Improving your booking conversion rate: how to build a great online funnel 

Building a booking funnel which drives conversions and makes your users’ booking experience as easy as possible can sometimes feel like a complex task. There are a few handy tricks of the trade, however, which are great to consider including no matter what phase of funnel optimisation you’re at. 

Top conversion-driving features to include in your booking funnel:

Reduce distractions: One of the benefits of a booking application is that it opens in something called an “enclosed checkout” with none of the marketing website’s menus or other features on it. This reduces noise for the duration of the funnel and distractions for the user completing the journey, helping to get conversions over the line. 

The power of choice: Where you have a complex service or booking process, make all the options available to your customer as easy to understand as possible, whilst reducing information overload. To do this, introduce each option step-by-step so that customers don’t get too overwhelmed and drop off. Be careful to order the steps in a way which makes sense to your users chronologically. 

Breadcrumb steps: Following on from the last point, you want to make it easy and intuitive for customers to build up their order. Show the “breadcrumbed” steps in the header ribbon; this gives users visual validation when going through the form, with visual signals of the past and future steps needed to complete the order. This allows navigation of the booking process and stops frustration associated with not knowing how much longer the form will take. 

Inline validation: This is an incredible tool to offer a responsive experience for customers – error messages are shown as data is inputted, rather than waiting until the users submits the form, helping to reduce friction/frustration in the booking funnel. 

Mobile friendly: It’s surprising how many businesses mobile-optimise their website but neglect their booking funnel. Offering the funnel in a mobile-friendly format is incredibly important for winning over the huge proportion of customers who purchase through their mobile devices. Make things clear and make sure no important information or options drop off the edge of the screen.

Form saving function: This allows the form to be returned to at a later date, with all of the user inputted data saved ready for continuation. This can be hugely useful if a customer happens to not complete their purchase fully the first time. The next time they come to your site it will be much easier for them to make that purchase decision. 

Upfront pricing: Customers will lose interest if they can’t find out how much a product will cost quickly. Product pages are the ideal place to put prices but if you can’t do this, for example because your product offering is complex and the quote needs to be customised, then we’d recommend asking a few questions to assess the criteria for your quote and then providing the quote as soon as you can following this. 

Agile pricing: Some businesses will need to adjust their pricing semi-regularly to remain competitive. If this sounds like you, we’d recommend building price benchmarking and editing capabilities into your platform if you can, as this can improve product uptake rates.

User Testing: This isn’t a feature, but it’s something you should be doing constantly when building your booking funnel. Treat your booking funnel’s development like a science experiment; learn from your user feedback and testing, then change just one thing at a time to accurately attribute any changes to each new feature. 

Before we give away all our trade secrets, we’ll call it a day! We hope you’ve found this article useful. If you have any questions or a project you’d like to discuss please don’t hesitate to get in touch.