HighKey: How HighKey Raised Their AOV by 40% with Chief Digital Officer Ryan Rouse

🎧 This week’s pod episode featured HighKey—a brand on a mission to help America snack smarter by creating delicious, crave-worthy snacks without sugar.

We sat down with their Chief Digital Officer, Ryan Rouse, to discuss HighKey’s AOV improvements, Amazon success secrets, his advice for working with agencies, and much more.

Get high-key excited for this one, fam. 🙌

‍The Takeaways 👇

🚀 How HighKey boosted their AOV by 40%

When Ryan started at HighKey, one of his first missions was to boost AOV by enhancing onsite offerings.

“We switched up the strategy. We wanted to make highkey.com the ‘Costco’ of our eCommerce strategy… buy in bulk, virtual bundles… [offering things] that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Here’s what they did to boost AOV from $49 to over $70 in just a few months:

• Offered site-exclusive bulk “value packs” of popular products
• Created virtual bundles with high-margin, best-tasting products
• Set up cross-sells and upsells throughout the shopping experience

📦 Amazon success secrets

HighKey has been crushing it on Amazon for years. Their best-selling keto chocolate chip cookies have almost 50K reviews with an average of 4.4 stars. 💥

Part of their success is due to positioning Amazon as a complement to their business, not a competitor.

“There’s so much riff-raff out there about considering Amazon a competitor to DTC. At the end of the day, as a consumable brand, you [should] sell everywhere that you possibly can that your customers are. None of these should be competitors; they should be considered different distribution channels that you should love getting money and customers from.”

The rest comes down to fundamentals…

Things like testing PDP design, titles, images, and making sure bullet points are optimized for SEO and sound like a human.

Sexy? Maybe not. Successful? Definitely. 😏

📇 Advice for working with agencies

Ryan has worked with many agencies over the years and learned a thing or two about what leads to a successful partnership.

“I’ve made the mistake of hiring agencies when I knew nothing and expecting the agency to do everything.”

Instead of assuming an agency will function as your entire marketing team, understand what they can or will do for you, and then try to fill in the gaps internally.

“My biggest piece of advice: Agencies are a partner of yours that’s helping you execute against a strategy that you should have put together… not the other way around.”

Amen. 🙏🏻