Reaching your conversion goals is arguably the single most important function of your hotel’s website. Yet the vast majority of properties fail miserably at it improving conversion rates. And, remarkably, we all think that’s OK.
Anyone who uses a relatively good analytics program is familiar with the conversion goals metric. You regularly check it to see how many times your goal is achieved. And you quite rightly pay attention to the rates and boost your SEO or paid advertising to improve them. After all, the more times you reach your goal, the higher the return you get from your digital marketing.
However, despite the attention paid to these goals, and how important they are to bottom line results, online conversion rates wallow in the single digits. Most of us would be thrilled to get a 5% conversion rate.
The ecommerce experience underlines the sad state of online conversion rates. Average ecommerce conversion rates range between 1% and 5%, depending on the product category, the device type used by customers, etc. Yet average in-store, bricks and mortar retail rates are in the 25% to 40% range.
That makes bricks and mortar rates an average of about 1,000% higher than online rates.
First, it’s a matter of course that online rates will have a tough time matching bricks and mortar rates simply because of the nature of the internet. When a person walks into your hotel or facility, they are somewhat “captive”. They can’t leave instantly, like they can do when they land on your website.
Unfortunately, you can’t really do much about the inherent flightiness of your online visitors. Regardless of where they are in a conversion funnel, when they are on your site, they might be distracted by an email from a friend, they might suddenly remember to check yesterday’s scores, or they might get the urge to check their step-count for the day – all of which will lead them away from your site, regardless of what you do.
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