Revenue Increased By 70%

Summary

I met with the owner of the Museum Hotel in Wellington NZ, Chris Parkin, who was interested in how he could increase the revenue generated from his own website.

The Problem

Chris had several things that he wanted to change:

• He wanted more bookings through their own website.
• He hated paying third party booking engine fees for what could be done from his website.
• He wanted more brand awareness.
• He wanted more sales.
• He wanted to increase his website’s presence and make the most of the visitors that came to the site.

About the Museum Hotel

Museum Hotel Wellington is a 165 room 4 star boutique hotel located in the centre of Wellington city opposite Wellington’s beautiful harbour and New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa. The spacious lobby features opulent décor, walls adorned with original New Zealand art and a bar/café in which to relax.

The Solution Process

We sat in the reception area and discussed an implementation program that would help his business grow. I was confident that if we were able to improve the performance of his website, it would bring in more sales and profits for Chris. We started looking at his current website and I jotted down some ideas on what I thought we could do straight away.

Ten years managing major hotel booking sites in Europe gave me the ability to see where we can add more value to his website immediately.

I proposed the following:

• Making more use of the booking engine on the website.
• Addressing usability and testing page enhancements to improve sales.
• Adding sales elements on the website to improve the sales funnel.
• New content for the homepage and other vital areas that would enhance engagement.
• That we work directly with the hotels booking engine provider to improve features.
• That we work directly with the reservation staff and manager of the hotel to help achieve more bookings.

I also then wanted to address the following:

• The SEO content on the website.
• The redesign of the online advertising pay-per-click campaign.

The next steps we took were to obtain access to their website analytical data. From the data I was able to determine how much traffic was coming to the site, what levels of contact were made, what and how many bookings were generated, where people went when they visited the site, how long they were on there for, and where they left. All of this information helped to paint a picture of the performance of the site.

I then reviewed the site for usability issues, friction and confusion points, and looked for gaps in the website were we could enhance value. I studied the site for flow of information to review the thought process that was currently on their website.

I proposed a new layout for the home page to ensure that high engagement levels were included in a great layout. We then tried and tested home page versions to get more visitors into engaging with the hotel website and then into the booking engine. There were a few obvious things to make the website more interactive and more focused on driving the visitor into making contact with the hotel. Our major challenge was to get people moving into the booking engine as quickly as possible from the website itself, as once there the likelihood that a booking would be made was very high.

Next, we focussed on getting the site found for more search queries in Google, improving the website so that they could get more bookings and inquiries, and to promote its services.

The next step was to address the pages that were visited the most, we did this by analysing what information was on the site and then provided advice and feedback to the hotel on what we thought these pages were lacking in. We also added new tracking systems so that we could monitor visitors and conversions levels, allowing us to track what part of the pages people were more interested in, what keyword phrases were bringing in sales and customers, and other valuable information.

We then added clearer navigation to aid the user experience, new contact forms, maps and directions to aid people in finding out more information about the location.

We rolled out these changes over the course of a few months, and as time went by we analysed and tweaked all of these areas to enhance the overall package provided by the website and marketing mix.

We now had the following in order:

• New website usability.
• A new search engine optimisation program.
• A new pay per click advertising program.

As a result we were able to increase the conversions created on the website by 100% over a small period of time (We were able to convert 5% of all visitors that came to the website from an initial 2%).

Results

By having a focus on both the conversions and the traffic, and having an alignment between search and usability, business from their online bookings increased, on average, by 20% month on month.

• In 2009 their revenue increased by 56% from 2008.
• In 2010 their revenue increased by another 11% from 2009.

Rooms booked in 2010 increased by another 8.5% compared with 2009.

This is a huge increase of 64% in rooms booked over two years!