First Impressions Matter

Is your website converting new prospective guests to a reservation?

It’s 2020, new potential future guests will discover your park and they will visit your website. What they experience on their first visit will have a monumental impact on what happens next. In simple terms, one of three things is ultimately going to happen:

1. They will leave without taking an action or giving you consideration
2. They will save your information (physically or mentally) to complete their planning or transaction at a later point in time
3. They will initiate contact or make a reservation by calling, completing a contact form or linking to your online reservation platform

Unsurprisingly, the largest number of visitors to your website will fall into category number 1 – leaving without taking an action or even giving you consideration. This is the area of opportunity that can make the biggest difference in getting more hard-earned visitors to convert to guests.

Let’s understand why a qualified visitor to your website would leave, and often within seconds:

• Mobile Friendly: Over 60% of your park’s website visitors will be doing so on a mobile phone and 15% on a tablet, together representing 75% of traffic. Your site needs to perform equally well regardless of platform (also known as being responsive). It’s bad news if it’s not, with 80% of visitors leaving if they have to pinch and zoom to view your content.
• Visual Design: 75% of your visitors will make a credibility judgment about your park based on the aesthetic design of your website. It will take them mere seconds to make this judgment and 38% will leave immediately if your site is not visually appealing and is unprofessional.
• Load Speed: If your site is slow to load, 39% of visitors will click the back button in less than 3-5 seconds, never even giving you a look.
• Simple & Organized: If you’ve made it past the non-starters above and actually get to the point of consideration by your visitor, the last hurdle is the ease in digesting and getting around your website, also referred to as User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). The most frequented information should be prioritized and easy to find, which is typically rates, amenities and of course, reservations. An example of poor organization: an astonishing 70% of small business websites lack a Call to Action (CTA) or easy way to contact you on their homepage.

If any – or worse all – of the scenarios above apply to your current website, you are losing a massive percentage of your current visitors before even getting a chance to earn their stay at your park. The good news is these are all entirely controllable factors and in 2020 are easy to address. And you’ll be rewarded greatly if you do.

Xpress by Big Rig Media includes everything you need to have a modern, reservation-driving website with custom Good Sam advertising landing pages that include the ability to earn additional revenue by selling Good Sam memberships. Big Rig Media is offering this package exclusively to Good Sam Parks for $140 per month – a savings of $59 a month for Good Sam Parks.

With Xpress by Big Rig Media, you get everything you need:

A modern website will convert more visitors which = more guests and more revenue.

If you address the issues causing website visitors to leave, you will convert more of them into new guests. It’s truly a matter of basic math. If you convert 10% of website visitors into guests, for every 100 website visitors that now stay and engage with your site (as opposed to immediately clicking back), that’s 10 new guests. Multiply this by your average new guest reservation revenue and that’s how quickly revenue can ramp up by simply bringingyour website into 2020 standards. This isn’t hypothetical math. It’s real and so are the dollars. Here are two examples:

• An RV property in Georgia went from an “old” site (with the challenges from above) to a new site and instantaneously retained 30% of their website’s traffic that was previously ‘bouncing.’
• Over a multi-month pilot program wherein a dedicated Good Sam landing page was set up, an RV property in Southern California recorded 3,043 visitors that converted at 9.6%, which resulted in 293 new reservations.