Building Flows that Convert

Booking flows are intended to walk a customer through the client’s offerings and easily find an excursion to book. A well-built, strategic booking flow can be extremely important for any website, especially one with a lot of offerings. Flows use sizing, placement, and flow pages to help the customer make their buying decision effortlessly and help increase book form conversion rates. It’s important to think critically about the booking flow you create because poorly put together flows may just result in more clicks and confusion for the end user.

Segmentation is the act of strategically categorizing and displaying activities in order to drive the customer to what we want them to book. (i.e. best sellers, most popular, special events or items a client wants to increase sales for, etc.).

Thinking Critically…

• What items should be included in the book flow?
  • Not all items need to be in every flow, flows can vary web page to web page
• Use flow pages to break the items into categories, or segments, and have it displayed properly in FareHarbor.

Segmentation ideas:

• Locations? (Denver Location or Needham Location)
• Activity Type? (Rental or Tour? Whale Watch or Fishing?)
• Skill Level? (Family Friendly or Advanced)

Try to know how well each item and/or segment is performing the best. Understanding this helps us decide how to size and place our categories in the flow. You typically want to make the most popular item and category the first and largest block in the flow. If possible, add in a headline on the most popular items cell block calling out that it is the most popular.

To know what items are performing the best, you can run a “bookings by item” report and rank all items by online sales. If you don’t have this data yet, speak with the client to help you order the most popular items.

Additional Tips

• Remember to include gift cards
• Make multiple flows if a business offers seasonal options
• Demo it on mobile (the majority of traffic is going to be on a phone)
• It’s a balance of fewest clicks possible, and obvious categories
• Any sub-flow names will be shown as breadcrumbs, so make sure they are customer-facing or add a breadcrumb name to the sub-flow if necessary.
• Always feature company best sellers or special events outside of their categories (as well as within their categories).
• Use Quality HD images.
• Consider a “Most Popular” category with the best sellers of each sub category
  • Great for large business that do everything (tubing, kayaking, hiking, etc)