in both Shopify in Maropost or Neto e-commerce, in Magento, all the major shopping cart systems. Here's how one of our clients who runs Maropost e-commerce has implemented that particular strategy. We haven't tried to reinvent the wheel. Their free shipping offer exists at $150. So if I change up the quantity here to 12 and update you can see it now updates to show that you've got free shipping and I can check out now..

Just to recap on those two strategies. First one is to provide people with some sort of incentive to make their first purchase with you, and number two is to call out your free shipping offer. So that's all for today's video. I'm trying to keep these short and sweet and useful.

Thank you so much for watching or listening. If you found this episode useful, here's two ways I can help you grow your business for free. Firstly, subscribe to my YouTube channel at rodsyt.com or just subscribe to this podcast, which I'll be doing in video format from now on. And secondly, you can join my free group at rodsgroup.com. And finally leave me a five star review so that I can reach some amazing people that I can bring on as guests on the show. I'll catch you in the next episode.