AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

Unless you are a leading entertainment product or service provider that is well known to the general public, it is likely that your website is wasting a share of the sales it could be generating from the traffic it attracts. This is often due to the fact that your business hired a “web design” agency to market your offerings. The problem here is that designers generally lack the skills required to actually market businesses online. After all, they are designers and not marketers, right?

One of the most common issues we see is that entertainment brands hire website design agencies that simply select a pre-designed, pre-built website template rather than developing sites that have all the essential elements others use to generate maximum bookings and sales. Worse is that they are often completely unaware of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) best practices and split test results that should guide how your site layout and wording is designed.

Ask yourself if you know for a fact that the wording on your homepage works better to generate sales than different wording? How do you know if your booking form is placed in the optimal location to engage your visitors and show them relevant products they are most likely to buy? And how do you know if your homepage is missing some of the most important trust elements your visitors need to see before going ahead and buying your products online?

The answer to the above questions come in the form of a truly scientific method of generating more revenue for the same amount of traffic, i.e. conversion rate optimisation (CRO) best practices and A/B split testing. This allows you to put to bed those in-house squabbles about which products to promote on the homepage, how to better word your sales and marketing copy and which product page layouts perform better than others in turning visitors into bookings and sales.

If you knew an element on your page turned people against your brand and was responsible for them hitting the back button, you would want that fixed right? By having a savvy team of people who know how to sell entertainment products online take a look at your website you can uncover where the worst pain points and untapped opportunities lie. Many of the issues we resolve to increase online sales are covered by the below common questions our clients find themselves asking:

Does your booking form sit at the top of your homepage and contain just the fields it needs to?

If you answered no, then be aware that only a fraction of your visitors will bother to scroll down the page to fill out the form to see what is on offer. Furthermore, only a small share of visitors will bother to click links in your content or navigation menu in order to go and find your search and booking form. And the more fields you have in the form, the fewer people will fill it out in order to see a list of relevant products and services they can choose from.

Does your homepage show a large slideshow that showcases your best offerings?

Most people are not aware that homepage slideshows are one of the biggest “conversion killers” found on entertainment industry websites. Again, they tend to only be used because a site was put together using simple to install templates created by designers and not by usability experts or CRO designers. The reason slideshows are notorious for reducing sales on websites is because the important information that is displayed on slide 2, 3 and 4 is usually never seen by your visitors.

Sometimes it makes sense to show slides of the best offers you want to promote. But beware, unless you repeat the benefits of buying your products elsewhere down the homepage, few visitors will see those all-important price guarantees, booking or payment options, or all those features you inadvertently “hid” in the slideshow. For mobile phone users, there is no better way of obscuring the most important features and benefits of buying from you than placing them in slideshows – which are only there to allow you to display large bright images of your attraction or products.

Do you highlight important trust elements so that visitors can skim read your homepage?

Split-tests have shown time and again that unless your visitors can see the most common trust elements, they are much less likely to buy from you or make a booking to visit your theme park, local attraction, museum or visitor centre. Logos of associations you are a member of, or logos of industry bodies you are governed by, approvals by your local council or others in your industry are just as important as product guarantees, testimonials and user reviews. Users who don’t see these elements at a glance often hear alarm bells in their heads. After all, if you are a brand that has worked hard to build trust and authority, why not show it and make use of your position in the market?

Do you help new customers choose a product and let existing customers convince them to buy?

Many potential customers visit sites before they are sure what it is they want. They arrived at your site to see what is on offer and what they can do. So by displaying ratings and reviews that your existing customers have submitted, they can be guided into which options or products will suit their needs the most. And by including lists of the most popular, most recently added and most discounted products, you can encourage them to view the stuff you most want to sell, whether that be discounts for group bookings or to promote the products that generate you the most profits.

There is an array of other well known CRO best practices such as ensuring your call to actions buttons are not only coloured to contrast with the other colours on your site, but also including wording known to generate more clicks. Many sites suffer from usability problems such as cookie notices obscuring the main content. Others simply throw away a large share of their potential customers by having a site that is difficult to use on mobile devices due to bad layout design and slow loading images. To check how your pages fare, try visiting your site using Google Chrome’s incognito browser using your mobile device. If you can’t easily see what it is you can (and should) do on each page, you will understand why many buy from competitors rather than from you.

From websites about children’s zoos that are designed for children (rather than the parents who use the site) to sports training websites that assume the visitors already know all about the sport or equipment used – it is always wise to have an extra pair of eyes take a look at your site and point out the friction points and wording that is unclear.

At Albion, we make the task of creating new variations of your homepage, landing pages or booking form a simple one. We use our knowledge of CRO best practices and our understanding of entertainment industry markets alongside a range of A/B split testing tools such as Optimizely. Then we make the changes both your and our team suggest and then send a share of your existing traffic to each variation – this allows your team to sit back and monitor the results as they come in.

Once you see the proof that one variation generates more sales than the other are you able to give your web developer or our team the go-ahead to implement the winning variations. As you can guess, this is how many leading leisure and entertainment business websites ensure they generate maximum sales from their existing online traffic.

It is also one of the main ways leisure industry leaders increase revenue and profits in a way that helped them enjoy ongoing growth and become leaders in the first place. To join them, simply request a free CRO review to see if your trust in a non-specialist website designer is responsible for your low conversion rates – it may be the most important thing you do all year to take a larger share of the market you are currently losing to competitors.