If you have traffic, but it’s not converting, then there’s either a disconnect between your audience and your offer, or your site simply isn’t optimized to convert.
Don’t worry – it’s easy to make conversion mistakes with your website. Fortunately, they aren’t necessarily hard to correct.
Your goal should be to get your website to convert visitors into paying customers, sooner rather than later. This needs to be a seamless, streamlined process.
Here’s how to achieve that.
What do you offer that others in your industry don’t? Why do customers want to book with you? What do your customers always compliment you on when they leave after their stay?
Every hotel needs a unique and compelling selling proposition to get people on their website to convert. The question is, how to communicate it?
If the cleanliness and impeccably decorated rooms are your selling point, then hire a professional photographer to take amazing photos for your rooms. If the view from your hotel rooms is breathtaking, put together a video of the sights and the surrounding area. And if your warm and friendly staff are getting rave reviews from customers, then share those reviews and testimonials on your website and social media for social proof.
These are just a few examples and ideas on how you can communicate your unique value. No one knows your selling proposition better than you do. No one can discern what content or media to use to best portray your strengths and benefits better than you can.
Per O’Rourke Hospitality, this is one of the top 20 things top-converting websites do to boost their hotel bookings. So, take a moment and think about what it is you offer, and how to better communicate it to your prospects and customers.
It’s not a hard thing to do, but it is easy to overlook. If you don’t have links and call to actions pointing to offers on your website, and if they aren’t consistent across the board, you’re leaving money on the table, and leaving visitors frustrated besides.
You can take advantage of static elements like the navigation bar, header, footer, or even sidebar of your website to ensure the delivery and consistency of the message. In this way, you can avoid sending mixed messages, and you can also do a better job of pointing your prospective guests to your reservations page, or other important parts of your site.
To summarize, tell your visitors what they’re going to get, and how they’re going to get it. Reinforce the same message, preferably on every single page on your site.
Your web forms need to be easy to use and uniform across your entire site. You shouldn’t be asking your visitors for more information than you need (keep it short), and you need to be engaging. Don’t forget to check that your forms are indeed functional. You’d be surprised by how many sites (even those that represent professional businesses) have forms that are broken and unreliable.
For seamless conversion, your website needs to be fast, so you’ll need to optimize load times. You’ll need to employ responsive design so that it’s mobile-friendly (keep in mind that mobile users don’t want to fill out a ton of information). And you’ll need to respond to bookings and inquiries as fast as possible. You can automate the sending of emails once a booking is initiated, which is par for the course.
This is just a starting point. There are many other ways to make conversions seamless. The main thing to do is make sure all your technology is synced, optimized, and working together in a cohesive way. Address any bottlenecks in the process, and replace tools that aren’t working right. Everything needs to be functioning optimally for you to get the best results possible.
As a hotel website agency, we expect you to trust us and leave yourself to us to present your hotels in the best way in the digital world and make the user experience positive.