How The Museum Hotel Improved Their Website Conversion Rate by 100%

Today, Dave Lemmon shares with us how Redcow Marketing helped The Museum Hotel improve their conversion rate by 100% and achieve a 70% increase in online sales. You can download Dave’s case study in its entirety, below.

The Museum Hotel’s Challenges:

The owner of Wellington NZ’s Museum Hotel – Chris Parkin – wanted…

• More bookings through his hotel’s website, more brand awareness, and more sales.
• To increase his website’s presence and make the most of its visitors.
• To reduce the fees he pays to third party travel sites for bookings, and to encourage guests to book from his website, instead.

Dave suggested they…

• Make better use of the hotel’s booking engine.
• Address usability and testing page enhancements to improve sales.
• Add sales elements on the website to improve the sales funnel, and add new content to the homepage and other vital areas that would enhance engagement.
• Work directly with the hotel’s booking engine provider to improve features.
• Work directly with the reservation staff and manager of the hotel to increase bookings.
• Address the site’s SEO content.
• Redesign the online advertising pay-per-click campaign.

First, they accessed the website’s analytical data to determine how much traffic was coming to the site, what levels of contact were made, what and how many bookings were generated, where people went when they visited, how long they were there, and where they left. All of this information helped to paint a picture of the site’s performance.

Dave reviewed the site for usability issues, friction, and confusion points, then looked for gaps in the website where they could enhance value, and studied the site’s flow of information.

Their major challenge was to make the website more interactive and focused – to get people moving into the booking engine as quickly as possible from the website itself; once there, the likelihood that a booking would be made was very high.

Dave proposed a new layout for the home page, then tried and tested different versions to find which one most effectively raised guests’ engagement levels with the site and booking engine.

The next step was to address the pages that were visited the most – providing feedback to the hotel on what those pages were lacking. They also added new tracking systems to monitor visitors and conversions levels, allowing them to track which parts of the pages people were more interested in, what keyword phrases were bringing in sales and customers, and other valuable information.

Finally, they added clearer navigation to aid the user experience, including new contact forms, maps and directions.

They rolled out these changes over the course of a few months, analyzing and tweaking along the way to enhance the overall package.

Results:

By focusing on both the conversions and the traffic, and creating an alignment between search and usability, business from their online bookings increased – on average – by 20% month-on-month.

[Click Here to Download The Museum Hotel Case Study PDF]

Thanks, Dave!