NEED
Affiliate travel marketing site, NJNN, was looking to increase bookings in order to increase revenue.
SOLUTION + OBJECTIVE
The site relies on organic traffic to capture users, and inform travelers about where to stay or park near NYC. A chatbot strategy was deployed to further increase conversions.
BENEFITS
Website visitors who engaged with the chatbot left the website and took action to book a hotel or parking 48.25% of the time. This increased per page revenue by 65%.
“Instabot was easy-to-build and had full analytics, so I was able to quickly measure its effectiveness.”
15,000
Users
48.25%
Conversion Rate
65%
Increase in Revenue
INSTABOT GREATLY INCREASES CONVERSION RATES LEADING TO HIGHER REVENUE FOR NJNN TRAVEL MARKETING.
New Jersey Hotels Near NYC is both an informational website and an affiliate marketing entity that earns revenue by prompting either a hotel booking or a parking confirmation.
The site’s strategy is based on high-quality, accurate and effective content about transit, parking, and hotel options around NYC that will appeal to budget minded travelers. Site visitation is split evenly by people on both web and mobile devices as they look to plan their trips.
The national average conversion rate for travel and hospitality ranges anywhere from .7% to 2.4%
In an effort to increase conversions, the company built a chatbot called “Katie”. Katie engaged users in a brief conversation, and by answering 3 questions with Katie, travelers received personalized recommendations regarding where to stay and where to park.
"Katie" was tested with a goal of 15% increase in conversion rate & revenue, and far outperformed expectations.
After testing several deployment methods, this approach was determined to produce the best engagement rates with users arriving on the website.
The goal of the bot was to easily walk the user through site content and get them to complete the action of booking a hotel or parking before their trip. In order to have enough data by which to gather any insight, the company set a sample set of 15,000 website visitors and a goal of 15% increase in conversion rate and revenue. The chatbot far outperformed expectations.
The engagement rate of the chatbot was 4.20%. Users who engaged with the chatbot had a conversion rate of 48.25%, well over the average conversion rate of the travel and retail industry. The increase in conversion rate led per page increase in revenue of 65%.
As a result of the experiment, NJNN is working on expanding their line of affiliate marketing sites in combination with bots to increase revenue for the company overall.
Jeff Howard is an expert in SEO and conversion optimization, having built destination websites from the ground up. With years of experience as a destination affiliate marketing company, his websites (D.C., NYC) have generated more than $20,000,000 (and counting) in hotel bookings. They have become one the highest converting sources of traffic for TripAdvisor, HoteslCombined, and Marriott. You can see more about his work here.