How we reduced cost-per-lead by 52% in a highly competitive industry

Hello Guest is one of the top short-let and airbnb management companies in the UK. They offer a complete end-to-end service to manage any type of rental or combination to minimise rental voids and maximise returns.

The short-let management space has become an extremely competitive industry with a lot of venture-backed startups entering the space, who have huge budgets to invest in marketing.

The increased competition has also driven up the overall cost-per-click on platforms like Google making it extremely difficult to acquire leads and customer profitably.

Hello Guest had seen rising lead costs month on month and were struggling to differentiate in an increasingly competitive market.

After analysing the competitive landscape we found there were serious conversion bottlenecks on the current Hello Guest website.

Being that a lot of the competition were tech-first startup’s, they had extremely well-optimised acquisition funnels and their media/PR budget enabled them to rapidly build trust and credibility with the market.

Whilst at the time, the Hello Guest website, might have been fine – when you looked in comparison to the current players in the space, it brought up a lot of doubt about the credibility of the company.

The worst part about this is that that Hello Guest actually have far superior reviews and service levels than any of their competitors, due to their more hands-on approach.

The issue was, this just wasn’t being portrayed on the current website and there was no clear value proposition on display…

Firstly, we set up a new dedicated sales funnel, designed to highlight the unique value of HelloGuest whilst also building massive trust and credibility.

We ran a number of split tests on different landing pages, and used heatmapping software to understand where we were losing visitors – then we would, test and optimise accordingly.

Once we managed to settle on the top performing variant of the page itself, we then set out to optimise the signup process itself (a critical component of a high-converting website) by testing a variety of different sequential forms.

Both of these actions helped us take the overall conversion rate from around 2.4% up to 10% on average within the first 3 months

Next, we worked on testing the Google Ads keyword targeting and ad copy to ensure we were not only getting the best cost per lead, but also the right quality of lead.

Also, due to the highly considered nature of this purchase, we knew that a lot of people wouldn’t be ready to sign up on that first visit.

As such, we set up a Facebook Ads retargeting campaign to retarget visitors of the website/landing page. This helps us to re-capture visits that we may have otherwise lost entirely…

Instead of just selling in these ads though, we also incorporated value-based content like posts & articles, which helps to build further trust and credibility (the key ingredients needed in order for someone to become a lead). 

This value-based content also helps to position Hello Guest as an authority and stand out from their competition.

The next issue we found was that due to there being no proper CRM in place, it was very difficult for us to identify which keywords or campaigns were generating the most actual revenue. This is key to making advertising profitable.

You’ll often find that the cheapest cost-per-lead does not always results in the cheapest cost-per-acqusition.

As such, we helped HelloGuest get Hubspot implemented so that we could accurately track leadflow through each stage of the funnel and identify which campaigns and channel were resulting in revenue to further optimise and scale over time.