Macdonald Hotels achieves ROI of 4700 Percent

The Challenge

Following an analysis, Macdonald Hotels became aware of several opportunities for improvements relating to registration, hotel search and the booking process on their website. Keen to improve these critical procedures Macdonald Hotels implemented conversion rate optimisation process, combining usability, email and analytics.

Solution

A Usability Review of the website incorporating analytics research on the user experience was carried out. Clear evidence-based findings and recommendations based on this activity were put into an optimisation report. The information enabled Macdonald Hotels to fully understand the issues customers were experiencing on the site and implement the proposed changes quickly and efficiently.

Two of these improvements were:

• Embedding registration into the booking process
• Introducing a ‘please wait’ animation for the hotel search

In addition areas to use email to re-engage users who started a booking but failed to complete it were investigated. A specific abandoned booking process was devised to understand the behaviour of these users and a behavioural email campaign was designed to communicate back to them in a targeted and timely fashion encouraging re-engagement.

Results

From the usability improvements recommended and the email marketing campaign the following results were achieved:

• Abandoned process behavioural email program received a 40% click-through
  • 40% users receiving the initial email clicked through to the site
  • Of these, 65% actively searched for a hotel and 4% went on to make a booking
• Over £350,000 in increased revenue was received over the first year
  • There was a 12.15% increase in conversion of people searching on the website
  • If all these additional searches went on to book it would equate to an additional 6,089 opportunities to book each month, equalling a huge £1,273,757.91 sales opportunities per month
  • Based on the current average conversion (2.52%), an extra 153 bookings could be made per month, equalling around £32,006.07 worth of sales per month; an annual increase in revenue of £384,072
• Registrations doubled without affecting conversion
  • The exit rate from the booking page was not affected and the average pages seen on site and the time taken to book did not change. This indicates the changes have not had any negative affect on the overall user experience
  • The registration rate from booking almost doubled from 36.1% to 71.6%
• Overall ROI of the optimisation project was 4700%
  • For every £100 spent on conversion rate optimisation, Macdonald Hotels received £4,700 in additional revenue

Next steps

Impressed with the results, Macdonald Hotels has chosen to continue their optimisation project focusing on the following activities:

• Investigate how hotel information is integrated into searching for room availability
• Apply the recommended strategy for increasing registration uptake on the site