Case Study - Groton Inn and Suites, Groton, CT

Blizzard Associate | 11 April 2006 |

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Customer Overview - Groton Inn and Suites is a hotel property offering rooms and suites in the Mystic, Connecticut, area town of Groton.

Goals - Nancie Keenan, the property’s General Manager, signed on as a customer in January 2005, intending to increase conversions from their website. While they had a good government and corporate clientele, she was looking to expand in the leisure market. She handed over all aspects of her website including design, hosting, and promotion.

Strategy - The overall plan included a major design overhaul, easily accessible website hosting, and a new web tracker, Blizzard Tracker, to measure the website’s return on investment.

Groton Inn’s website had a black background that would appeal to the corporate world, but is generally not what the leisure traveler interested in a vacation destination looks for. Nancie provided all new, professional photos that really helped the design team come up with creative solutions. In the new site, you’ll find a more appealing color scheme with plenty of pictures to attract the eye and show off the amenities of the property. Please see an image of the new homepage, below.

Full New Groton Website

Once the design changes were completed and hosting was rolled over to our server, we began to optimize the site. The new design allowed us to optimize for both the leisure and corporate industries, with individual pages catering to each travel market, including other areas, such as weddings and the restaurant.

Results - Traffic! Traffic! Traffic! When comparing March 2005 traffic to that of March 2006, we see that The Groton Inn and Suites traffic volume has tripled. While the focus was to attain leisure clients, corporate clientele increased as well. The meetings page received twice as much traffic as the year before, and the its bounce rate decreased 19%.

The Blizzard Tracker installed on the site shows that searches on Google, Yahoo, and MSN bring the most traffic to the site, with local directories that target the Mystic area are next in line for referring traffic. Recently, we’ve begun to track revenue, and now know that these same referrers are also the ones that convert traffic into sales.

Conclusion - By implementing some marketing strategies, Groton Inn and Suites achieved their goal of obtaining more leisure customers, and also increased the corporate market. Winter is typically the slow season, so the increase in traffic from last year is even more welcome. This increase is primarily due to the new design of the website that appeals to a variety of customers, and the optimization techniques that give more exposure to the site.

Nancie Keenan explains, “Blizzard Internet has been most helpful in setting up Groton Inn and Suites and positioning us in an aggressive marketing environment against the franchised properties in the area. When you are an independent property, marketing on the internet can be very difficult and you do not have the dollars to compete in the same way with the franchise big spenders. Blizzard has given us the opportunity to level the playing field in the internet arena. We have seen the results. It is most helpful, too, that we can measure the return on investment. Our local Eastern Connecticut CVB and the Mystic Coast and Country groups also appreciate our ability to provide them with traffic information, especially when even the franchise properties are unable to measure it as specifically as we can. Our partnership with Blizzard Internet and Sceptre reservations is unique and profitable.”

Lou White - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.