Europcar boosts online optimisation in digital push

The car rental firm aims to further boost conversion rates among its website visitors by creating a new role within its digital marketing team to determine how best to present its content online through a process known as multivariate testing (MVT).

This process gives brands insight into the most popular aspects of their site plus the best combination of content to improve sales through behavioural targeting by tracking parts of the page users are clicking on.

The pan-European company plans to boost its investment in MVT, a process that requires near-constant supervision, by 30 per cent in 2013 as a result of earlier successes .

Catrena Blanco, Europcar’s head of user experience, says:“Almost 50 per cent of our bookings comes from online and our CEO believes we need to push that further.”

Blanco says that consumers are accessing its service online increasingly and “we want to build products that revolve around people’s needs” adding that using MVT means that its online content strategy is “not necessarily based on subjective decisions made by a marketer.”

The decision to invest further in MVT in particular was triggered by an earlier partnership with online specialists Webtrends which helped boost online visitor conversions by 15 per cent as well as increasing the purchase of extras and add-ons at check-out, experiencing by 12 per cent.

The pairing enabled Europcar to segment its online strategy from market-to-market across Europe as well as the USA according to Blanco adding both companies will continue to work together post the appointment of Europcar’s MVT specialist.

“Investment in digital is increasing as a whole whereas the rest of the marketing budget is relatively stable,” she adds.

Europcar has just unveiled a new positioning line “Moving your way” to underpin a multimillion marketing campaign.