Website personalisation and testing helps create personalised customer shopping experience

Website personalisation and testing helps create personalised customer shopping experience

LateRooms.com, the discount hotel specialist and part of the TUI Travel group of companies, has signed a contract with Maxymiser to deploy its personalisation, testing and optimisation solutions on its website in order to enhance the online shopping experience for visitors and boost conversions.

LateRooms.com will be using A/B testing and multivariate testing with MaxTEST and MaxRECOMMEND, which provides multivariate testing with recommendations, to tailor its website content based on the personal preferences of live visitors. Maxymiser also forms a critical component of the LateRooms.com mobile commerce strategy, by allowing the company to test and optimise content across a variety of different mobile handsets as it looks to capitalise on the increasing popularity of mobile shopping.

Speeding up development process

Maxymiser replaces Webtrends, which LateRooms.com had been using for the last 12 months. Following a review of the marketplace, Maxymiser was chosen because of its market-leading technology and reporting, combined with the expert knowledge and experience of its consultants in the areas of website personalisation, testing and optimisation. LateRooms.com will also benefit from Maxymiser’s OneTouch integration platform, which enables the company to launch testing and personalisation campaigns continuously, without the need for any lengthy coding or change control processes. For LateRooms.com this means a low total cost of ownership and a reduced time to market.

Jessica Reading, director of marketing and user experience at LateRooms.com, stated: “Using Maxymiser we have complete confidence that the changes we are making to our website will improve the user experience and increase conversions. In the past, decisions about website content have been based on subjective views and opinions, which meant it was often difficult to get a consensus. Maxymiser removes this problem by allowing us to test content with the people that matter most – our customers.”

Reading continued: “We have found that even a subtle change to a button colour or some specific wording on a page can often result in a major uplift, so having scientific proof of winning content, based on live visitor feedback, gives us an extremely powerful tool to help us grow our business – whether that’s the website or the rapidly expanding mobile channel.”

Small changes make difference

With website personalisation an increasing focus for LateRooms.com, the implementation of MaxRECOMMEND is intended to further help enhance visitor engagement. By combining multivariate testing with recommendations, the content, placement and presentation of recommendations can be tested with customers and optimised for the highest conversion rate. Indeed, Maxymiser said it believed that small changes in these various site properties have proven to have just as big of an impact as the recommendations themselves.

Commenting on the working relationship with Maxymiser, Reading concluded: “We replaced Webtrends with Maxymiser because we wanted a partner that has a dedicated focus on website testing and personalisation and this is what Maxymiser lives and breathes 24-hours a day. They truly are the experts in this field and they have experience of helping hundreds of brands to optimise website performance.

“Maxymiser sets the benchmark in the industry for fast, low latency test and personalised content delivery. They have a unique proposition which, combines excellent project management and know how with best-in-class technology that is really fast to deploy and does not place any additional workload on our internal IT resources. We consider our partnership with Maxymiser to be a strategic investment that helps LateRooms.com to increase revenues, build loyalty and enhance the customer shopping experience.”