The importance of mobile has been widely accepted by digital advertisers, which is demonstrated when we see adspends continuously increasing. There is a Phocuswright study showing brands allocating 44% of their digital spend through mobile channels.
With the continuous growth in mobile, are you investing time in creating the most streamlined booking experience to drive conversions on mobile?
If not, then DerbySoft can help. We have put together five tips to help jump start converting your mobile visitors into bookings.
1) Create Relevant Landing Pages
With your website traffic originating from several sources, you should consider creating separate landing pages for each source.
Each source, whether it’s organic search, social media, email marketing or metasearch, reaches different audience types, and testing these segments is important since the behavior for each is different.
Think about the motivations behind a user’s visit, and what the user is expecting to see on the landing page. They would have clicked on your metasearch ad which displayed your room rate. Is this displayed room rate the same on your landing page? Making sure you show the same room rate, along with additional information, will aid in the decision-making process. This additional information can be hotel descriptions, location and images, which all help the user feel confident in the booking process.
2) Click, Click Book
For channels like metasearch, it is important to get straight to the point. If a user has landed on a transactional page, they will be more interested in booking than they were at the beginning of the research stage.
Think about shortening the booking process. Too many clicks can act as obstacles for users in the booking conversion process, and by reducing the number of clicks to book, you give users few reasons to go elsewhere.
Click, Click Book.
3) Limit your booking form
When it comes to the number of fields on your booking form, less is more. A user is looking to book on a mobile because their time is precious. Save them the stress of having to complete several fields and only ask for what is necessary.
You can always follow up and ask for further information after the booking has been confirmed. This follow up also provides opportunities to upsell, but, more importantly, it feeds into your customer engagement cycle by making sure your communications with customers are relevant.
4) A Rule of Thumb
Space on mobile is premium– every pixel must be used efficiently– so make sure you use the space to show what you know will aid in conversions like great images (that are easy to scroll) and short text.
More importantly, think about how users actually interact with their devices. Research shows 49% of mobile users use one hand, where 39% cradle their phones with one and interact with the other hand.
As we know from handling mobile devices ourselves, the most used digit is our thumb.
This means you need to consider where you place your call to action and interactive buttons. Think about which buttons are easy to reach.
Can a user scroll to the buttons or are they stretching to interact?
5) Decrease Load Times and Include Optimized Images
So you’ve tested, tested and tested and optimized each interaction on your mobile landing page. Have you taken into consideration your page load speed?
With each second delay in page load, you can expect a decrease in conversion. 40% of your visitors will abandon your site if it takes over 3 seconds to load.
Google provide an insight tool to help you benchmark your site performance with other domains. It also allows you to estimate the revenue impact of having a slow loading site.
If you find your site is slow you can use Google’s developer tool for suggestions on how to make your web pages load faster on all devices.
The recommendations above are a great starting point for optimizing your mobile experience offerings. Even though there are never guarantees for conversion, employing best practices and continuously testing your conversion funnel will go a long way in seeing a return on your digital advertising program.
If you would like to find out more about how our experts in travel marketing can help manage your campaigns, get in touch with DerbySoft today.