Travelmole guest comment: companies must address their sites’ leakage rates
Sunday, 01 Jun, 2009
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The following article is by Mark Simpson, managing director at website content optimisation firm Maxymiser.
Travel companies need to wake up to the appalling leakage that is taking place as visitors move through their web pages.
In the travel sector, conversion rates (the rate at which visitors to a site progress right through to a purchase) average out at just 1-3%. This means that, despite all of your best efforts to get them there, a staggering 97% of visitors to your web site are still not doing what you want them to do.
Even more shocking than the overall drop-out of visitors to web sites is the rate of abandonment by those who intended to book a holiday. This can be as high as 70%. Even at 50% this would be scandalous, given that these are customers who have spent time on the web site, and selected a holiday that they are willing to buy.
It is often the smallest and least obvious details that make the difference between conversion and abandonment. When National Express experimented with its heading, strap-line and call-to-action buttons in the checkout process, it saw a double-digit uplift in conversion rates at the checkout.
However, most travel businesses continue to rely on blind faith in their web development – following gut-feel, spurious ‘best practices’ or reactive feedback from small research samples. Alternatively, they may spend large sums of money on retrospective site activity analysis, which is then fed into a protracted redesign lifecycle where the web site is completely, yet somewhat randomly, overhauled every couple of years.
Ultimately, it should be the holidaymakers themselves who design your web site, based on the live choices they make on your pages. A truly personalised web experience will be one which offers customers web page layouts, sequences and content that have been dynamically put together based on that user’s demonstrated preferences.
As the cost-effectiveness and impact of acquisition marketing diminishes, a focus on conversion strategies makes sound business sense for travel companies. Chasing 10% more traffic to your site will cost at least 10% in additional spending – only for 97% of that traffic to drop out without purchasing. By redirecting the same level of investment into improving your conversion performance, travel companies stand to see far greater returns.
The average uplift in conversion following regular testing and small iterative improvements has shown itself to be in the region of 34-35%, which could have a huge impact on the bottom line.
These are frugal times when cost-justification reigns. 2009 will be a year when travel companies are forced to reassess their budget allocations, so there is no better time to embark on a well thought-out conversion strategy.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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