Guide 1: Hotel Website Design & Conversion Optimisation

YOUR WEBSITE - YOUR MARKETING HUB

In the hospitality market, your website is your number one marketing tool and everything you do online must support this. A website is the hub of all your online marketing activity, a facility to convert interest into sales.

Much of your other online and offline marketing activity will be encouraging people to visit your website. Once you get them there you need to convert those people to tangible sales, or at the very least collect their contact information so you can continue to communicate directly with them.

WHAT IS THE CONVERSION RATE?

The rate at which visitors are converted to sales (or to some other key objective) is called the Conversion Rate. A small change in the Conversion Rate can make a big difference to your return on investment and turnover.

There is much that can be done to improve your Conversation Rate and, when planning your website, you should consider everything with Conversion Rates in mind. Using enticing action buttons, suggestive copy and banners and text links all help you to direct site visitors around your website and to your booking engines or enquiry forms.

One of the most effective forms of increasing conversions is to include a reservation booking system on the homepage.

Always ask yourself when planning your website: “Is this going to drive sales?”

It should also be noted that convincing a visitor to sign up to receive Email Newsletters should be a key conversion objective, though secondary to actual bookings.

THE WEBSITE PLANNING PROCESS

The content and structure of a hotel website should be carefully planned out. When developing a new website, try and consider everything from your visitors’ perspective.

First off – who are they?

Business travellers? Couples? Families?

Identify 4 or 5 key demographics and then plan your website around them. Continually consider everything from their perspective:

• What are they likely to be doing?
• Why are they there?
• What information are they seeking?

Then consider your attributes that might encourage these visitors to book. We call these attributes ‘Persuasion Assets’; the things your hotel has that are likely to impress a visitor and persuade them to book a room.

Special spa facilities, unique interior design and personality – we’ve met with countless hoteliers and uncovered all manner of Persuasion Assets that weren’t being effectively represented on their websites.

The trick is to identify your Persuasion Assets and ensure your website structure and design does them justice.

Including key conversion tools, such as ‘Book Here’ buttons, ‘Sign Up Here’ buttons and booking engines at relevant points on your website will encourage them to easily convert into a sale.

WHAT CONTENT SHOULD BE INCLUDED?

It is not unusual for hotels to over-complicate their websites. As previously mentioned, speed and clarity of information are more important to your visitors than anything else.

The majority of your website visitors are looking for fairly simple information or have specific objectives that need to take centre stage in your website planning:

• Book a room
• View (and possibly print) a map of your location (we recommend you use Google Maps)
• Find your phone number
• See images or a video of your hotel’s rooms and facilities
• Examine details on your F&B, Leisure and Business facilities
• Explore the suitability of your hotel for a special event or wedding
• Look for attractive special offers or package deals
• Subscribe to a newsletter

Everything else is a secondary or tertiary consideration.

Links within copy text (called Deep Linking) are also useful for website users; if they’re reading about your great spa, why not allow them to jump straight to your spa pages by making the word ‘spa’ a link in your copy?

Simple, direct, clear and obvious is always best. If you annoy or bore a visitor by trying to be too clever they will leave without buying and your website will be a failure.

Social Media can also be integrated into your website. You can run Twitter Feeds, Facebook comments, Flickr photos and YouTube videos. This all helps to make your site more interactive and interesting.

You should ensure that it is easy for your site’s visitors to get involved in your social media channels.

Regularly encourage them to 'Follow' you on Twitter or 'Like' you on Facebook. Competitions will help to achieve this (social media will be covered in more detail in lesson 5).

TEST & IMPROVE

Take a moment to look at your own website with all these points in mind:

• Is it intuitively designed?
• Is all the information where you’d expect it to be and is your business presented in the best possible light?
• Does it encourage you to make a booking?

One of the advantages of the online world is measurability and the pure statistical data and analysis tools (namely Google Analytics) that the internet so readily provides. This key attribute can be used to fine-tune and optimise your website, achieving higher Conversion Rates.

For a quick and inexpensive testing method, use your friends and ask them to perform certain tasks whilst you stand behind them and watch. If they can quickly and easily perform these tasks then give yourself a pat on the back. If they get lost or confused and take too long you will need to take action, as you are losing sales and missing major opportunities.

A more scientific testing method we use is where different versions of a page can be ‘A-B Tested’ to determine which version is most effective. By using a free tool, called Google Website Optimiser, two different versions of a website can be alternately displayed and the activity of visitors then compared.

So Version 1’s layout and design might cause 100 people to click on Book Here, but Version 2’s layout and design might cause 120 people to click on Book Here, a 20% improvement. The example below shows how colour can be used in A-B testing

After running the test for a predetermined time you then select the version that produced the best results happy in the knowledge that you’re using the best version. You can put a rest to boardroom discussions as to which design is best by running tests like this!

Finally, be sure to include Google Analytics in your website so that you can easily measure:

• Visitor numbers
• Traffic sources
• Keywords people have used to find your website in searches
• Popular pages
• Conversions to bookings or sign-ups

This will help you make informed decisions on your Internet marketing.

In Summary: Ignite's 6-Step Website Development Process

Plan carefully – consider your users’ objectives and include what they will be looking for

Use your Persuasion Assets wisely

Encourage bookings regularly to maximise your Conversion Rate

Use simple navigation and deep-linking

Test your site

Measure your results and continually improve

Important note: we will discuss SEO techniques in the next guide, some of which needs to be considered during the website planning process.

Our goal is to help hoteliers succeed online and we believe the first steps in achieving this is by undertaking an analysis of their most powerful online marketing tool, the website. Smart hoteliers should dedicate increasing proportions of their marketing budgets to internet marketing - the only growth channel in 2011 and the cheapest.

If you would like to work with us to dramatically improve visitors to your website and subsequent online bookings call 020 7275 8682 or email us.