3 Oh-so-important steps to boost your spend per customer in 2022
If you’re like basically every other small business owner, one of your goals in 2022 is to increase your revenue.
Typically, we look to selling more as the primary means to increasing annual revenue, but what about optimizing your spend per customer?
Imagine if you could make more money by doing less—offering quality over quantity. That’s where boosting your spend per customer comes in.
And no, it’s not as simple as, “Just raise your prices!”. Unfortunately, well-meaning advice like this often completely misses the mark by ignoring a few oh-so-important steps that must take place if you want to make more with selling less.
So before you jack up your prices in 2022 (although you’re free to do so anyway), don’t miss out on these 3 oh-so-important steps to boost your spend per customer in 2022.
1. Present an elevated brand image
If you want to attract higher-paying clients or customers willing to spend more, you need to present a brand image that reflects the quality they’re expecting.
Including a brand’s pricing strategy in the brand strategy is key to ensuring a brand is positioned to best attract the right people and send subconscious messages of what they can expect from the brand. Basically, this means that your brand’s visual identity—your colors, fonts, logo, packaging, and more—should send cues as to what your pricing will be like before your customers ever see the dollar sign.
Imagine a high-end fashion boutique hosted on a hastily-thrown-together, dated-looking website. Or a dollar store exuding elegance and sophistication with high-street-inspired fonts. There’s a reason why brands position themselves not just for who they want to attract, but for the pricing strategy they have to offer.
Position your brand not only around who you want to attract, but to reflect your pricing strategy.
This is the perfect moment to remind you that if you’re aiming to raise your prices in 2022 but your brand’s visual identity doesn’t reflect that value increase, you’ll lose your customers along the way and alienate the higher-paying ones.
And for you product-based small business owners out there, leveling up your brand’s visual identity will further enhance a sense of respectability and professionalism that will encourage customers to have trust in your offerings as well.
The quality of your brand’s visual identity reflects the perceived quality of your offerings.
Increasing your prices comes with an increase in value, which can either be real or perceived (because a Louis Vuitton purse carries your wallet and keys just as well as a Target purse does, but the status-signaling of the two is very different). In order to increase your value, therefore, you need to send the visual cues that your brand is worthy of the value it asks for.
2. Increase your brand experience
In the minds of consumers, cost = value. Our willingness to pay for a good or service directly relates to the value we perceive from it.
And unfortunately for any objective thinkers out there, value is a relative term.
Everyone is going to value a particular product or service uniquely. Yes, market value is still important when it comes to pricing, but we can also name a dozen brands who price far above market value because they provide additional value that in the minds of their customers, goes above that market value. (Plus, market value is also relatively subjective as well—broadly speaking, of course).
This means that if you want to increase your prices, you need to provide additional value. Increasing your spend per customer must come with increasing your brand value.
There are many ways to increase the value of your offerings—adding new features, adding new services to your existing packages, improving the quality of goods used in your products, etc.—but an essential step is remembering to increase your brand experience to go along with it.
By increasing the experience your clients and customers have with your brand, you increase the overall relative value of your offerings.
This can look like:
Investing in a higher-end website to better present your brand (see point #1 above) and make the purchasing/booking process easier, faster, and elevated
Splurging on custom packaging for a swoon-worthy unboxing experience that further enforces a positive association with your brand (and is also highly Instagrammable—win-win)
Providing additional customer/client support or touchpoints, whether expanding your response time with a direct messaging system or virtual assistant, sending check-in emails after they hire or purchase from you, or elevating your onboarding process
There are countless other ways to elevate your brand experience (and maybe we’ll write a blog post about them someday!), but the point is the provide additional value in the minds of your customers by not only directly adding value, but also by indirectly adding value in the form of an increased brand experience.
Ultimately, you want your customers to feel like they’re the ones getting a great deal.
Make your brand experience so stellar, they feel like they’re being treated like royalty and getting away without paying royalty prices.
3. Optimize your website for sales, sales, sales
The third oh-so-important step to boost your spend per customer is more practical: make sure your website is optimized for its number one job, which is to sell your offerings.
That may sound obvious, but head to any number of small- to mid-sized businesses’ websites and you’ll find not many of them make it easy for their clients or customers to purchase from them or book their services.
Many of them bury the value they have to offer underneath paragraphs of text, hiding their call-to-action buttons at the very bottom of their webpages. And when you get to their contact page, either the link doesn’t work or the contact form returns an error.
I have a favorite shop nearby I often visit to stock up on tea, and one week I didn’t have time to go in person so I visited their website to try to order online. Unfortunately, their online checkout process didn’t even work, so after a few minutes I gave up and was so frustrated by the experience that I made my purchase from one of their competitors the next time.
Consumers’ digital attention span is a matter of milliseconds, so it’s critical to not just to make a strong first impression, but to provide a fast-loading, user-friendly, functional small- to mid-sized business website experience.
But you already know that, of course. No small business owner thinks their website should be slow, confusing, or frustrating. So with that mind, what exactly does optimizing your website for sales look like?
Make it easy for them to purchase from your website
Again, this point sounds obvious but it’s surprisingly overlooked.
If you offer products, put the “ask” everywhere. Constantly redirect the user flow to your product galleries, product pages, and more. Update your banners and website images with your newest seasonal offerings or best-sellers to draw attention to your best offerings.
If you offer services, make the booking process easy and simple. Set up a Calendly account and embed it into your website or link to it on your call-to-action buttons to eliminate a step from someone contacting you to setting up a discovery call. Or if you offer any lower-priced services, such as one-day intensives or small packages, Maggie Giele suggests making those immediate purchases instead of hiding those behind layers of contact forms and emails, saving your vetting process for higher-ticket packages only.
Make sure your website is functional
Another point that may feel too simple to be noted, but you’d be surprised how many websites don’t actually work. Test each and every link in your website. And then test it again. Test your checkout process, following it through to the very last step (go ahead, treat yourself to one of your own products!).
Check your website speed to ensure you’re not losing visitors due to oversized images, make sure you don’t have any dead-ends in your website (pages that don’t lead anywhere), and ensure your overall site structure is easy to navigate.
Oh, and that it looks stellar and functions perfectly on mobile, too.
Drive demand with plug-ins, offers, bundles, and more
My final favorite trick to boost spend per customer on ecommerce websites is to utilize nifty plug-ins that drive demand and increase value. FOMO pop-ups (you know, those alerts that pop up in the bottom corner that say “Sara from Idaho purchased this 3 minutes ago”) to drive demand and increase social proof that this product is desirable; special offers to incentivize more immediate action (providing a higher value for a limited time); or bundles to combine multiple products or services they’re already looking for in a single, easy unit.
