Digital Marketing Case Study – Legacy Hotels

Legacy Hotels came to us for assistance in improving the conversion rate across its website channel.

They had been running successfully for many years using traditional channels but wanted to make their struggling digital channels work for them.

Mainly the websites of the hotels they manage all suffered from poor conversion rates and many dropoffs.

The first issue we found was that mobile conversion rates suffered greatly compared to the desktop version of the site.

This is because mobile sessions tend to amplify the negative aspects of the site’s user experience. 

Fixing this was a priority because we found that 68% of users were on mobile.

The initial conversion rates across each device were as follows: 

• Mobile 0.32% conversion rate (The big problem). 
• Tablet 1.36% conversion rate.
• Desktop 4.36% conversion rate.

One of the biggest reasons we found for the poor mobile and overall conversion rate was the preference page. 

The page was long and convoluted and required all potential customers to choose additional add-ons before they could proceed.  

Simply removing it caused a significant site-wide conversion increase.

We ran two experiments regarding navigation removal. We noticed a lot of people would get cold feet in the final stages of the booking funnel (this is very common and we see this a lot). 

One way in which we can combat this is to give people no choice but to proceed (or leave the site). 

We simply removed most of the text from the top navigation bar on these pages and our experiment boosted booking rates by +-30%, with a 90% booking probability once they reach this stage.

There was a considerable conversion rate decrease amongst users browsing the site from outside of South Africa. To combat this, we experimented with a native currency converter. We ran this test for the U.S. and UK. site visitors. The results were as follows: 

UK Experiment:

• Original – 12% chance to be the best performing option. 
• After GBP Conversion Experiment – 88% chance to be the best performing option with an improved conversion rate of 374% over the original (3.7x the conversions!).

U.S. Experiment:

• Original – 47% chance to be the best performing option 
• After GBP Conversion – 53% chance to be the best performing option with a 7% improved conversion rate. 

Most purchases are emotional or at least can be influenced by emotion. 

We added a number of psychological triggers across other websites we manage, and the results were quite amazing.

In one experiment we tested the impact on bookings when people were encouraged to continue checking out by adding a level of scarcity. 

We added a notification bar that told customers the room type is very popular, and that they needed to finish booking to guarantee their stay. 

Adding this level of scarcity resulted in a transactional improvement of 810% (8x) with a conversion probability of 97% once they get to this stage.

Too much choice is often overwhelming. 

We recorded a few people navigating the site and noticed people were becoming confused when presented with multiple room types and pricing options per room.

In order to discover which combination worked the best, we tested three versions on 4 different hotel brands.

The combinations of options we used were: 

1) Only one room option (maintaining wheelchair friendly options where applicable).

2) Multiple room options but with only one price per room type.

3) The original website room layout.

And the results per combination were as follows: 

1) (Original setup). Always the worst option. 3-8% chance to be the best performing option. 

2) (One price per room). 10-48% chance to be the best performing option, average of 3,3x better performing than the original across the board. 

3) (Single or two room options). The best option. 20-82% chance to be the best performing option, 6,6x better than the original across the board.

Conversion rate is not only a function of the website UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) but also highly affected by the type of traffic on the website. 

Many websites, like Legacy Hotels, have two distinct user bases; B2B – Trade Visitors and B2C – non-trade visitors. 

Our assumption was that in all the experiments we can do little to affect the behaviour of trade visitors and therefore our analysis and experimentation was focused on non-trade visitors.