Improving a Leaky Funnel and Conversion Rate for Family Travelers

It was the first the first place customers landed on our site. But we weren't impressed with how it told our story. Why would you spend this much on an experience with some company you didn't know when you could get a free walking tour from that place your friend told you about that would be just fine?

We had a problem. The majority of our ads led to pages on our site that we didn't believe told our brand story well. Bounce rates were higher than we wanted. As a small, growing company, we didn't have the resources to just add new features to product. We weren't able to target special audiences with the messages that resonated to them.

In short, we couldn't make the connection between their problem and how to solve it.

After much lobbying, we got a tool built that allowed us to create brand new pages on our site that could achieve what we wanted. For the rest we have Google Optimize -- back when it existed.

So as a marketing team we dove into our customers and chose to focus on families first. It's a unique challenge, traveling with kids and we knew that our company had the ability to not just solve it, but to create an unforgettable experience for our customers. I led the team through a persona activity  on the steps on Red Rocks on our team retreat in Colorado (arguably one of my favorite memories on this marketing team.) We identified their pain points of a variety of customer groups in a very fun role playing exercise. What did we know about our customer's behavior on site? What had we learned from customer interviews?

Custom Landing Page Design

From there, my colleague in charge of all things paid and I got to work. I designed new landing pages that spoke to the needs of parents looking for tours that engaged their kids, made them feel special, and weren't awful for them either. I then used our CRO tool to create a version of the product page that was pre-filtered with only our "Kids" product line, and with messaging that felt seamless with their ad and landing page experience.

By doing this we improved conversion rate on these pages by 86%. It worked!

So we went ahead and built over 30 landing pages and applied the same concept. What if each SEO keyword, each product group, persona had its own pages on site? Their own welcome flows? Their own commercial and content emails?

While the results were mixed, the company gained more engagement and higher conversion rates on a variety of these journeys. And we learned a lot about our customers in the process.

Full Customer Journey Map