Booking Flows: The Secret Ingredient to Tripling Your Business
How to avoid inadvertently shooing away some of your best customers. Plus, a special tool you can use to capture 50% of lost business!
Imagine approaching a new store in your local mall- I know that’s tough to imagine seeing that even Dillards left that dilapidated beige behemoth years ago- but just try your best to imagine. Before you enter, before you catch a glimpse of any displays, you’re greeted by a store representative asking your name, your email, your phone number, and saying, “how about I hold on to your credit card while you look around.”
Sound suspicious? … What are they an airline lounge?
Just as you would be hesitant to offer up any information, so are your customers when you ask them to book your attraction without adequate information. This process is a give and take, carefully balancing the needs of your customers with your own business needs. A booking flow is not a place to get greedy, but one of your key conversion tools. When optimized for your business, we’ve seen conversion rates triple. That means three times more bookings.
Qualify Your Leads with Content
Hours, pricing & cart totals, schedule, rules, anything your customers need to know should not be gated. Use images, videos, and more to help customers know this is the place they want to be. Showing the cost and commitment for your attraction upfront qualifies your customers. Maintaining a qualified stream of customers in your booking flow is essential to optimizing for the greatest conversion rate.
Educating your customers before they enter the booking flow can save you from 55% of customers bouncing. (May 2022-23, Singenuity Report).
Give and take
I know you’re itching for it, you’re screaming inside, “This person is shopping my site and I haven’t asked for their social security number yet!”
Hold your horses my friend, let them shop and be ready to lend a helping hand. A great way to do this is again by providing pricing, availability, rules, or restrictions alongside the activities you’re offering.
This activity block is a good example showing a captivating title and image while offering the necessary information below.
Got an interested shopper? Great, let’s check the schedule to see when they can have their turn. Finally, after they select their activity and time you can take down their information.
I have to wait this long? But, but, but…
I know it seems far down the flow, but after conducting a year-long study, we found flows formatted this way are 300% more likely to convert than flows that begin by asking for information.
Let’s go back to the mall. You walk out of a dressing room jazzed about the hip new fit your going to wear to your high school reunion. An employee says, “That looks fantastic! Would you like toss in a matching handbag?” To which you say, “I didn’t know ghillie suits came with matching bags!” After snagging a this customized upsell (a neat revenue generating feature in Singenuity) you’re now directed to the checkout counter.
Now, let’s get down the necessary information to complete this purchase.
What information do I need, what information do I want, what information is nice to have?
In the world of data, we’ll take anything we can get and big-tech companies will just take anything they want. There are some essential elements we need to complete and verify the transaction and these are expected for your customers.
NAME, EMAIL, NUMBER – Is there something else you absolutely need? Be extremely careful when adding on required fields.
*Not all field types are created equal, and depending on your customers they may be happy to select from drop down lists, select boxes, or even enter short responses.
A general study conducted by Hubspot, showed customers preferred text fields, like NAME and EMAIL, finding them to be less tiresome than text areas or select boxes. While the graph below from CRO experts, Unbounce, show that there is a smile curve to the number of fields, these need to be done extremely carefully.
Customize to Your Audience's Needs
You’re in the attraction industry, so there may be additional questions you need or want to gather. Be it for safety, dining, or to make their experience extra special. Don’t interfere with processing a payment or converting a sale, but don’t be afraid to pose questions that help the customer. Assurances you can give throughout the process by means of an optional form field or additional information can lend to sealing the deal.
Use the customizable fields in Singenuity to shape out your own bits of additional information to support your customers. “Tell us about your allergies, medical conditions, or other special requests,” Gives the customers a place to share either life-saving or life-making information like, “I want to propose to my partner on this tour.”
Sometimes even the best booking flows fail, but that doesn't mean the deal is dead.
Using the Abandoned Booking Report in Singenuity, a successful client has been able to capture 50% of their lost business!
Once a customer begins to share some information, the Singenuity API automatically begins to place that in your pending orders. You can customize when an unfinished transaction is considered abandoned, but default is 5-minutes. Once an unfinished transaction meets that criteria its fed to the Abandoned Booking Report. There you can utilize the given information to retarget, send reminder emails, offer discounts, or use your own approach to get them to convert.
The math
The Singenuity method
Enter funnel (100%) >> Shop Activities (75%) >> Give Info (25%) >> Complete Transaction (12%)
For those that return through Abandoned Checkout campaigns, 65% complete the transaction.
Other methods on the market
Enter funnel (100%) >> Give info (20%) >> Shop Activities (15%) >> Complete Transaction (2.5 – 3%)