AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

The chances are that most of your website is left completely to guesswork. Perhaps you hired a “web designer” to select a pre-designed, pre-built holiday or travel based template and they simply switched the placeholder images and wording with the content you provided them. This is usually one of the worst mistakes brands in the holiday and leisure sector make. Why? Because most generic themes and templates are built by designers, and not digital marketers or conversion rate optimisation (CRO) experts who know how the best websites generate optimum engagement and sales.

Let’s put it another way – how do you know if the wording on your homepage describes your products or services in a way that converts more bookings than if you used different wording? How do you know which destinations or packages to show on your homepage? And how do you know which elements on your site are missing and which might be causing potential customers to hit the back button and look for their holiday provider elsewhere on the web?

The above questions can be answered, not by guesswork and hunches, but by scientific methods that increase revenue and profits. Call Albion to find out how your website could become a fine-tuned machine that is optimised to generate maximum bookings from your traffic. We provide a range of Conversion Rate Optimisation based A/B and multivariate testing services that give you the answers and can pay for themselves many times over.

Look at your holiday, vacation, hotel, guest house, day out, attractions, or other leisure activity website and answer the below questions to find out if you are leaving money on the table – simply because your marketing agency didn’t advise you about proven conversion rate optimisation best practices.

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

If you answer yes, then you likely want to remove it. Really! Homepage slideshows are known by CRO experts to be one of the biggest “conversion killers” that holiday websites suffer from. Why? Well, because all that information on the second, third and other sites simply isn’t seen by your visitors. If it includes important information about guarantees, availability, booking or payment options, offers and discounts, these are better placed in the main body of your homepage.

Does your online booking form sit near the top of your homepage in all devices?

If you answered no, you might want to reconsider the layout of your homepage. What could be more important than a form that allows visitors to search or select their chosen destination? Holiday sites that have highly visible and simple-to-use forms are shown to outperform sites that don’t. And because more and more traffic is from those using mobile devices, you need to ensure it’s the first thing they see too.

Does your booking form contain more input fields than it needs to?

Be aware that each extra field you require your visitors to fill out, the more of them will abandon their search or their booking. It’s best to have them fill in only the information you need to serve them with suitable destinations or holiday packages. Then and only then would you need to have them fill out all the fields required to make the actual booking. Remember people use the search or booking form to get an idea of prices, to see what is available and to uncover other factors they need to consider when choosing a holiday.

Does your site require large images in order to “sell” the holidays you offer?

If you think your homepage should include an array of full-sized, high-resolution images to display the wonders of the destinations you offer, think again. Sure, you need to show people the beautiful landscapes on offer but you can wave goodbye to them if this causes your homepage to load slowly. It’s better sometimes to include regular or thumbnail images that click through to the actual destination or specific holiday page. And be warned, you have visited your site many times before, therefore you are viewing images already cached on your device. New visitors have to wait until these huge images files load up, often leaving their pages blank… until they leave to buy from your competitors.

The above best practices are well known to those with experience of conversion rate optimisation and particularly those who have a deep understanding of optimising conversion rates for bookings and sales on holiday and tourism websites. Indeed, an expert’s first glance at your holiday website is likely to flag up an array of “friction points” and untapped opportunities we know would generate more sales if resolved. But it doesn’t end there. The true power of conversion rate optimisation is the ability to split-test your layouts and wording to achieve optimal results.

Don’t take our word for it though. If you can’t afford to lose sales from visitors you paid to attract, then Conversion Rate Optimisation is a win-win situation. At worst, the results of a round of split testing can tell you that alternate layouts or wording performed lower or the same as your existing site content. At best, it shows exactly which changes would produce more bookings or enquiries without having to increase online traffic or rely on staff guesswork or a web designer’s choice of generic holiday site template.

Albion makes the process of creating new variations of your homepage or booking form layout a simple one. We use a range of A/B split testing tools such as Optimizely to make the changes both your and our team suggest. We then send a share of your existing traffic to each variation while allowing you to sit back and monitor the results as they come in. Then when you are ready you can give your web developer or our team the go-ahead to implement the winning variations.

The only thing to ask yourself at this stage is: did we guess what to put on our website and do we know for a fact that other variations wouldn’t generate more bookings, revenue and profits? Now is the right time to join those of your competitors that use their sites as dynamic online marketing tools. Sites that let them better understand how their potential and existing customers think and behave. Then tap into that intelligence to make more money from the increased profits and ongoing growth your brand deserves.