How five minutes work resulted in $100,000 in sales

By making your brand’s website easy to understand and putting customers first, your targets and goals will be reached. In 2009, Hurtigruten did not have the €15.8 million valued searchbox on the home page so as a solution, we created the „book“ page, which listed our most popular trips. The webpage made it easy for web visitors to access the booking soltuion and book their desired voyage.

Reassure your web visitors and emphasize the benefits

For the last 12 months, the webpage has sent 30 visits (initiated orders) per day into the booking solution. With an average conversion rate of less than 1%, this results in close to 48 bookings per year. However, recently we decided to highlight the benefits of booking online compared with that of calling our reservation center or booking with a travel agency. The results were staggering, and initiated orders increased by 193%. In terms of sales, this is an additonal 600,000 NOK per year, that’s 120,000 NOK per minute of work!

Perry Marshall, online marketing expert referenced earning $10,000 per hour in a post titled „How to lose $36 million per hour“. Using Perry’s calculation, that hour of work is valued at $1.2 million. The change itself took less than 5 minutes; we scoped out the reasons why booking online is beneficial and then implemented. It’s exciting to see the results and when attaching numbers and sales to website improvements, senior management become a lot more involved and supportive.

Benefits of booking online

• No booking fees
• Online booking guarantee
• 100% secure order process
•  Easy to use booking system
• 24/7 Customer support and live chat

There are a lot more benefits and we will continue to add to the list and reassure users that booking online with Hurtigruten is trustworthy, safe and secure.

Testing your website and sharing your success

20% of the traffic that visit Hurtigruten websites initiate an order. If the benefits of booking online are moved to the home page and on all Hurtigruten websites, sales could explode. This is potentially millions of dollars per year!

Many of the success stories Hurtigruten have reported in this blog have come from testing. I highly recommend running at least one test on your site per week either by tweaking copy or placements and reviewing the impact or using tools like Optimizely and Google Website Optimizer. It takes only a few minutes to launch a test and the results can not only increase sales but increase the relationship with your visitors.

Do you have any success stories that had a significant impact on the bottom line for work completed in minutes?