Home to the first manmade whitewater rafting course in North America, the Midwestern city of South Bend, Indiana, lets you raft through the heart of downtown and then pop into a coffee shop for a cup of joe. Even though the rapids are artificial, the rest of "The Bend" is an authentic mix of a destination that is rooted in its industrial past while stepping into the high-tech future. From catching a Fighting Irish football game at Notre Dame to visiting the Studebaker National Museum, the team at Visit South Bend Mishawaka encourages visitors to linger with its clever theme of “Mondays Can Wait.”
To further maximize the brand essence of The Bend, when its website was due for a redesign, the destination marketing organization (DMO) turned to Simpleview. Already users of Simpleview CRM and Act-On, the DMO hoped to take advantage of the seamless connection between Simpleview CRM and CMS and add additional integrations such as the Book › Direct lodging referral engine and CrowdRiff.
“The results have spoken for themselves,” said Nicole Lawler, director of tourism marketing & travel media for the DMO. “We set a page views record, our bounce rate is way down, and time on site is up. All our engagement metrics are better, so I don’t know of a better way to say it’s been successful other than when people get to our website, they stay longer and look at more stuff. It’s been really rewarding.”
Switching to Simpleview CMS has been an unqualified success, as evidenced by being quickly awarded Best Tourism Website by the Indiana Tourism Association. The new site helped contribute to the largest number of website visits in the DMO’s history, exceeding 1,000,000 million visitors for the first time in 2021. That’s an increase of 20% from both 2019 and 2020.
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