Promo Code Injection Increased Bookings by Nearly 30%

Challenge

The Pacific Surfliner train service offers an array of everyday discount programs for select groups. If you’re a student, senior citizen, a child, or a member of the military, you can qualify for a discount on your fare of up to 50%. To take advantage of these offers, you’ll need to use a program specific promo code during checkout. At Pacific Surfliner, we promoted these offers, and their respective promo codes, on offer specific landing pages such as the one below for senior citizens.

Clicking the Book Now CTA launches the trip booking widget where you can begin planning your trip itinerary. To apply the discount, select the appropriate offer from a dropdown of options and continue through to checkout.

When looking at booking widget submission and conversion rates from offer pages like the one above, we discovered that they were converting users at a similar rate to those who did not visit an offer page. This was likely happening because users were clicking “Book Now” from a discount page, only to find that the respective discount had to be selected from a dropdown in the booking widget.

Solution

Working with our external web development agency, I created a project to enable the ability to launch a booking widget from a button CTA and inject a promo code to pre-populate the relevant fields in the widget. The basic requirements were as follows:

• CMS admin can configure a button CTA component with an optional promo code

• When a button CTA component with promo code is added to a page, clicking on it launches the booking widget and presets the Promotion Code fields accordingly

Now, when a user clicks the “Book Now” button from a page such as the Senior Citizens discount offer page, the booking widget would launch and inject the promo code with it on widget load. It was expected that this would increase the likelihood of a conversion, given that the responsibility placed on the user of taking an extra step was removed.

Results

• When a discount is automatically applied, it resulted in a +28% improvement in booking widget submissions (percent of users that proceed to checkout)

• In turn, we observed a +24% uptick in the conversion rate of the booking widget.

Takeaways

• Removing friction can be just as effective as adding value. By eliminating the extra step in having to select the discount, users were more likely to follow through and complete their purchase.