P&O Ferries tackles drop-out rate

P&O Ferries reports improvements in its online drop-out rate, return on marketing and staff efficiency through use of a customer-insight tool supplied by partner Speed-Trap.

P&O Ferries reports improvements in its online drop-out rate, return on marketing and staff efficiency through use of a customer-insight tool supplied by partner Speed-Trap.

Daniel Acarnley, P&O Ferries direct marketing and e-commerce controller, said the company had seen a 40% improvement in the number of customers completing online sales since adopting the tool. One of the main advantages was that the IT and e-commerce teams now use the same tool, he said.

“We can now monitor all page activity via just one line of code, a task that takes our IT team only a couple of minutes to complete, not several hours,” said Acarnley. “We are also able to monitor campaign activity and simultaneously monitor usability of the site.”

The P&O Ferries site exists in five languages and attracts 700,000 unique visitors per month.

Acarnley said Speed-Trap had helped identify a problem with a legacy online-booking engine which was presenting an error message during the sales process. “We could not previously see where, when or why the booking engine would fail,” he said. “We could only see that it was happening. With Speed-Trap, we were able to pin down the exact circumstances.”