How we made an extra £14 million a year for a travel company

Sunshine.co.uk are a UK-based travel agency offering cheap holidays. Within six months of working with Conversion Rate Experts, their conversion rate almost doubled.

This was achieved despite the fact that the rest of the UK travel industry was in crisis: the country was in the grips of a recession, airlines were collapsing, and the number of holidays booked was falling at its highest rate since records began. In fact, during this period, the travel industry lost over £2.1 billion in profit. So, during this tough time, how did sunshine.co.uk double their revenue?

Conversion rate optimization, of course. (You had guessed that already, hadn’t you?) In this article, we’ll show you how we did it…

If you’d like to hear the thoughts from the sunshine.co.uk team about this project take a look at our interview with the team.

How we did it

Surveying your customers is the bedrock of a successful campaign

Everyone knows that they should survey their customers, but few companies do it regularly. And even fewer survey their customers well. With sunshine.co.uk, surveying was the foundation for the massive increases in conversion.

“Surveying our customers with SurveyMonkey was mind blowing. Normally, the main customer contact we have is when the customer has an issue with a booking. With the survey, we found that the silent majority loved us.” Chris Clarkson, Marketing Director of sunshine.co.uk

That’s not all. The survey also helped us understand the reasons why the customers loved sunshine.co.uk—which we could then emphasize on the website.

Here are our top three tips for surveying your customers:

1. Try making your surveys more qualitative—If you stick to multiple-choice questions, it’s easier to process the data for hundreds or thousands of customers. However, it won’t be anywhere near as valuable as if you asked questions with open-text field responses.

Don’t get us wrong, multiple-choice questions have their uses, but we find open-text fields to be much more useful for conversion rate improvement.

2. Give customers an incentive to fill out the survey—The more people complete your surveys, the more valuable they’ll be. sunshine.co.uk decided to offer everyone who filled out the survey the chance to win the cost of their last holiday—which could be as much as several thousand pounds. This investment paid off quickly when we started to implement and test the ideas generated by the survey’s feedback.

3. The covering email is just as important as the survey and incentive—It’s essential to get the email right, to ensure that as many people as possible fill out the survey. This is what we did to ensure sunshine.co.uk’s email would be read:

• In the subject line, emphasize the benefit to the customer. That’s why we used “Get your holiday free” instead of “Can you fill out our survey?”
• Sell the survey like you’d sell your products or services. So we emphasized that it was easy to fill out (“it only takes about 3 minutes”) and added the incentive (“win back the cost of your last holiday”).
• Emails should be personal. The more personal the email, the more likely people are to respond. That’s why we included the customer’s name in the email, as well as signing it from a person, rather than from a nameless marketing department. We emphasized this further by including a photo of sunshine.co.uk’s managing director Chris Brown (and Pluto!).

In addition to using Survey Monkey, we also recommend KISSinsights for surveys. KISSinsights provides an incredibly quick way of adding a short survey (usually just one or two questions) to a particular page. You can create and launch a survey in less than a minute (we timed it ourselves, and it took 55 seconds), which completely changes your approach to surveying.

Usability testing will make you rich

We started usability testing quickly and easily with remote testers from usertesting.com and whatusersdo.com. While some testers were able to book a holiday easily—including flights, hotels, transfers and parking—others struggled.

“Usability testing was easily the biggest ‘wow’ and ‘facepalm’ moment.” Chris Clarkson of sunshine.co.uk

Here are our top three tips for usability testing:

• Don’t just test your site—test your competitors’ too. By comparing sunshine.co.uk against the competition, we were quickly able to see what they were doing right—and what we could do better.
• Do it often. We carried out usability tests on every major redesign of the homepage, resort and hotel pages, and the booking process. This way, we could make sure that the site was as user-friendly as possible before and after testing.
• Do it now. This is the most important point—a lot of people think usability testing is a good idea, but put it off indefinitely. Don’t! You can get started in less than 10 minutes.

Know your analytics

Each type of research tool or technology gives you a slightly different view of your current business. Web analytics software such as Google Analytics or Omniture SiteCatalyst doesn’t give as much rich information about what’s going on in your visitors’ heads, but it does reveal loads of quantitative detail about the flow of users through your website. It’s particularly useful for helping you decide which pages to work on first.

sunshine.co.uk use Google Analytics for their web analytics. They have also used Crazy Egg, which provides simple visual heatmaps that show where your visitors are clicking on a given page.

Regular split-testing is essential

Split testing with Google Website Optimizer became a built-in part of sunshine.co.uk’s development process: nothing was changed on the website without being tested first. That way, we could see exactly which changes were increasing the conversion rate, and which had no impact—or even lowered the conversion rate.

It took just six split tests to almost double sunshine.co.uk’s annual revenue. But we actually did ten split tests in total. The advantage of CRO is that you can’t go backwards. If a test increases the conversion rate, you switch to the new version and increase revenue immediately. And if it doesn’t increase the conversion rate, you just stick with the original.

What we changed

Make it clear why you rock

When we started working on sunshine.co.uk, it wasn’t immediately clear why a visitor should use them rather than use one of their competitors.

To find out, we spoke with two of sunshine.co.uk’s founders, Chris Clarkson and Alan Gilmour. They had the inside knowledge of the travel industry, and could tell us how they were different from the competition.

We also studied the data from the customer survey. We wanted to find out what customers liked about sunshine.co.uk and how they’d describe the company to a friend.

We took all of this data and distilled it into four main benefits:

• Lowest-price guarantee—sunshine.co.uk have incredibly low prices for holidays, so we backed this up with this compelling guarantee: if you can find a holiday cheaper, we’ll refund the difference—and give you a fiver on top.
• Peace of mind—Prospects were understandably anxious about the turmoil in the travel industry. sunshine.co.uk recognised this objection and emphasised a guarantee that allayed the prospects’ concerns: if a supplier ceases trading, you can claim your money back from us.
• ABTA-bonded—sunshine.co.uk are bonded by ABTA, the UK travel trade association. This reassures visitors even more that their booking and holiday are secure.
• No hidden charges—When booking a holiday, most customers are used to having baggage fees, taxes and fuel surcharges added on. Not with sunshine.co.uk, who include all of these from the start. They even include supplier failure cover for free (which most competitors charge extra for).

These were sunshine.co.uk’s main benefits—not just based on vague opinion, but verified by customer research. By clearly communicating these benefits, we were able to increase the conversion rate.

Uncovering—and overcoming—common objections and misunderstandings

Improving conversion isn’t just about expressing benefits; it’s about overcoming all the major objections.

Here’s one objection we identified: sunshine.co.uk’s prices are so low, they’re often unbelievable. (At the time of this writing, you can get a trip to the Algarve including flights and accommodation for just £91 per person for a whole week!)

In our usability tests, we discovered that there was often confusion over the prices. Visitors weren’t sure if the figures were per person, per night, or whether flights and hotels were included. Ironically, the prices were so low that they were harming the conversion rate.

By clarifying the pricing, and what it included, we increased the conversion rate by 19%, adding an amazing £4 million to their annual revenue.

Turn negatives into positives

Visitors and usability testers often commented that there wasn’t a phone number displayed on the site. This is deliberate—sunshine.co.uk keep their costs down by only accepting bookings online.

But it can look odd if there isn’t a phone number. As one usability tester commented, “You make the website really friendly, but you also make it hard for people to call you.”

So instead of brushing over the fact that there was no phone number, we promoted the fact that they didn’t have one.

Now at the top right of every page—where you’d normally expect to see the phone number—it says, “Where’s our phone number?” Clicking the text opens a pop-up that contains the following text:

“We don’t have expensive call centres, so we can pass on these savings to you—making our holidays incredibly good value!”

The negative was turned into a positive—and this feature is now commented on regularly by visitors to sunshine.co.uk.

What all this meant

Here’s a short video interview, in which Chris Clarkson from sunshine.co.uk discusses his experience of working with us:

Annual revenue increased to £31 million

In 2009 sunshine.co.uk’s sales were £17 million; in 2010 they’re on target to hit £31 million—and we’re still carrying out tests. That’s a huge £14 million a year extra, as a direct result of their work on conversion rate optimization.

But it doesn’t stop there. Because the conversion rate almost doubled, it also meant that…

Travel affiliates could double their commission by working with sunshine.co.uk

sunshine.co.uk already had a successful affiliate program. And when their conversion rate increased, it wasn’t long before affiliates started to notice—making the program even more successful.

sunshine.co.uk’s biggest affiliate noticed that the pay-per-click (PPC) traffic he sent to sunshine.co.uk was converting twice as highly as the traffic he sent to competitors—so his earnings doubled.

We expect that sunshine.co.uk’s revenue will increase even further, as more affiliates discover their super-high conversion rate.

PPC offered huge potential for growth

PPC had previously been too expensive for sunshine.co.uk to consider. But with the higher conversion rate, huge volumes of traffic were suddenly available to them.

As a result of working with Conversion Rate Experts, sunshine.co.uk could afford to increase their bids on PPC profitably—knowing that their higher conversion rate would mean they’d still make a strong profit.

As a result, PPC is becoming one of sunshine.co.uk’s biggest growth areas. It’s likely to be a huge source of traffic, which will allow them to increase their market share rapidly.

What next?

It doesn’t stop here … sunshine.co.uk and Conversion Rate Experts are now focusing on the next phase of development: aggressively developing and testing the website, together with email marketing and advertising.

Thanks to sunshine.co.uk

We’d like to thank Chris, Alan and the rest of sunshine.co.uk for their hard work during this project—and for allowing us to share this case study with you. We’d also like to thank Michelle from Caboodle Design. Without all of their help, none of the successes above would have been possible.

Our gift to you: a free PDF of conversion tips

If you’d like a PDF of some advanced conversion tips, just sign up to our free newsletter. All of these tips are currently being used by sunshine.co.uk, but they’re applicable to almost any type of website. We’ll send you a copy of the PDF straight away. It’s a quick two-page guide of advice that’ll help you boost your conversion rate.

Our newsletter goes out fairly infrequently, it contains truly valuable information, and you can easily unsubscribe whenever you wish (though few people ever do). You can get it here.

(If you’re already signed up to receive our email newsletter, you don’t need to sign up again to receive the free PDF; we included a link to it when we emailed you about this article.)

Want more case studies like this?

If you would like to see more of our clients’ results, you can find a long list on our “clients and results” page.

We’ll be publishing detailed case studies on more of them soon. If you’d like to be notified as they become available, join our free newsletter.

Want us to work on your business?

If you would rather find out right away how we might help your company to increase its conversion rate and profits, just get in touch with us for a friendly chat with one of our consultants, during which we’ll identify the biggest opportunities for you to grow your business using conversion rate optimization.