Converting a travel customer is always a tricky business but a new report from EyeforTravel outlines six tactics that may, just may, help you go from booking bust to conversion king!
#1 Test and test consistently
When it comes to site look and layout, what will and won’t succeed in increasing conversions is frequently not obvious and often frustratingly irrational. A/B testing is essential, as even the most adept web designers may miss a conversion positive tactic. Do note, however, that you will need good levels of traffic to the test pages, especially for more subtle changes. This will help to avoid freak results or misleading conclusions.
#2 Reduce steps to completing the booking
Once customers have reached checkout, give them only crucial information. It may help to just confirm the booking and deal with payments later. This is especially true when a travel customer is booking on mobile as reduced real estate makes it harder for the customer to enter details and move through stages.
“On mobile, we have found that entering credit card information, and/or address details, overwhelmingly became the highest bounce rate,” says Steven Consiglio, product performance manager at Booking.com. “It was a tremendous [source of] friction once you already shrink the screen and shrink the steps to book.”
To address this, the business created a product to allow hotels to waive the need for a credit card to be entered, in certain circumstances. According to Consiglio, this had a huge conversion-positive boost [for] last-minute [bookings].
#3 Give customers a good reason to ask for a product
If travel consumers drop off at every extra hurdle then questions arise. Why is this happening? The trick is to keep any additional products simple and make it acutely obvious what the benefits are to the customer at every single stage. If at all possible, use previous sales data, intent information and cookie tracking to discover what products are most likely to win customer loyalty. Also, consider optimal pricing levels! Again, it’s important to test and learn; run an A/B test to understand if the sale of an ancillary product is genuinely conversion and revenue positive. Small page changes or product variations really can deliver benefits.
