Fort Lauderdale wanted to build on its innovative virtual site tours initiative, launched in 2020 as a response to the global pandemic. It created an opportunity to engage more visitors in the meetings section and push them further down the sales funnel. Now the DMO was looking to increase engagement and conversion rates to RFP submissions.
The CRO team at Simpleview looked first at the website’s present content in the meeting section and found that visitors could easily get distracted by compelling leisure content and exit the meeting section of the site without submitting their RFP.
“Over time, we’ve learned that the key to keeping a visitor focused on the subject and task you want them to complete is by removing distractions. Instead, you want to provide more opportunities for them to complete the goal the DMO wants them to complete,” said Michele Barnes, a Senior CRO Analyst. “For meetings, usually this goal is for them to submit their RFP.”
When evaluating the key pages of Fort Lauderdale’s meeting section, the team focused on whether the pages answered the following key questions that planners would most likely have:
- Will this destination have a venue or meeting facility that can accommodate my meeting needs?
- Are there any incentives or discounts I can get for booking this destination?
- What type of support will I receive if I end up booking my meeting in this destination?
“Keeping these questions in mind, we paired this with data from Google Analytics and determined the pages that would help answer these questions,” Barnes said. “We wanted to make sure we featured the content which answered these questions in prominent placements on the site. We used a mosaic widget to feature content for meeting incentives, venues, their virtual site tours, and the biggest call out to encourage the planner to submit their RFP.”
Next, the team determined where the majority of visitors left the meetings section. As expected, it turned out that many visitors were exiting through the leisure navigation that was featured on every page of the meetings section. A custom navigation widget enabled the team to curate the content to display in the navigation bar to stop this from happening. The primary leisure navigation was switched to be meeting-specific, and the last item in the list was styled to garner the most attention.
“We used this to again focus planners on the desired action of submitting their RFPs,” said Barnes. “Additionally, we removed other possible distractions from the section such as calls to action for the leisure newsletter in the footer.”
Next, following the old sales adage of “always be closing” – which applies to website sales, too – the team turned its focus to positioning planners for the closing call to action. Using the serial position effect, which indicates that users are more likely to click on items at the top of a list than those in the middle, in the interior navigation, the “Submit Your RFP” was positioned at the very top. Additionally, links were added to the RFP form in the meeting homepage hero, and the team found more opportunities to link throughout the content on the site.
Finally, the process for the final conversion was simplified.
