5 Urgency tactics to increase hotel website conversions.
5 urgency tactics to increase hotel website conversions
Urgency tactics are widely used by ecommerce stores and OTAs to influence conversion rates, but that’s where most hotels fall down.
The power of urgency gives your customer a compelling reason to act now. We’re all guilty of putting things off until the last minute, but savvy marketers understand this behaviour, and use urgency to show why delaying is a bad thing.
One study by Marketing Experiments found, by creating urgency with a deadline, sales increased by an astonishing 992.68%.
Urgency removes your customers’ assurance that the same room will be available at the same rate when they feel ready to book. It purposefully plays on the fear of missing out if they wait.
OTAs such as Booking.com and Expedia already have the advantage. They all use urgency to generate bookings, which is one of the reasons why they’re so successful. But these tactics can be easily replicated by your hotel so you can take back a piece of the direct booking puzzle.
Here are the most popular ways to create urgency in the hospitality industry.
Popularity notices
When you highlight your hotel’s popularity to potential guests, you create a sense of validation and remind customers to act quickly to avoid disappointment.
Let your guests know how popular your rooms are. Add messages like ‘5 people are viewing this room/offer’, or ‘5 people have booked this room in the last 24 hours.’
This technique stirs anxiety, stating the rooms they’re interested in may be booked up soon. The customer doesn’t know when another interested person is likely to book. As a result they end up feeling they’d better act now so they don’t miss out.
This is a great technique for tapping into the psychology of your customer’s buying behaviours, to motivate a purchase before someone else takes advantage.
Availability countdown
Whenever a product or service is soon to be unavailable, this immediately becomes more desirable.
This is an urgency motivator through scarcity.
The scarcity heuristic denotes that if something is more difficult to acquire, the more value we place on it and the more we fear missing out to the competition.
This is particularly powerful for hotels, as when people search for a room they typically have a certain time period in mind. If availability is in short supply during their allotted time frame, guests feel more compelled to book immediately to stop others snapping it up.
Tell your guests how many rooms are available at a certain price on their chosen dates. A message to say ‘Don’t delay, only 3 rooms left on this date. Hurry!’ is a good motivator to create urgency and force their hand.
Offers with timers
Special offers are paramount if you want to compete against the OTAs and your competition. But sometimes simply promoting your offer isn’t enough to encourage an immediate booking.
If guests feel the offer will always be available, they’ll think they have time to delay and search other hotel deals. We want to give them the reason to stay and make a purchase now.
Limited-time offers give guests an end time, a cut-off point when they’ll no longer be able to benefit from the deal.
Even more enticing is adding a countdown timer to your deal so guests can physically see the time ticking away.
To ensure your time-sensitive offers are effective, avoid prolonging your offers over weeks or a month at a time. This doesn’t create the kind of urgency we’re looking for. Now limiting your offer to a couple of days, hours or even minutes is far more urgency focussed.
Another point to note — use your offers sparingly. If your offers only pop up now and then, it creates a sense of rarity and excitement when they are available. If you do them all the time, customers will know you’ll blast off another offer soon enough and may feel more inclined to wait.
Influence with powerful words
Words are a powerful motivator, and sometimes it’s a simple word or phrase that can create urgency and transform conversion rates.
Influencing people with words is something all the best marketers in the world know how to leverage. One in particular is marketing evangelist Neil Patel, who reveals the 9 best time-related words to increase urgency. These include:
- Now
- Fast
- Quick
- Hurry
- Rapidly
- Close
- Approaching
- Never
- Seconds
- Again
- Over
- Instant
Look at your call to actions and consider how you can rephrase your copy to incorporate these keywords.
Special discounts for new customers
Chances are over 90% of visitors entering your website are brand new customers. They may have found your website through a simple Google search or through a social networking site. Either way, the customer was attracted to you because they liked what they saw.
This is your chance to create a dazzling first impression and hit them with an enticing offer they can’t resist.
As soon as a customer clicks on a room, show them an exclusive first-time visitor offer. This could be a 10% discount or a restaurant/spa voucher. To retrieve this offer, all they need to do is give you their email.
This new customer doesn’t know you present this offer to over 90% of your visitors, but it makes them feel special and almost part of an elite new customer club.
This will also show you care about your new guests and save the best deals for them, giving a great incentive to book instantly.
Even if they don’t book now, you’ll always have their email to promote future offers and potentially convert them further down the line.
Urgency tactics are used to remove time for thinking and create space for doing. They should never be used in a manipulative way — always deliver on every urgency technique and avoid creating false promises.
Your customers are not stupid, they will know if you’re trying to use trickery to make a sale. Simply use urgency to highlight the benefits of booking quickly, and you’ll soon experience a positive impact on your website’s conversions.
The Booking Factory
