Yourway Car Rental Service was one of those businesses not simply interested in visitor numbers alone.

“There’s no point having a website that can’t convert website traffic to actual bookings,” says the company’s e-commerce business development manager, Claire Anderson.

Yourway’s challenge
Yourway needed some strategic web expertise, and it set Exceed Online, Contegro and Alkemi a challenge. The online car rental company:

• was a start-up e-commerce business entering a very competitive market;
• was entering the market with no brand equity (in fact, not even a name or a brand at the time);
• would not survive without a truly effective, flexible and user-friendly online booking engine;
• had a limited budget;
• needed to be online in just two and a half months!

“Our main objective was to generate car rentals from inbound traffic online,” says Anderson.

“The website also had to be strongly consumer focused, and not ‘all about the company’.”

The challenge was met, on time and on budget. Results are already exceeding targets.

“Within our first two months we have already reached our six-month target conversion rate,” says Anderson.

Flexibility is the key
Critical to this project’s success, Yourway needed a platform for a booking engine that was going to be totally flexible.

“It needed to be able to respond and adjust as we learned more about our customers and how they interacted with the website. It would be of no use if the functionality was rigid and unable to change and grow with our business,” says Anderson.

Building the ‘perfect selling machine’
Exceed Online’s team excelled at creating the Yourway brand, and worked closely with Contegro to develop a functional booking engine and website.

“They totally understood our requirements in terms of functionality and flexibility. They were able to think outside the square, and created a custom built booking system that met all our needs,” says Anderson.

Exceed Online identified that Yourway’s booking engine needed to meet a number of criteria:

1. It had to build credibility - e.g. through quick downloading of all pages, intuitive selling steps, professional presentation;

2. It had to educate visitors about the company and its services - whilst selling simultaneously;

3. Each step of the booking process had to be accurately measurable – to provide constructive data for ongoing development;

4. It had to be able to access and apply a range of testing tools that could test visitor behaviour and reactions – to help increase Yourway’s ROI;

5. It had to be flexible - to implement changes in response to new information learned from measuring and testing.

A golden rule: Know your customers
Exceed Online’s partner, Alkemi, contributed its expertise by advising on how to best communicate with the customers to achieve conversion.

In the online world, conversion rates are just a fraction of those in the physical world. Face to face retailers are advantaged by having real conversations, and reading and responding to customers’ body language and the subtleties in each unique customer interaction. Online transactions don’t provide this type and level of interaction (yet).

Alkemi’s expertise in web analytics and web efficiency architecture enables it to deliver the Yourway team critical information about how customers are interacting with the website and booking engine.

“With Alkemi’s monitoring and analysis we can tell where customers are dropping off during the booking process. Alkemi can then help us respond appropriately,” says Anderson.

With a flexible platform that can evolve as this information is delivered, Yourway can subtly and continuously adjust the booking engine to interact more successfully with customers, yielding greater conversion rates, improved ROI and more profits.

Client-controlled web content
The platform employs Contegro (another of Exceed Online’s strategic partners). Contegro is an innovative content management system that puts Yourway in complete control of managing virtually all the content on the site. “We can update all the fast moving items ourselves using Contegro. This is a real advantage for us and we’ve found it to be very flexible and user friendly,” says Anderson.

Another satisfied customer
Delivering an innovative booking engine and website that meets all client requirements on time and on budget has been achieved by a professional, strategic approach – one that puts meeting business objectives and applying a user-centred design at the top of the priority list.

Exceed Online and its partner Alkemi lead the way in intuitive, intelligent, flexible e-commerce solutions. “They demonstrate a new way of thinking about e-commerce. Working with them has been very easy; they always walk us through the process and ensure we understand the reasoning for what is being done, as well as what the outcomes will be,” says Anderson.

To be exceeding targets just two months after launch is proof that Exceed Online and Alkemi are a winning combination. “To get it right in an online market you have to work with the professionals. We are very satisfied,” says Anderson.

For more information

www.yourwaycarrentals.co.nz

Contegro
www.contegro.co.nz
0800 WEBSITE (932 7483)

Exceed Online Limited
www.exceedonline.co.nz
09 414 4375

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