There’s a plethora of tactics and strategies you can use to increase your hotel direct bookings. But if you’re looking for a quick guide to some of the most important drivers of conversions, we’ve got it narrowed down for you.
Listed below are 13 of the most important elements of any marketing strategy. These marketing elements are perfect for a hotel marketer to test and optimize, including aspects of your hotel website, marketing campaigns and email marketing. Each of these things has been proven time and again to be important to conversions – they have the power to either boost conversions or to become leaks in your booking funnel.
Have a look through these 13 factors, and consider testing the ones you’re not sure of.
Is your website navigation confusing? Do you send out hotel newsletters too often? Find out what the experts say, and test to discover what the best practices are for your own hotel.
Website Navigation
Your hotel website plays an important role in the conversion funnel. It’s the place where visitors get to learn more about you, consume useful content, and hopefully your Book Now button and go on to reserve a room or two.
However, if your website feels like a more like a maze than a website to visitors, you’ll be stuck with high-converting back buttons and no bookings.
That’s why we’ll start with website navigation testing ideas.
Factors to test:
- Number of fields on contact forms
- Drop down menus
- Familiar buttons
- Navigation bar
-
Sometimes, Less Is More
When Imaginary Landscape, a web design company, reduced the number of fields on their contact form from 11 to 4, they boosted form submissions by 160%, and received a 120% increase in conversion rates.
In another study by VWO, reducing on-page options boosted engagement by 17.8%. Will limiting navigational buttons have a similar impact on your site?
You’ll have to test to find out for sure, but it’s safe to assume that you shouldn’t have more navigation buttons than you really need.
-
Drop Down Menus
Some studies say that drop down menus can be annoying for visitors and bad for your site. Others have reported they work better than other methods.
If your hotel has an extensive set of offers or a spa with lots of features, this might be a test worth running.
-
Familiar Button Names
Ever heard of cognitive fluency?
The idea behind it is fairly intuitive: the brain prefers to think about things that are easy to think about. The easier a choice is, the more likely it is that we’ll make it.
Cognitive fluency is linked to The Mere Exposure Effect, which says the more you’re exposed to something, the more you prefer it.
To make navigation smoother on your site, why not try making your buttons similar to the leading sites in your industry? This could make navigating your site more intuitive and natural, or it may not have any impact at all.
Either way, it’s worth testing.
-
No Navigation Bar
Kitchen tool retailer Yuppie Chief wanted to boost signups for their wedding registry landing page. So they ran a split test that completely removed the navigation bar, the results?
Removing the navigation bar netted them 100% more signups.
For some sites, no navigation bar can lead to strong results.
Read rest of the article at: NetAffinity
