Strategies for AOV Growth Through Extended Customer Experiences [Webinar Recap]

Last week AfterShip hosted a webinar focused on strategies for increasing average order value (AOV) by providing extended customer experiences. We were joined by industry experts who shared their insights and best practices for achieving AOV growth through innovative tactics.

Panel of Experts

Sarah Kang is the Sr. Technology Partnerships Manager at AfterShip. Her role centers on fostering technology partnerships to ensure our customers benefit from meaningful integrations, creating a seamless shopping experience across their tech ecosystem.

Adena Merabi is the Partnerships Team Lead at Okendo. She oversees their West Coast agency collaborations, technology partnerships, and overall partnership strategies.

Carina Shahin is a Sr. Partner Manager at Attentive. There, she has helped many partnered brands report an impressive 18 to 20% increase in online revenue, attributed solely to leveraging SMS as a marketing channel.

Jen Kalant is the senior director of Strategic Partnerships at Searchspring. Her role encompasses overseeing the team's technology and platform partnerships—providing advanced site search, merchandising, and personalization solutions, all tailored specifically for the eCommerce sector to enhance the online shopping experience for consumers.

Adam Folman is the Director of Business Development and Partnerships at Rise.ai. His team provides services encompassing store credit-related services, including cashback refunds, gift cards, compensation, referrals, and loyalty programs. 

Q. How can brands integrate personalized touch points to boost AOV in customer journeys?

One topic discussed throughout the webinar was the importance of personalization in increasing AOV. Our panelists shared their experiences and tips on how brands can effectively incorporate personalized touch points into their customers' shopping journeys to boost AOV. Here's what they had to say:

Display Reviews Across Your Website

• Reviews act as social proof, reassuring potential customers of product quality and value.
  
• Adena Merabi noted that 48% of consumers view customer reviews and user-generated content (UGC) as crucial for meeting and exceeding expectations.
  
• Reviews are the top source of information that boosts customer confidence in purchasing.

Personalize Marketing Strategies

• Personalize campaigns by gathering zero-party data to segment customers based on profiles, characteristics, and behaviors.
  
• Use reviews, surveys, and quizzes to refine customer segments and create highly personalized campaigns.
  
• Personalized emails (e.g., product recommendations for specific skin types) have significantly higher open rates than generic product promotions.
  
• Implement dynamic merchandising techniques and personalize product recommendations based on consumer preferences and behaviors on-site to drive higher conversion rates and increase average order value.

Carina Shahin: "Personalizing your outreach is really so much more than just a message. It's every single aspect of your communication to your customer. That includes relevancy, audience segmentation, and images, making everything extremely granular across the board."

Using Cross-Selling and Upselling

• Displaying relevant product recommendations early in the shopping journey, such as on the homepage or product page, helps plant seeds for potential upsell opportunities by showing customers complementary or higher-value alternatives to their initial selections.
  
• Offering higher-value alternatives with premium features when shoppers show high purchase intent, and cross-selling complementary items by identifying products commonly purchased together can significantly increase AOV. 
  
• Additionally, leveraging reviews, quizzes, personalized recommendations, email, SMS, and campaigns based on customer data are key personalized touch points that can further enhance AOV and ensure repeat customers.

Q. What prevents brands implementing extended CX strategies?

Next, the panel discussed the challenges brands face in implementing extended CX strategies and how to overcome these obstacles.

Adena Merabi: "Timing is very important. You need to know when to offer the right upsell opportunities; and the right kind of products. And when the wrong product is not going to be appealing to your to your customers. You can overcome this by having your customer data in one place. Gather those customer data points with a consolidated tech stack using reviews, surveys, and quizzes to gather this zero-party data. You can also overcome this by asking customers about their preferences. Use a survey on your website to collect data and characteristics. Ask your customers how often they want to get emails from us."

Sarah Kang: "Another challenge we see brands commonly face is the lack of urgency when it comes to upselling products. Brands should be offering promotional tools like discounts, or free shipping for upsell items. These incentives give customers a compelling reason to act immediately. And they increase the likelihood of conversion. FOMO tactics such as limited-time offers or showcasing low stock levels can instill a sense of urgency and ultimately drive conversion."

Q. How can businesses use customer data and feedback to understand customer needs?

Next, we asked the panelists for their insights on how businesses can effectively leverage customer data in today's competitive market.

• Customer Data is Key: Capturing and leveraging consumer data throughout the entire shopping journey, from site discovery to post-purchase, is essential for creating personalized experiences that boost engagement and sales.

Adam Folman: "Businesses should want to get their shoppers to feel connected with the brand immediately. Successfully doing that will increase the opportunities to capture zero and first-party data to use down the line to drive more revenue. And they can do that easily by prompting shoppers to create an account."

• Seamless Integration for Personalization: Incorporating customer data into your tech stack enhances the shopping experience through intelligent search and recommendations, leading to higher conversion rates and average order values.
  
• Continuous Site Optimization: Analyzing site data to understand customer behavior and preferences enables merchants to offer personalized product recommendations and optimize merchandising strategies, ensuring relevance and appeal.

Jen Kalant: "It's really to focus on continuous improvement. As a merchant, make sure that you're taking a look at: what are your highest search terms? What are the products that are being purchased? Together most frequently? How do you kind of surface that those up in different capacities? How many different touch points can you offer personalized product recommendations through that shopper experience?"

• Openness to Share Information: Customers are generally willing to provide personal information if it means receiving a more tailored shopping experience, mainly through interactive methods like quizzes and reviews.

Adena Merabi: "If you're providing those customer feedback channels, they're more than happy to tell you who they are, what they look like, how they interacted with your brand, and what they expect. It's really important to be collecting that data and using it across your campaigns and strategy"

• Customer Loyalty Through Experience: Building trust and a strong connection with customers through personalized interactions encourages loyalty and repeat purchases, especially when customers feel valued and understood.
• Adapting to Privacy Changes: With the decline of third-party cookies, collecting first- and zero-party data directly from customers has become increasingly important for delivering personalized marketing messages and experiences.
• Conversational Commerce Enhances Engagement: Leveraging conversational messaging to collect customer preferences and engage in personalized dialogues creates more meaningful and interactive shopping experiences, driving customer satisfaction and spending.
• Making Customers Feel Special: Personalization strategies that make customers feel unique and valued are crucial for deepening engagement and encouraging increased spending, leveraging the power of customized experiences to foster brand loyalty.

Audience Questions and Answers

Throughout the webinar, we received dozens of questions that our panelists tried to answer live. Here are a couple that piqued the interest of the group.

Q. How can businesses measure and optimize their AOV growth strategies to capitalize on revenue opportunities?

Businesses can effectively measure and optimize their AOV (Average Order Value) growth strategies by following a comprehensive approach:

View Overall Performance: Analyze the revenue growth driven by personalized recommendations from various angles and benchmark against industry standards. This involves:

• Calculating the share of revenue from personalized recommendations relative to total revenue.
• Determining the ratio of successful orders with personalized product recommendations against the total order count.
• Assessing the proportion of personalized product quantities within a single order compared to the overall quantity.
• Evaluating the increase in AOV following the implementation of upsell strategies.

Discover and Optimize Best-Performing Techniques: Identify the most effective upsell techniques, spot areas for improvement, and refine your strategy by:

• Analyzing revenue generated from personalization in different scenarios and integrating promotional tools with low conversion rates.
• Assess personalization revenue by widget and focus on those demonstrating strong performance across various scenarios.
• Investigating product affinity rates to enhance personalized recommendation accuracy and effectiveness.

Q. Does AfterShip use AI and predictive analytics in forecasting behavior and tailoring marketing strategies?

Yes, AfterShip employs AI to forecast customer behavior and customize marketing strategies to enhance AOV. It uses advanced generative AI and visual and semantic intelligence to predict shopper intent, supported by a vast database of 500 million transaction data points for generating intent-rich product tags. This approach improves product discoverability by enriching the product catalog with over ten thousand tags derived from cutting-edge multimodal AI and Large Language Models (LLM).

Additionally, AfterShip captures real-time click streams and analyzes shopper behavior to more accurately predict shopper intent, allowing for more effectively tailored marketing strategies.

Takeaways

The key takeaways from our in-depth exploration of leveraging customer data and feedback in a competitive market are as follows:

1. Customer Data as a Cornerstone: Effective use of customer data, gathered through various means such as reviews, surveys, and quizzes, is paramount. This data not only aids in personalizing the shopping experience to increase engagement and sales but also in making informed product and marketing decisions.
   
2. Personalization is Paramount: Tailoring shopping experiences through intelligent recommendations and conversational commerce significantly enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty. Businesses should focus on creating a unique and personalized experience for each customer, increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases.
   
3. Upsell and Cross-Sell Across the Buyer Journey:  Incentivizing customers through promotions and limited-time offers and utilizing customer data to optimize merchandising strategies can effectively drive conversion rates and average order values.

Boosting AOV is imperative to eCommerce success. AfterShip Personalization helps you achieve just that. For a limited time, new users can get 1 month free. Try AfterShip Personalization today.