Challenge
The global recession has had a significant impact on the travel industry and Costa Rican domestic airlines Nature Air has felt the effects. To make matters worse, Nature Air's web site was challenging to use and didn’t give an optimum experience to visitors often frustrating visitors and driving people who would otherwise have made a reservation online to either use the phone to make a reservation or not make a reservation at all. Ultimately the goal of the Nature Air website is to get people to book flights on Nature Air.
Therefore converting visitors into reservations is the top priority. The plan was for us to first build consistency throughout the site so that visitors would feel properly anchored, knowing exactly where they are and how to go to the next step. Nature Air has a network of several external sites and over half of the links in the main navigation sent users to to one of those external sites. This was potentially confusing to many users so we needed to make a clear distinction between internal navigation and external sites so the user was not lead off the main Nature Air site before making a purchase
Result
Blast Advanced Media used website optimization tactics and improved search engine optimization to reverse decreasing web sales. In fact, the website is Nature Air's only marketing channel doing well and since the optimization of their website Nature Air's
online revenues are
up more than 70% over their
best year ever despite the
travel recession.
In the redesign of the site we made tactical changes and design improvements to the current site to vastly improve the overall user experience and provide clearer paths for users to book flights.
We upgraded the site code to improve performance for better
Search Engine Optimization and for integration into the Motivity™
Website Optimization Platform. Simplified the design so users could focus on the information with a color palette that reflected the colorful planes in Nature Air's fleet and the tropical nature of Costa Rica. The site navigation (i.e. information architecture) was greatly simplified and restructured to be inline with site visitors goals and terminology. Throughout the site we used call to action techniques to better pull people through the site and always made it easy to get to take the desired action on the site, Booking a Flight.
The 'Book a Flight' form was placed in a prominent position in the middle of the homepage and in the near future we will be helping Nature Air to streamline it's book a flight process as the current third-party system is not user friendly and is adversely impacting conversion. Our work is never done; since continuous optimization is the key to gain marketshare and increase revenues when you want to be a leader in your industry.
Finally we focused the content around flying within Costa Rica and used a "Fly, don't drive" concept that emphasizes the benefits of flying throughout the many vacation destinations of Costa Rica. This allowed us to easily build engaging SEO rich content about flying to and from these destinations in Costa Rica. Within the first six months Nature Air saw a
50% increase in organic search engine traffic, Bounce Rate
reduce by 30%, Conversion rates increased significantly, Time on Site and Page views increased by about 40%, and through user surveys we were able to determine that users were much happier with the site. More specifically, that user frustration in task accomplishment has been greatly reduced as a result of the many user centered design strategies employed throughout the website.
What we did
The result is a 70% increase in web-based sales over the same month last year while every other channel had year over year declines.
Nature Air’s commitment to its website as the primary revenue generating vehicle has been strengthened by these results. Through testing using Google Website Optimizer and data analysis Nature Air and Blast Advanced Media have set up a culture of optimization that continue to help them capture market share during the storm of this recession.