About Nature Air
Nature Air is a Costa Rican domestic airline company operating flights in the countries of Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama in Central America. Nature Air caters mostly to the tourist traffic within these nations. Majority of customers for Nature Air are North Americans who look for local travel within Costa Rica after they have landed into the Costa Rican capital of San Jose. The destinations are mostly the tourist destinations on the Caribbean and the Pacific coasts.
Objective
Global economic recession had adversely affected the travel and tourism industry. Nature Air also had felt its deep impacts. Due to global recession, overall sales and digital sales had plummeted. They felt the need of increasing sales through digital initiatives. With this objective, Nature Air decided to focus on digital marketing to increase sales and revenues and defined following goals for this project:
- Increase on-line conversions ( flight ticket purchases)
- Increase free qualified traffic to the website www.natureair.com
Nature Air commissioned Blast Analytics and Marketing( Blastam), a Certified Digital Marketing company to assist them in increasing on-line sales and conversions.
Approach
Usability testing
The first goal was to increase conversions. Here conversion is complete when the visitor books a flight ticket. So the goal is to increase the numbers of on-line tickets booked. The existing design may not be suitable for this conversion to happen. There could be obstacles or distractions in the conversion path. The design may not be user friendly. So the project team performed usability tests and carried out qualitative analysis like surveys to find out the usability of the exact path for the visitors to book flight tickets. From this analysis, they made changes in the content, navigation and calls to actions. The usability tests were performed by using tools like the Google Webmaster Optimiser, Google Analytics, 4Q Surveys and Crazy Egg clicks.
They used the learnings from the above exercise to simplify the information architecture and navigation. They simplified the paths leading to the booking engine and performed extensive tests on it.
We will now see the new path in the website for booking a ticket. After clicking the url www.natureair.com, we land on the page shown in the picture below. Please note the ‘book now’ button on the left side. This call to action is direct, crisp and clear. It is also prominently visible with very clear instructions for filling the details. The design is kept simple with only the very essential data for booking a ticket like origin and destination, dates of journey and no of travellers being required to be filled. You do not require a login id or password to get into this activity. Even your name is not required at this stage. 
After entering the details and clicking on the ‘search flights’ button, the user is guided into the path for ticket booking with very well laid down events as is shown in the screen shot below.
After selecting the flights with the value of the ticket, the user is guided into the next event in the path- selecting services after which he updates the names and other details, confirms the booking and makes payment. Thus the user is very well guided to book the ticket with well laid out events. This helped Nature Air to increase the conversion goal.
Search engine Optimisation
The second goal was to increase organic traffic into the website. Web Analytics revealed that earlier the website attracted traffic that was interested in general information about Costa Rica, but not the traffic that was really looking for inland travel within Costa Rica. Blast Analytics and Marketing helped Nature Air create better content and user experience that improved search engine rankings for relevant keywords. eg. Let us see the result by typing the keyword ‘Costa Rican airlines’
We can see that Nature Air has # 1 ranking in organic searches for this keyword. For the keywords ‘Airlines in Costa Rica’ too, Nature Air has # 1 ranking.
Results
- Overall conversions increased greatly. A critical step in the buying funnel is the conversion occurring in the 17 flight destination pages. Here the website provides detailed information about various destinations based upon which the visitor finalises his itinerary. The conversion in this step increased by 591%. This led to a 70% increase over the highest sale in the same month of the previous year.
- Non-paid organic traffic increased by 19% as compared to two months’ previous data. Blastam delivered 53 #1 rankings in Google keyword searches, 114 #2 and #3 rankings and many # 10 rankings for keyword phrases.
The website has emerged as the primary source of revenue generation for Nature Air.
Learnings
We learn that by detailed usability studies and optimum design we can increase conversions for e-commerce sites. If a visitor has a great user experience and is guided properly, he is more likely to convert as per your goals. We have seen how user friendly webpage designs have helped Nature Air to get more bookings on-line.
Search Engine Optimisation also helps in garnering higher organic non paid traffic to a website which helps in the final goal of conversion.
Blast Analytics and Marketing (Blastam) has also displayed its strengths in optimising website design through usability.
Images Courtesy: www.natureair.com
Data Courtesy: Blast Analytics and Marketing
