5 more things to consider for improved booking conversion
Recently we were invited by Mysa to talk to their clients and audience about what can be done to help improve direct booking conversions online via their own websites rather than relying on Online Travel Agents (OTAs). We’ve summarised the talk below, as the advice isn’t only niched to the travel sector and can be applied across many different booking journeys.
Considerations, frustrations and goals hierarchy
If you know your customer, you will be aware of the considerations they have when purchasing, frustrations they face when booking and the goals that fuel their decisions. Each of these data points could have multiple parts to them and should be used when designing the experience.
Organise your content to reflect these needs and at timely points along the journey. If price and location is a key part to what they want to understand before exploring further, show this in the journey as soon as possible.
Transparent pricing
The topic of visible pricing has many different views depending on what sector or industry you work in. When it comes to booking and purchasing, pricing needs to be visible as it has such a large role to play in the decision making process for most users working within budget constraints.
Visible pricing lets those who can’t afford your product to qualify themselves out without taking up the time of your sales staff via email and phone when they could be engaging those who can afford your services. It also lets your customers who can afford you, to quickly do the maths and have the knowledge they need upfront without any effort when comparing options. Potentially comparing with others who don’t have visible pricing and making it harder for them to understand the costs and book.
Keep users on task
With concentration times being so small against a world of distractions we need to make sure we keep our users on task and not give them reasons to be sidelined by distractions of our own making. Don’t design or add in unnecessary distractions that don't support the task you would like your customers to complete or the content they are consuming. E.g. Animations that are purely aesthetic and add no value to your content.
Use clear links and call to actions to move your customer through the journey so they don’t have to hunt around a page which is trying to pull their attention in a variety of ways. Keep your designs true to the task at hand. That’s not to say don’t add in design flair, just make sure the flair added supports the role of the task, content and experience without becoming the experience itself.
Simplify your website navigation
A topic we have spoken about a number of times, simple navigation will always be key to improving conversion of those landing on your website. Keeping information easy to find, and products easy to locate, making life easy for those using your website.
We can easily overwhelm customers by adding in too many links into the navigation with similar language. This can cause confusion that later turns into frustration and abandonment of their time with you. By reducing the amount of links in the primary navigation while using language which differentiates the different paths they can take, creates clearer direction for the user to start the right journey to their desired outcome.
Nobody scrolls websites like instagram
A behaviour we see time and time again is scrolling of feeds on platforms like instagram, facebook and reddit. This behaviour does not however translate over to your website. This is because when people use your website they are looking for a specific piece of information in the least amount of time possible. They don’t have the same amount of investment in your website as they do with their personally curated social media feeds made up of content they have subscribed too.
To not fall victim to this lack of scrolling behaviour, make sure your main call-to-actions and key information is above the fold when the user lands on your website that moves them to the next phase of the journey. Keep pages as short as possible to deliver more information. This will force you to consider what information is most important and remove anything that isn’t needed. This is good practice when considering a user centred approach and keeping page load speeds down.
Bonus: Test before you make changes
Testing is something we always recommend in our design processes. The testing we mean is usability testing: testing a prototype with the target audience to see if any unexpected behaviours occur and tree testing: where we can test the structure and language of navigations before any costly development is undertaken.
If you need to get the changes live and launched, then maybe you have enough traffic to test the options you have designed in the design phase of the project. It’s a great test to do when changing simple things like micro copy for calls to action or marketing messaging on landing pages to see which converts better.
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