Category Archives: Case Studies
How To Increase Your Web Leads By Going Against Best Practices..!
In this article I wanted to share some interesting experiments we ran for a client of ours last year which, in return, brought about an amazing return on investment.
My client, who already had a website in place, was unhappy with the number of leads that were coming from his website. He had good positioning in place already and people were being referred by other social networking sites, but the number of sales were just really disappointing! Armed with this knowledge, my objective was to look at barriers that may be getting in the way of leads being generated from his site.
“The First Test Resulted In….112% More Leads!”
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Usability & search drive 70% more revenue to hotel
How Redcow Marketing helped Museum Hotel improve their conversion rate by 100% and achieve a 70% increase in online sales.
The Museum Hotel’s Challenges:
The owner of Wellington NZ’s Museum Hotel – Chris Parkin – wanted…
- More bookings through his hotel’s website, more brand awareness, and more sales.
- To increase his website’s presence and make the most of its visitors.
- To reduce the fees he pays to third party travel sites for bookings, and to encourage guests to book from his website, instead.
Dave suggested they…
- Make better use of the hotel’s booking engine.
- Address usability and testing page enhancements to improve sales.
- Add sales elements on the website to improve the sales funnel, and add new content to the homepage and other vital areas that would enhance engagement.
- Work directly with the hotel’s booking engine provider to improve features.
- Work directly with the reservation staff and manager of the hotel to increase bookings.
- Address the site’s SEO content.
- Redesign the online advertising pay-per-click campaign.
First, they accessed the website’s analytical data 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, how long they were there, and where they left. All of this information helped to paint a picture of the site’s performance.
Dave reviewed the site for usability issues, friction, and confusion points, then looked for gaps in the website where they could enhance value, and studied the site’s flow of information.
Their major challenge was to make the website more interactive and focused – to get people moving into the booking engine as quickly as possible from the website itself; once there, the likelihood that a booking would be made was very high.
Dave proposed a new layout for the home page, then tried and tested different versions to find which one most effectively raised guests’ engagement levels with the site and booking engine.
The next step was to address the pages that were visited the most – providing feedback to the hotel on what those pages were lacking. They also added new tracking systems to monitor visitors and conversions levels, allowing them to track which parts of the pages people were more interested in, what keyword phrases were bringing in sales and customers, and other valuable information.
Finally, they added clearer navigation to aid the user experience, including new contact forms, maps and directions.
They rolled out these changes over the course of a few months, analyzing and tweaking along the way to enhance the overall package.
Results:
In 2009 their revenue increased by 56% from 2008
In 2010 their revenue increased by 11% from 2009
This is a massive revenue increase of 73% over two years
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Online marketing for car rental companies
Discover a marketing plan that grew a rental car business by 1800%.
The Internet is full of companies advertising themselves in search engines as the company to use when looking to rent a vehicle. Yes, it’s a crowded space, and many have gone down the slippery slope of competing for business by cutting their rental costs per day (especially within the car area) where the larger companies have thousands tied up in stock and must look to discounting just to empty the yard! It’s a competitive area and one that must be managed carefully if you want to make a splash. But there is hope, we have managed to find thousands of leads for our clients using our creative marketing models.
Here’s how…
I have been working with rental companies for around five years now and over this time we have tried many ways to find opportunities to grow businesses. We started off like most do, with a search engine strategy to ensure we had all of the ingredients in place for search engines so that they could be found by Google, Yahoo and MSN (now known as Bing).
The method in the early days was to optimise their website and display all products and offers, ensuring they had all their offers and specials at the time nicely placed on the home page. This method worked for a while but we ran out of home page space with these traditions and the sites just become a clutter both to manage and to surf around.
I can only imagine what site visitors thought at the time – we were just overloading them with offers for specials and deals for vans, cargo trucks, cars, people movers, minibuses etc, and it was not working to the levels we were happy with. We then thought we just needed more visitors to the site, so we started an advertising program using Google’s platform. We soon found out that having more people visit wasn’t the solution, the problem in fact was due to the confusion and clutter we had on the home page – people just could not see the woods for the trees!
The question now was, how can we increase our leads and sales without having a home page include all the information needed for each customer type? What we did then was create a new creative marketing model to direct these customers to sites that closely matched their requirements. We did this by using the models below all bundled up into a web strategy:
- Landing pages
- Sales pages
- Advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing
- Search engine optimisation
- Website Optimiser
- Live support/chat
- Facebook profile & brand advertising
- Automated customer signup process.
Line chart showing growth for one of our clients.
The results not only spoke for themselves, they were almost too good to be true. This marketing method worked and we were able to track the progress of this business and over the course of four years build up the sales from the Internet.
If you would like to know how you can grow your rental company to the levels seen above please contact me using the details below.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
