When it comes to evaluating the performance of your business, there are plenty of areas to consider. But one key indicator as to how your overall sales efforts are going is to look at your Average Order Value (AOV). But sometimes it can be hard to interpret, especially for businesses who have started their operations a little more recently. And what happens if your AOV isn’t quite as high as you feel it should be? How do you solve that problem? Well, we’re about to tell you how you can increase the AOV for your Business-to-Business (B2B) sales operation with Adobe Commerce.
What is AOV?
AOV is the average monetary value that your customers spend with your business over a particular time period. This time period could be any length – it’s dependant on how you’re approaching the calculations and setting of your goals. But common practices generally involve calculating monthly or yearly AOV in order to compare changes in performance, be those changes positive or negative ones.
Why is AOV important to your business?
AOV is a vital metric to know and understand as it indicates how effective your business is in a variety of areas and processes regarding sales. It tells you how much your customers are spending with you and gives you insights that you can use to plan ongoing strategies to increase that number (as well as your revenue as a whole). It helps you to understand the behaviours of the people who you trade with too, giving you a better idea about the mindset of your customers and how that mindset may have changed. But aside from all of that, it plays a role as a key performance indicator regarding business growth.
Why might your AOV not be as high as it should be?
Pinning down exact reasoning for a lower-than-expected AOV isn’t straightforward. But with that said, there are some common factors as to why you might not be seeing the numbers you’d like to see for your business. A big part of this is the complete experience that your customers have when shopping with you.
In the world we live in, efficient, personalised experiences aren’t just a luxury for your customers – they’re a necessity. The demand for positive, frustration-free shopping is at an all-time high, and that demand is only going to continue to grow. This in itself presents a wide array of challenges to businesses, and these challenges can often result in reduced performance in certain areas whilst solutions are being discovered. But we’re about to tell you the ways that you can approach those challenges to breathe life back into your B2B AOV.
How to increase your AOV with your Adobe Commerce store:
Create an efficient, connected environment for your customers
A disconnected shopping experience is detrimental to any sales business, be it in the B2B or B2C sector. But in B2B, that connectivity is even more vital to creating tangible results across the board. The businesses who engage with your organisation are looking for an effective method to acquire the products and/or services that they need. They don’t want to have to jump through hoops in order to achieve their goal.
The same concept applies to your business operations. Your team and your business as a whole, no matter how big or small, needs to be able to work efficiently and effectively. Not only does this improve the workflows and processes in the business, but it also reflects back to the customer experience. A lack of connectivity between processes can cause setbacks at any point in the entire sales process. This can impact the way your customers approach future sales, as well as affecting your operation.
By connecting the functions of your business through Adobe Commerce, as well as the back-office systems of your business, you create an integrated system that can effectively communicate and function in a more streamlined manner. Adobe Commerce is a highly effective platform for achieving this – it’s built with integrated B2B functionality in mind, allowing you to ensure that your business can deliver a distinctive, positive shopping experience for your customers and clients whilst maximising your own productivity and efficiency behind the scenes.
Make the shopping experience personal
As we mentioned earlier, a personalised shopping experience goes a long way towards delivering positive reactions and engagement from new and existing customers. It’s also a tried-and-true method of pushing up the AOV of the people who buy from you. Personalisation covers all areas of your website and provides a wide variety of methods that dramatically improve the shopping experience for your customers.
With a personalised user journey, your customers can have tailored product recommendations (which is particularly useful for up-selling and cross-selling) based on their existing browsing and buying behaviour. It’s this sense of relevancy that generates interest and improves the overall experience of your buyers. It also reduces the workload that your business must complete, automating a highly complex area of your sales channel. Powerful personalisation is flexible to your needs and can supercharge the AOV of your customers at a rapid pace.
With Adobe Commerce powering your B2B store, personalisation features can be integrated and managed in an intuitive way. You’ll have access to page and navigation adjustments based on customer profiles, relevant and effective product recommendations, personalised search capabilities with unique results based on the customer’s previous search habits and behaviour, unique discount code and promotional marketing functionality, personalised emails, and so much more.
Embrace the technology that’s available to you
With such a vast quantity of different technologies available, it can be a little overwhelming when it comes to finding the right solutions for you and your business. The sheer volume of choice and variation in features that you never knew you needed can result in a complete avoidance of some pretty useful (and often vital) tools.
We recently published an article on why having the right tools as part of your Adobe Commerce store matters to your business, regardless of the industry or sector you operate in. And when it comes to improving your B2B AOV, it’s essential to make use of the right tools and integrations within your business. Not only do they aid with some of the points we’ve already talked about regarding streamlining operations and providing personalised shopping experiences, but they give you invaluable insights and essential features that can provide a dramatic improvement for driving sales with new and existing customers. Adobe commerce is a platform with effective third party tool integration in mind, giving you access to a plethora of options that provide outstanding functionality that can be tailored to your exact needs.
Think about growth and scalability
The future is just as important as the present. Planning for the future of your business is possibly one of the most important aspects of enhancing your B2B AOV. This involves both planning, and strategic management of existing processes and systems. You need to consider your options for sales channels – how you want to utilise existing ones, and any new avenues that you may want to pursue. It’s worth taking the time to carry out extensive research in order to address areas that are lacking or missing from your strategy, and finding solutions that enable you to acquire a presence in those areas (particularly if they’re in danger of becoming overrun by your competition). Extending your business’ capabilities is a sure-fire way to help enhance the AOV of your business, whilst growing your overall offering.
Adobe Commerce excels at providing a scalable solution for your business. It boasts a scalable infrastructure that can be adjusted to your needs when required, meaning you’ll never fall behind or suffer performance hits for the channels that you cover. Combined with the ability to handle a variety of channels, Adobe Commerce gives you exceptional long-term functional flexibility that can grow alongside you.
Discover the power of Adobe Commerce for your business today
We specialise in creating powerful solutions for clients that want to harness the capabilities of Adobe Commerce. We’ve worked with countless clients to help them meet and exceed their goals across a multitude of KPIs, including AOV. Get in touch with us today and find out how we can help your business.
