This is part one of a three part series detailing how you can make your website “recession proof”, Follow these steps to ensure that you are able to increase your inline revenue even in these tough economic times.
This first article will focus on website design and conversion rates. Each article or step will build upon the last. Combining the techniques in all three articles will have the greatest cumulative effect. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
More often than not, during a period of a down economy, business owners tend to either stop marketing and advertising all together, or they’ll start throwing money at whatever they think might work to bring in new business. The problem with the later is that the business owner has no detailed plan to know what works, while the former is all together a bad idea. Using this ‘triple play’ process will ensure that you’re dominating your competition, while they’re scrambling to keep up, or will stop playing the game altogether.
First Play – A High Converting Website
If you already have a working website that is generating bookings, you can easily double your existing online revenue by ensuring that your website converts at a high level. A good conversation rate is 1%. Anything less than that and you’re losing money. A conversion rate is simply the percentage of visitors making a reservation versus the total amount of people visiting your website. For example, if you have 3000 visitors per month and you have a 1% conversion rate, 30 people will place some kind of reservation through your website.
Now what if we were able to push the conversion rate to 2%? This is would essentially double your existing online revenue, using only your existing traffic that is already visiting the website. This is literally a hidden asset within your business right now, and many in travel industry are missing out. Increasing conversion rates is very easy to do in most cases. Here’s how we do it.
The number one tool you must have is some kind of analytics program. This tool will track the visitors to your website, show you how the visitor came to your website, and what they’re doing while they are at your website. Many analytics programs are free, and the best free tracker available is Google Analytics (
http://www.google.com/analytics/).
With a tracker installed, we’ll be able to see how visitors are interacting with your website. Are they quickly exiting certain pages once they hit your website? How much time are they spending reading each page? Are they exiting the site during the booking process without finishing? Any of these could cause a website to have a poor conversion rate, but the most common are:
· Poor website design – Your website reflects your property. A poorly designed website can make the best properties look second rate. This includes the website design, photography, etc...
· Poorly organized website – If your website draws lots of traffic, but no bookings, this could be the culprit. Are people leaving your website because they can’t find what they’re looking for? This includes the navigation structure of your website. A visitor should be able to reach any page of your website within 2-3 clicks.
· No call to action – This is marketing 101. Is it easy to place a reservation? Is your booking solution intuitive and fast? Is the credit card transaction secure? You should have several “Reserve Now” buttons or ways to place reservations on each page. Make the booking process as easy, safe and fast as you possibly can.
By improving on the above areas of your website, your conversion rate will naturally increase, thus bringing you additional online revenue using only the existing website traffic. Focus on making your website represent the quality of your property, make it easy for visitors to find the pages they’re looking for, and tell the visitors what to do(“Reserve Now” Button) once they’re there. This is the magic formula to having a high converting website.
A new website design can have conversion rates as high as 2-3% and even higher! The average conversion rate in the travel industry – less than .5%. You do the math.
Use this first step and improve your conversion rates. Once you have increased your conversion rate you can focus on driving more traffic to your “new and improved” website. The next two articles will help you do exactly that.
GuestStream provides Internet Marketing Services and Website Development to vacation rental managers. GuestStream is located in Denver, CO and a member of VRMA. Call 877-880-5946 or
email us for more information.
Joe Pawlak
President, GuestStream