If you’ve already read our guide to improving low website conversion rates you’ll know how important it is to make sure you’ve created a clear user journey on your website. Reviewing your website regularly allows you to remove out of date or unnecessary content that might prevent a customer taking the action you want them to take.

That said, personalization increases conversion rates by around 16% so it’s also vital that your website provides the tailored digital experiences that customers expect. Targeted Messages help you keep your fundamental user journeys clear and seamless, but still provide dynamic and relevant content for every website visitor.

In this guide we’ll cover:

You already know the value of using Triptease Targeted Messages to highlight your marketing campaigns to everyone who comes to your website. That kind of consistent experience - where your website content reflects and reinforces the other marketing campaigns you’re promoting out in the world - helps to build trust in your brand. It also helps customers find the deal they’re looking for when they arrive on your website.

But Triptease Messaging can be used in other ways too. Lots of hotels use Triptease to experiment with delivering different kinds of content to different kinds of guests. This allows you to easily and quickly test out ways to increase conversions from a particular customer segment.

First, you’ll need to work out which segment of customers you want to run a test on. There are three key charts in the Triptease Insights Dashboard that should provide you with some useful insights to get started.

Let’s start with Performance by visitor country. In the table below we can learn a lot about which countries are currently visiting this hotel’s website. By reviewing the number of visitors from a particular location, along with their conversion rate and average booking value, you can start to draw some clear actionable insights.

For example:

From just a quick glance at this table, it’s clear that this hotelier should be creating targeted content to help increase the conversion rate and average spend of those visitors from the United States. And if Swiss visitors are converting well and have money to spend, it also might be worth seeing if a personalized upsell might convince them to spend just that little bit more.

Now let's look at Most searched check-in dates. This heatmap gives hoteliers visibility of how interest in their property fluctuates over time, with darker colors indicating a greater volume of searches. This can help you spot unexpected spikes in interest (is there an event happening in your area that you didn’t know about?) or periods when interest is really low (could you run a targeted promotion to encourage guests to stay during this ‘down time’?)

Let’s run through an example. If we look at the heat map for this hotel group, we can see that they have some big spikes in check-in date searches over December (pretty understandable, given that it’s the holiday season) and they also have small spikes, usually on Saturdays, which we can assume are leisure guests checking in for the weekend.

Due to the spike in interest around the Christmas period, this would definitely be a good opportunity to launch a Christmas campaign and turn some of those searchers into bookers!

But it’s when you start digging further into the data that you’ll uncover some potentially unexpected insights worth investigating. If we switch the heatmap above to view the whole of next year, we can observe periods of high interest and periods of comparatively low interest.

They have months with low levels of interest, such as April and May. Looking at this, the hotel group’s Marketing and Revenue teams might want to get together and consider what kind of offers and messaging they can get in place to drive interest for those quieter periods of 2022, for example, an Easter campaign in April.

Conversion rate based on lead time of searches

Now let's look at Conversion rate based on lead time of searches. This graph can help you increase conversion rates by targeting last-minute or advance searchers.

On the graph above we can see that in the last 28 days, this hotel has had over 2,200 ‘last minute’ searches (with a lead time of seven days or less), but that those searches only had a conversion rate of 0.44%. While it’s unlikely that all of these searchers are seriously considering booking a stay (they may just be trying to get a sense of your prices by clicking on immediately visible calendar dates). That said, with this many searches being run, it would be a waste not to target this segment of customers to see what kind of incentive might help them to convert.

Ideally you should be using a range of sources to build a clear picture of where your customer demand is currently strongest and weakest. Other useful data sources include:

Google Analytics

There’s a wealth of analysis available to you in Google Analytics, but it can sometimes be a little overwhelming and tricky to know exactly what action you should take based on what you see there. For a crash course in getting the most out of Google Analytics as a hotelier, watch our Direct Booking Masterclass session with search and analytics expert Barbara Pezzi.

PMS/CRS data

A full analysis of who has historically booked your hotel and how those customer segments are changing is a great thing to do regularly. This allows you to see which customers drive the highest revenue for your business.

Customer interviews

Speaking to your customers directly is key to understanding what each segment actually wants and expects from your hotel. Are business travellers often looking to extend their trip into the weekend? Are you offering packages that appeal to younger, millennial groups? You could speak to customers directly in your hotel if they’re happy to do so - or leave survey forms in rooms or send them via email post-checkout to gain valuable insights about your customers.

Travel demand tracking

In previous years you’ll likely have had a clear idea of who your customers were, when they’d be most likely to book and what you needed to do to secure their booking, based on their patterns of past behavior. Historical data still has its place, but right now - particularly with fewer people actually travelling and booking hotels - there’s nothing more important than pre-booking data and demand signals.

Pre-booking data is everything that happens before your customer makes their hotel booking. From flight bookings to length of stay search data, these are now your go-to reference points when understanding who to target. For example:

The answers to these questions can tell you which customers you need to target right now. Check in dates and flight information can change fast depending on local and national lockdowns, so this is data you need to review regularly.

In this final section of the guide we’ll walk you through exactly how to set up a message to target the customers that will have maximum value for your hotel, based on your previous customer analysis.

When you arrive on the Triptease Message Builder, the first thing you’ll need to do is decide which type of message you’d like to set up. Simply click on the message type you need.

If you select a Nudge Message - as we’ve done in this example - you’ll have the option to choose from a range of pre-built templates, or to start designing a message from scratch. Let’s start from scratch.

The Message Builder consists of three sections: Behaviour, Audience and Design. We’ll walk through each of those now:

In this section you’ll define which pages of your website - or which hotel websites - the message will display on, how quickly it will appear and how long it will stay live for. You’ll also give the message an internally visible name so it is easy for you and your colleagues to find if you have multiple messages set up in the Message Builder.

This is where all your customer research will be used! We’re now going to define which customer segments your message will appear for.

If you haven't had time to run customer analysis and just want to get something up on your website as quickly as possible, there’s an option at the top of the page to apply Smart targeting to your message. Selecting Smart targeting means that Triptease will automatically determine how likely a visitor is to book. All you need to think about is what message you'd like them to see.

For example, if a visitor already looks likely to book it could be more profitable to entice them with an upgrade rather than a discount on what they would have purchased anyway. Whereas for visitors with a low likelihood to book, a discount message might be exactly what it takes to persuade them.

If you do know which customers you’d like to target, you will make your selection from the Custom targeting options below. These are split into Visitor profile targeting and Booking engine search targeting:

Visitor profile

Booking engine search

So, if you know from your research that you have lots of Spanish first-time website visitors arriving from your Instagram profile (on their mobile phones), and searching for stays on New Year’s Eve, you can pinpoint precisely those guests using the Audience tab and show them exactly the offer that will help them to convert. Here’s how you’d set that targeting up:

One important thing to remember, though, is that the more targeting specifications you use on a message, the fewer people it will display for. That’s fine if you’re keen to offer a really great deal to a very specific audience and not to all of your website visitors. But it’s important to remember that the most impactful messages are often the ones that have less targeting and can display to a broader group of guests.

Finally, in the design tab you can get creative! This is where you write your content, share your offer, add images, branding, and a call to action button to send customers through to your booking engine (or wherever else you want them to go).

There are a few features here that will help you make the most of Triptease Targeted Messages: