As an ecommerce consultant, I’m constantly thinking of ways to deliver and, more importantly, measure value. When I’m getting started with a new account, there are a few things that run through my mind:

• How can I drive more traffic to the site?
• Which mediums will drive this traffic (search, social, etc.)?
• How can I squeeze more value out of existing visitors?

In the company blog, we often discuss the first two items on this list. However, I’d like to look in more detail at the third item since it can drive immediate, measureable value to any ecommerce website. Here are three things you can do to get more out of your current customer base.

Increase Conversion Rates

Your conversion rate is determined by the number of transactions that occur on your website over the number of total visitors. By improving the conversion rate of your existing traffic, you’ll increase revenue without needing to drive additional traffic to the website. Here are a few tips to increase your website’s conversion rate:

• Focus your marketing efforts on high conversion rate activities. For example, if Google organic traffic has a 5.00% conversion rate and Google CPC has a 2.00% conversion rate, consider spending more resources on developing your organic presence and reducing unnecessary clicks from CPC
• Simplify the visitor experience by reducing check out form size and removing required logins for first time buyers. Changing from a multi-page to a single-page checkout can increase conversion rates significantly (I’ve seen upwards of 20-30% improvements)
• Show site security authentication and making shipping policy prevalent on relevant pages (see below)

Increase Average Order Value

Like your conversion rate, the great thing about improving your average order value is that it doesn’t require more traffic to be incredibly successful. Fortunately, you can track the average order value right to the source, which can help you define resource allocation and guide your marketing efforts

Keyword Order Value

In this case, we see very few visits coming from some high value keywords. It is worth exploring our organic position for these keywords and our presence in paid search. By driving more traffic to the website from higher value terms, we’re likely to see an improvement in the site’s overall average order value.

• Make sure your SEO efforts are focused at improving the positioning of these keywords
• Develop a significant presence in paid search marketing using top performing keywords, including adding derivatives of these keywords
• Seek out long tail keywords that have high average order value and develop content around them to improve likelihood of capturing more long tail traffic

Within this small group of referrals, we can see that email customers generally spend more (the website’s average order value is under $100). It would be wise to increase and improve email activity to generate higher value sales at a greater frequency.

• Determine which traffic sources deliver the highest average order values
• Reallocate marketing resources to improve presence across these mediums
• This may mean increasing your paid search budget or reducing SEO staff requirements

Cross Selling/Up Selling

Notice how overstock.com has a section to sell items that are closely related to the featured product. This method of cross selling is attempting to encourage customers to purchase more items that they may or may not be aware are sold on the site.

And here, Amazon is up selling to make buyers eligible for free shipping. If a visitor spends at least $25.00, their item will ship for free. If not, they will be prompted with the above making them aware of this special offer.

• Cross selling similar products can help visitors find additional items that might interest them while they’re most willing to purchase
• Up selling (spend $25.50 more for a free gift!) is also a great way to inspire people to purchase more items
• Don’t hesitate to offer discounts and free shipping if it makes sense in terms of your ROI

Improve Remarketing Efforts

At no point should you consider your job done once a visitor has converted. After all, we want someone who purchases once to become a lifetime customer, right? Keep these things in mind when remarketing to your customers:

• In your shipping box, include additional materials that encourage visitors to come back and purchase more. For example, information on upcoming promotions or coupons for specific products
• In the receipt email your customers receive, include additional information such as related products or upcoming promotions. It’s like a digital version of the shipping package material
• Continue to send follow up emails to customers, including special offers and new product launches. Segmenting and leveraging your email list is a great way to define high value or high conversion rate customers and target them with specific messaging

Wrapping Up

Hopefully, these immediately actionable things will help propel your ecommerce site a bit more. Once you’ve successfully squeezed more value from your existing traffic using these methods, look into driving more traffic to your website through organic search, paid search, and social means.