The more you know about your customer before they arrive, the better your chance of conversion
In the Kevin Costner baseball movie “Field of Dreams”, the central character turns his corn field into a baseball diamond after a mysterious voice tells him “If you build it, he will come.” The travel industry has followed its own version of this, spending vast sums of money optimising sites in terms of usability to maximise conversions from traffic driven by SEO and online advertising – something we at Cowan Group call ‘Dreams of Fields’:
Having invested so much in the infrastructure, it’s time for the travel industry to look to be more precise and sophisticated in its approach – and in turn generating greater returns from existing investment.
Achieving it is a three stage process:
1. Engaging potential customers early on through a number of different touch points, be that SEO, social networking, eCRM, blog or PR. This gives your visitors more information with which to create their expectations of your site – the closer you marry expectation and reality, the lower your bounce rate will be.
2. Preparing people and communicating with them BEFORE they reach your website will improve the quality of customer who decides to visit i.e. they understand what they want and are ready to convert!
3. Understand more about the buying cycles of customers, and target them with effective communications.
And the best bit – it doesn’t have to cost the world. With a user-friendly website and marketing budget, it is a question of capitalising on your existing assets and making them work a lot harder for you.
Some travel firms are already exploiting this integrated approach to great effect. Ocean Holiday’s embarked upon a process of learning and improvement in the last six months, and has seen conversion rates rocket by 40%, PPC bounce rates down to 15% and, perhaps most impressive, open rates on emails are up to 50% thanks to precise segmentation.
By following this sophisticated approach, Ocean is enjoying significant returns – 15% of all visitors to the site either book or order a brochure.
In this current climate, you have to justify the money you spend, and everything has to deliver a clear result. If you can understand more about your customers and put them in the right frame of mind – if they come, they will book.
