Now that we have identified your donation personas (Step 1), chosen your targeted first nonprofit (Step 2), established a relationship with your preferred nonprofit (Step 3), chosen the best donation options for testing (Step 4), deployed our best practices to optimize conversion (Step 5), put in place best practices for AOV and LTV (Step 6), identified a turnkey compliance solution (Step 7), learned how to market the overall relationship with your nonprofit (Step 8), and how to leverage multiple personas (Step 9)...
It's time for our final step: measuring success.
Doing all of the above, you will achieve a minimum of 19% conversion improvement, 18% AOV lift, and 20% LTV bump.
This is Step 10 in the process. If you haven’t completed the previous steps, please go back and walk through them. This process is simple, but it’s necessary to follow each step sequentially to optimize your results.
The ten key steps are as follows:
In Step 10 of this Master Class, we are going to teach you:
If you have reached this section of the Master Class, we can safely assume you are a competent ecommerce marketer and you know that average conversion rate is probably the most critical metric in your business.
For most ecommerce companies, conversion rates hover in the 2.5-3% range.1
You should expect, at a minimum, a 19% lift in conversion when deploying the strategies set forth in Steps 1-9.
Our champion performer in the first 30 days is 54.7%.
So, if you start at 3% and you aren’t at least at 3.6% after 30 days – something is wrong.
Make sure you have two different baselines before deploying the strategies in Steps 1-9:
For example, if I am deploying my new nonprofit partnership strategy in August 2024, I need to know the conversion rates for the following months:
This allows me to look at three critical comparisons for success:
And as an aside, make sure you give the results at least 15 days before you start making comparisons.
Pro Tip: Troubleshooting Conversion
Here are the top three things that hinder a conversion increase:
Remember, you are fighting cart abandon rates, which are the #1 conversion killers.
Typical ecommerce cart abandon rates are 74.52%2, so communicating throughout the checkout process is key.
As you know, lifting AOV is a surefire way to increase overall company sales.
The industry metric for AOV is $110,3 but this varies widely by product, audience, industry, etc.
Similar to conversion, your AOV improvement should be 20% or higher when implementing our best practices in Steps 1-9.
This is the nice double whammy that partnering with a nonprofit provides: a conversion lift plus an AOV lift.
As is the case in conversion improvement measurement, make sure you have two different baselines before deploying the strategies in Steps 1-9:
For example, if I am deploying my new nonprofit partnership strategy in August 2024, I need to know the conversion rates for the following months:
This allows me to look at three critical comparisons for success:
As with conversion, make sure you give the results at least 15 days before you start making comparisons.
Pro Tip: Troubleshooting AOV
Here are the top four things that we see that hinder an AOV increase.
The top three are the same factors that hinder conversion optimization, but the fourth is a critical opportunity to lift overall performance.
Example: The below is a great example of how you sell throughout the customer experience
Oofos, a popular footwear company that specializes in recovery sandals, has partnered with the Dana Farber Cancer Center.
They’ve donated over $4 million so far to benefit cancer research and treatment.
Note how as the customer is choosing the product they are reminded that a portion of the sale helps end breast cancer.
The nonprofit relationship is reinforced.
The cause – cancer research – is reinforced.
The product – women’s sandals – is connected to the nonprofit benefit (breast cancer).
And this drives more donations for the Dana Farber Cancer Center.
It’s a win for fighting cancer.
It’s a win for Oofos’ customers because they participate in a greater cause.
And it’s a win for Oofo which undoubtedly lifts their sales.
LTV and CAC are typically metrics that determine if you have a successful, profitable ecommerce business.
Industry experts assert that a ratio of 3:1 for LTV:CAC is ideal.4
If your ratio is too high, you’re probably leaving potential customers on the table.
If your ratio is too low, you’re probably struggling to make money.
So how do we improve this ratio?
Applying the strategies laid out in the Master Class should increase your LTV by at least 20%.
Increasing conversion rate, especially on paid traffic, lowers CAC and increases the LTV:CAC ratio.
Increasing AOV increases the revenue component of LTV.
See how we are already well down the road to improving LTV?
A critical component of improving LTV is your ability to improve your remarketing game because of your nonprofit partnership.
Regular social media posting, emailing, and press releases about your nonprofit relationship will lift your LTV.
Customers like to buy products from companies they like and feel connected to.5
In fact, LTV for customers who feel an emotional connection to a brand have a 300% higher LTV!5
So, invest time (and some money) in your persona-matched nonprofit causes.
Another factor that influences LTV is customer retention.
87% of consumers will switch to brands that are aligned with a good cause.5
So, aligning with a nonprofit will make your customers stickier and your competitors’ customers more likely to switch to and stay with you.
Measuring LTV can be a lengthy process, but you can accurately extrapolate LTV performance by comparing customer LTV in the first 90 days after deploying the strategies in Steps 1-9.
The best method to measure LTV is to measure your 90-day average revenue per new customer prior to launching your nonprofit partnership.
Then compare 120 days into your campaign, by measuring the first 90 days of average revenue per customer.
At the same time, you will want to measure your total new customers in the first 30 days to determine your CAC for the new test period.
Both of these metrics should show increased average revenue per new customer and decreased CAC per average customer.
Pro Tip: Troubleshooting LTV
Here are the top four things that we see that hinder an AOV increase. The top three are the same factors that hinder conversion optimization, but the fourth is a critical opportunity to lift overall performance.
If you follow the steps in this Master Class, you will drive better conversion, AOV, and LTV.
It always works if you work the plan.
But that doesn’t mean that people understand the benefits internally.
Once you get a taste for how dramatically partnering with a nonprofit can impact sales performance, you’re going to want to do more.
For example, if you have three personas and you have only launched a partnership that targets one, you can apply the methods in Step 9 to have a deeper connection with all of your personas and drive additional sales.
It’s critical to communicate effectively with your team about the impact of working with a nonprofit.
The most compelling information is a 90-day post launch report.
Prepare a 30-day report comparing the same calendar month from a year ago or the previous calendar month to the current month, using the nonprofit marketing partner strategy.
We recommend this simplified format:
Because of increased conversion and AOV, revenue will rise without a resulting increase in paid traffic.
However, you may be incurring some donation costs from the company as well as software and transaction costs of using Change.
The table above is not a stretch for your results – you should achieve this level of improvement.
Now, once you’ve reported on your monthly impact, extrapolate the impact annually and add in the LTV impact.
This creates the most accurate picture of what partnering with a nonprofit is doing for you.
In the annual projection, you’ll need to explain that you are now adding the expected incremental impact for LTV over a 12-month period.
In this example, partnering with a nonprofit has added an incremental profit of 57% – or, a nominal amount of $3.378 million.
On a relative basis, this is a median result.
If you diligently follow Steps 1-9 and continuously revise and hone your application of the principles we taught, your performance is sure to improve.
Sources cited
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