This project started with a Digital Marketing Campaign inquiry: Doorm wanted to target the local housing market through paid search and social media. But on our first meeting it became clear that their website wasn’t inline with their objectives. Everything, from the brand claim (Student Housing) to the copy and pictures used to promote the hotel was geared exclusively towards students.
Doorm
New booking website helps Lisbon hotel boost conversions
We proposed a website redesign before working on any marketing campaigns. The first thing we did was to change the claim to a more encapsulating “Quality Housing”. We also shifted the focus of the website: less lifestyle and greater accommodation push as we wanted to boost tourism conversions as much as possible. The introduction of a split screen separating each target audience (students vs tourists) was Doorm’s idea: we tested both approaches, with and without it, and the statistics proved that they were right. Click-throughs and conversions increased while bounce rates decreased with the split approach.
The redesign project was split into sprints. The first sprint involved changing the overall look and feel to make the case for a unique travel housing experience. Part of this implied design and usability changes but, for the most part, it was communication strategy shifts. We then introduced an amenities page, describing in greater detail what the hotel had to offer, focusing on Doorm’s unique selling points. Finally, we brought the rooms and apartments to the homepage and included a self-hosted booking engine, installed over a bespoke WordPress content management system that eventually hooked up with their property management software so they could centralize sales and improve availability management.
