Hi all,
At National Museums Scotland we're thinking about customer journeys from our main website CMS to TNEW. As part of this conversation, the question about whether to offer guest checkouts or not has been raised. We understand how we can benefit from asking all customers to create an account, but are interested to know whether requiring a log in could be off putting to customers.
One of our objectives for TNEW is to maintain the online booking levels we've had since online booking stopped being required by COVID restrictions, or, failing that, increasing online ticket sales from pre-pandemic levels (which were quite low). Because of these we don't want to put anyone off buying online by forcing a log in.
Is anyone able to share any testing or data they've gathered about this and whether requiring a log in has resulted in lower online sales? This is probably most relevant to museums or other organisations like us that haven't historically had sold out exhibition runs but it will be interesting to hear a range of experiences from the community.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts and apologies if this has already been asked (I did a search but couldn't find anything super recent).
Hannah
We heavily analyzed this before Guest Checkout was available, using Google Analytics, and creating an account/resetting a password was identified as a very significant hurdle to completing a sale (given the nature of our business as a presenting organization, 90+% of our patrons would have to do one or the other every time they made a purchase, as at best most patrons would only make one order once a year or once every other year). When we enabled Guest Checkout we observed a distinct improvement in conversion rates.
And then we had to turn it off again, because it doesn't play nicely with online transactions that require an active account, such as contributions or streaming events using Gated Digital Content. That's a real frustration for us, but I don't think selective Guest Checkout availability is even on the roadmap.
Hi John, Gawain, and Hannah,
From the TNEW Product Team, I am of course following your stories closely. I am impressed to hear some of these conversion statistics when using Guest Checkout.
Gawain, regarding your comment about not playing nicely with Digital Content and Mobile Tickets, one of the features we are excited to release with v16 will be functionality to permit a user who has only used Guest Checkout in the past to create a password and access their account and purchases. Would that help you to turn the feature back on?
Paul
I think the big sticking point is contributions (but also I guess packages) as they tie back in to ranking-driven MOS changes as well as other customer account driven changes. I haven't tracked Guest Checkout for a while as a result, but we also had difficulty sort out the ramifications of guest checkouts for existing logins, merging guest checkout accounts, etc.