SantoriniCarHire.com PDF Print E-mail

Transforming a traditional car rental to a digital company - SantoriniCarHire.com

Challenge

Vaggelis Kyliakoudis (Christos Kyliakoudis brother) has a car Rental Company in Santorini. Sales before 2007 were flat without any sign of recovery. Christos had already advised him to build a website from 2003 to increase the car rental bookings. They rejected the idea in 2003 but Vaggelis thought we should go ahead in 2007. The challenge was to build a website in order to increase the car rental bookings. The budget was very small (only 1500 euros), without any budget for promotion. Moreover, Vagellis had a limited knowledge of the internet. We had to learn Vaggelis even how to handle emails.

Solution

2008

The first action was to build a website that would allow customers to make a query and book a car online. We couldn’t afford to develop online availability but at least we could send an email back confirming their requests.  
The first draft of the site (The old version is here ) was a static site. You cannot imagine how many meetings we spent just for the first version of this site. I think that common sense is sometimes difficult in website development. We knew exactly what we wanted: we wanted an acceptable customer experience for our visitors.
We started our PPC Campaign in May of 2008. The campaign was very successful. Some metrics for the PPC of 2008

  • CTR 12%
  • CPA (Cost per Action, Cost per booking in the car rental industry) 9,16€ euros
  • 10.500 visits
  • Conversion Rate of 7%. This is a fantastic Conversion rate!

2009

The year started with concern the crisis, which we thought would be bad for the Greek tourist market and especially for Santorini because it is one of the most expensive Greek islands. We just forgot about the crisis ,start working (just do it) and made actions which, in turn, developed us into the biggest online car rental website for Santorini.

New website

We built a new website. This site was very user friendly. With only seven clicks you could query a car rental price for Santorini. In this new site one can upload the car rental inventory. The pricing structure is also very flexible, allowing to set different prices for each car type, period and different discounts for more rental days. It also allows many other features regarding business logic.

Pay Per Click

We continued to optimize the PPC campaign. We made it more modular and had a lot of new campaigns and keywords (Italian, Greek, German etc). 2009 was a competitive year and many keywords CPC (cost per Click) increased. However, we had consistently high positions (first, second) and managed to increase the ROI of the campaign.

SEO

Hiring traffic from Google is expensive so this year we started SEO. We created landing pages for the most important family of keywords. The results were very successful:

  • 7000 visits from relevant non-branded keywords (July to December)
  • The online conversion rate of 4% from Organic traffic

 

Referrals

It started with the need to have links in some Santorini sites for SEO reasons. However, these text links brought relevant and high quality traffic to our site.

Results

Financial results


The results for every action are the positive return – I think it must be measured in money. Every other metric is inferior measurement of success.
•    2008- 90.000€ sales from online bookings of SantoriniCarHire.com. ROI of the all the online campaigns were 650%
•    2009-120.000€ sales from online bookings of SantoriniCarHire.com. ROI of the all the online campaigns were 780%

The total online revenues do not represent the capabilities of this site.

  • SantoriniCarHire.com had only 23 cars and there were always issues with cars availability. Demand was always bigger than supply so Vaggelis had to give a lot of bookings to other santorini car rental agencies. What a beautiful business issue!!!
  • This does not include the email and telephone bookings.Many customers especially the Greek customers prefer to use telephone instead of online booking.

PPC campaign


Using the right keywords and running a targeted, carefully monitored pay-per-click campaign, santorinicarhire.com was able to get thousands of visitors while increasing conversions and significantly decreasing the acquisition of cost. The cost per acquisition was 9,16€. We keep optimizing one of the best campaigns in the car rental industry.

New Website

Today this new website is a tool for Vaggelis; he uses it to change inventories and prices according to demand.  The next version will include payment capabilities and automated price changes according to demand and supply.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The SEO was very successful and brought a lot of relevant traffic. We think that in the long run SEO has higher ROI than any other form of online marketing - money here is well spent.

Pricing Structure

SantoriniCarHire.com had always issues with car availability. Cars were never enough to match demand. We had to find the right prices to maximize revenues. The idea was simple. Copy the revenue management of the airline industry. The prices are cheap in the beginning but gradually become very expensive if the booking is close to the rental period. We believe that we should reward customers with better prices if they book early.

General Results

It is worth mentioning that Vaggelis was very happy with the results. He has now got an understanding of online marketing, and a clearer focus on his website’s objectives than ever before.

The car hire market is extremely competitive with tight margins. Therefore, campaigns need to be carefully designed and continuously optimized. We constantly use a handful of top-notch PPC and Analytics tools to reduce guesswork, discover missed opportunities and revenue-generating long tail keywords with minimal time and effort. Combined with conversion tracking and Google Analytics we obtain a clear picture of what is working best - and measure overall returns at all times.
We are very proud to say that santoriniCarHire.com succeeds in a very competitive market. There were many websites from independent car rental Agencies that failed to realize financial returns.
We also believe that putting the customer first is the most difficult but the most profitable option when building a website. We will keep ourselves innovative and do the best for SantoriniCarHire.com and all our customers  

Call us today on +30 211 800 3131 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to help you increase your revenues.