Test #8: “Reconsideration Messaging: Customer responsibility”
A major hotel travel website asked us to help increase the sale of hotel insurance (travel insurance) for the rooms booked in advance that also had a policy of charging an additional fee for changes or cancellations. The insurance was a way for their customers to protect the value of their purchase in case something bad happened before their trip and it was covered by the policy. It was much less expensive than the change/cancel fee.
As a way to encourage sales while also making sure customers saw and understood the valuable option in front of them to purchase, we wanted to remind customers when they chose ‘no’, what they were doing: accepting the risk and responsibility for any fees incurred for making changes or cancellations of any kind.
Goal:
To increase purchases of hotel and travel insurance by adding a dynamic opt-out message reminding the customer that they take responsibility for additional charges.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI):
Conversion rate of hotel insurance
Traffic Source / Segment:
US, Desktop traffic only, 2-night stay
Sample Size & Test length:
Approx. 11,500 visitors were randomly shown either variation over the same 23-day period.
Hypothesis:
Because consumers are often unaware of the purchase rules and their responsibility to pay additional fees, adding a message that is displayed dynamically will get attention and influence some customers to reconsider their initial action to opt-out, thus increasing purchases. ‘Reconsideration’-type messaging had been effective in market tests from other websites, so we thought this was a good test to try.
Summary of difference(s) between variations:
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| Figure 1: Variation A – Original (50% of traffic) – no message shown when ‘no’ button is selected. |
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| Figure 2 – Variation B (Test) (50% of traffic) – adding the “I am responsible’ message to appear when the ‘no’ button is clicked. *** WINNER *** |
Results:
The test variation B increased revenue by $29,396 annualized which is a lift of +16.64% with 96% significance.
Actionable Takeaways:
This test was a win pretty much across all segments tested – why? We think its because we were directly targeting customers that could be influenced! In most cases, you are trying to get customers to read something or add something BEFORE they have made any purchase decision. In this case, we already knew that, at least initially, everyone in the test group were decidedly “non-purchasers”. So the only way to go from there is up, right? The questions was — could it go up enough to be measured and the answer was: Yes!
Some websites and brands may find this approach to be a little annoying or too aggressive marketing, so you will have to choose whether an idea like this is right for your customers to test.
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Jason Keough
Jason holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business from the Belmont University and has over 20 years’ experience in e-commerce strategy and web development and design.
