In the highly competitive travel space, it is hard to bring potential customers to your website and even harder to convert them into paying customers. People often ask us how they can increase the conversions on their website. While there are no universal best practices for the same, we have tried to put together a list of best practices that can help you increase the rate of conversions on your website.
#1- Keep it simple
Ask less questions before making the sale. Even one extra field can result in a significant drop in the number of conversions. You can ask the user to provide more details when required to avoid putting off the customers at entry. Of course it goes without saying that a simple and neat website layout also helps.
#2- Add buy back
To make a sale, it is very important to inspire confidence. You can do that by offering cancellation options and easy refunds. Usually the number of bookings you gain will outweigh the ones you have to refund by a significant margin.
#3- Always be around
It is very important to have a customer support team readily available. Apart from the phone support, also add the chat feature so that users can interact even if they have a query in the middle of the transaction.
#4- Add faces
Don’t hide behind your brand, especially if the brand in question is a young startup. If your brand is young, tell your story, show your face and let people see the team behind the product. Adding testimonials is also a good idea but it is better to embed tweets and posts rather than just copy pasting the testimonials into your website code.
#5- Work on social media
While you might be promoting your Facebook page or Twitter account to sell more, a strong following will help you present yourself as a trustworthy brand. If the social media numbers are worth flaunting, flaunt them. This will work as a social proof and users wont be hesitant to buy from you.
#6- Dont just throw money on Google
If you are using Google AdWords or any other form of advertising to bring visitors, make sure you don’t just dump them on homepage. You need to have a proper landing page for people who click on your ad and make sure the landing page copy is along the same lines as the ad copy. The page should be clutter free and should be focussed on the one product or service that user came looking for.
#7- Experiment with CTA button
Play around with the position, look and size of your ‘buy’ button and see what works best. It may perform quite differently depending on where it is and what it says. Avoid text links and use large buttons as much as possible to offer better experience for mobile users.
#8- Add more payment options
A recent Think with Google report indicates that a large number of Indonesian travellers won’t buy from a website if they don’t find bank transfer as a payment option. A large number of buyers abandon the cart if they don’t find the payment option they prefer and usually they won’t come back for the same reason. You absolutely don’t want to repel a customer, who was ready to pay, due to the lack of options.
#9- Sell more at checkout
You can present one time only offers at the time of checkout to create a sense of urgency and sell more. Like if you are a booking platform, instead of offering ‘flights’ and ‘flights+hotels’ separately, offer relevant hotel options right after someone books a flight. If possible, offer discounts at this point that won’t be available otherwise.
#10- Make them come back
It is also important to turn a buyer into a repeated customer. To bring them back, incentivise them with deals or gifts on their next purchase. You can also add points or credit to their account which can be redeemed on next purchase to bring them back to your website.
If you have shifted you focus to mobile app for your travel brand, you can read How you can reduce the number of users abandoning your travel app. Join the discussions on travel marketing and get inputs from the topic experts here.
