How to increase bookings by mapping the guest journey on your hotel website
How to increase bookings by mapping the guest journey on your hotel website
When a customer enters your website, they take a specific journey. Depending on how your website performs, that journey will be a good or bad experience for your guest.
That experience then influences a guest’s decision to book or not.
As more businesses strive to provide an exceptional customer experience, you need to understand how a visitor navigates your website.
This is the best way to give your guest what they truly want when browsing.
So what if you could visualise your guest’s exact steps when engaging with your hotel?
These insights can show you where your guests encounter friction and what you should do to drive them through the next phase in the booking process.
The method of mapping the guest journey requires accurate and extensive data. You need to capture the entire customer experience story to create a high-performing website.
Luckily, there are plenty of customer journey mapping tools available to help you master your own guest journeys.
These software tools are invaluable for seeing exactly how guests interact with your site through recordings, heatmaps, graphs, and other visuals.
We’ve suggested a few incredible customer journey tools below so you can find out what your customers really want from you, and how you can better serve their needs.
Mouseflow
The most impressive part of Mouseflow is their session replay facility. This lets you see an actual recording of what visitors do on your site. The software tracks clicks, mouse movements, scrolls, forms and more.
This means you can pinpoint guest behaviour and fix pain points without the guesswork.
Mouseflow’s heatmap facility allows you to spot trends on specific pages. The software summarises where people click, scroll, pay attention or move the mouse in a colour-coded, easily digested format.
With the funnels tool you can see the exact point where guests drop off. This lets you analyse key moments in the customer journey where certain pages cause guests to leave. You can also build reports to visualise how guests behave and watch recordings of the moment they leave.
Perhaps most valuable is the ability to monitor how guests interact with your forms. This means you can identify what is helping or damaging your conversions. The tool measures drop offs, refills, errors, blank submissions and more to help you reveal any issues.
And lastly, you can gather feedback from your guests with interactive surveys. This allows you to gain feedback as guests are on your site when they’re experiencing issues or in need of help.
Heap
Similar to Mouseflow, Heap tracks clicks, taps, form submissions, gestures, page views and more.
Heap lets you construct reports based on where guests click and what makes them do it. You can also see the moment visitors drop off, and even see which field on your booking form is causing leaks.
The software lets you know everything you need to about your guests. You can create highly-targeted funnels that filter your userbase according to the steps they made.
Inspectlet
Inspectlet is another recording and heatmap variation. The software lets you watch videos of guests using your site, as well as heatmaps showing where users have clicked, scrolled or moved the mouse. All of which allow you to visualise where obstacles surface.
With Inspectlet you can also filter your recordings to see specific actions. For example, viewing people who added a room to their account but didn’t proceed to checkout.
You can also see where drop offs occur and tag individual sessions or users so you can find recordings later on.
Zoomifier
There are 6 main features to the Zoomifier platform. Some of which include:
The Content Repository allows you to curate all your online and offline content, and see a detailed record of engagement with every customer.
The Customer Journey Designer shows you how to engage with your guest persona effectively by understanding their interests. This means you can engage them with the right content at the right time.
The Sales Enablement and Customer Engagement Portal delivers customer engagement content and analytics via web browsers and native mobile apps.
The Analytics feature presents visual dashboards in real-time to reveal how effectively your content engages and nurtures guests.
Autopilot
Autopilot lets you visualise the customer journey and create maps for converting browsers into paying guests with email, messaging, SMS and direct mail.
With their visual workflow mapping software you can build and automate a personal journey for every guest on your website. This lets you send personalised and targeted messaging at precisely the right time in their journey.
You can A/B split test individual emails to entire journeys, and track opens, clicks and conversions. You’ll get real-time results so you can optimise journeys and reach your ROI goals. You can also use the revenue funnel to see which referral sources drive sales.
The best thing about most journey mapping providers on the market today is they offer a free package. Of course the free options have their limitations, but you can get a good grasp of every feature before signing up for a paid package.
We’ve outlined a few options to get you started, but I’d suggest having a good browse online to find the right software for your hotel. Not every solution will be a good fit.
There’s nothing to lose and the data can be a game changer for your bottom line.
The Booking Factory Team
