How you can get your calculator project approved and create the overnight success you and your company need to reach your goals

 

With data from more than 10.000 calculator projects implemented on the LeadDoubler platform we’ve
identified the 7 key components that makes up the success of the projects that becomes overnight successes – both in terms of leads generated and revenue.

The 7 key components will help you to ensure the success of your interactive calculator.

View them as the essential stepping stones needed to give you success.

Below I’ll go through the 7 Key Components one by one.

Component Number 1: The Right Question

The most important component is the question the interactive calculator must answer.

Before starting your project it’s absolute key to ensure that the calculator answers a question your potential customers actually need answered.

Too many calculator projects are built too complex – answering questions nobody need an answer to.

Luckily there are easy and free tools and methods you can use to identify the right question for your calculator.

Tools based on billions of Google Searches and free to use.

Tools that will help you identify exactly the right question for your calculator.

 

 

 

Component Number 2: The Right Customer Journey

To ensure your calculator becomes a success it’s important to map out your customer journey from traffic to sale.

How will you get traffic for your calculator?

(Just closing your eyes and pray is not a strategy)

How will you follow up with the leads that are generated in your calculator?

Will you call all leads?

Text them?

Or throw them directly into your newsletter to educate them further before reaching out?

Mapping out the perfect customer journey is key to ensure you can use the calculator to drive actual revenue – creating a perfect loop, where revenue from the calculator can be reinvested into more initiatives or simply into more traffic generating an increasing amount of leads.

Need help mapping out your customer journey?

Component Number 3: The right system to build your calculator

To ensure your initiative doesn’t become an overnight disaster it’s key that you build your calculator and customer journey on the right platform.

Look for platforms that:
– Helps you build and launch beautiful lead generating calculators fast and efficient.
– Helps you manage your follow up
– Allows you to track your success

There are many different systems available out there.

Some make it easy to build simple calculators with simple mathematics, but can become impossible to work with if you’re building calculators with more complex mathematics.

Some make it easy to build calculators that does calculations based on the input itself while others allows you to fetch data externally to build truly impressive calculators where the user is left stunned by the amoount of value the calculator could generate when compared to the amount of data inserted.

Here are the elements we encourage you to look for when choosing a calculator platform:

• Is it easy to build a calculator? – Also if it becomes complicated to calculate the results.
  • Many platforms offer drag and drop calculators, that look easy for a start, but as soon as the calculations requires a little more than plus and minus they crumble – leaving you in a tight spot.
  • With a platform like LeadDoubler you can simply upload an excel file and have it converted into a calculator by magic
• Is it easy to maintain?
  • No calculator can live forever without a few changes. When choosing a platform ensure you can maintain it without having to rehire the original team of developers. (Actually building it without developers should be what you aim for)
• Can it be integrated with your tech stack?
  • Can it be embedded on your website?
  • Can it send leads to your CRM or marketing automation software?
  • Is tracking easy?
  • Modern platforms like LeadDoubler is built with integration in mind.
• Does it support your customer journey?
  • Can the platform itself ensure you reach your business goals and help your sales team do their part of the puzzle or does it simply leave you to handle everything in Outlook?
  • With LeadDoubler’s CRM and lead management system your customer journey can be supported by one system – helping you ensure no leads are left untouched.
• Can you build on brand calculators that will impress your visitors
  • Your calculator must be aligned with your brand guideline and will most likely be embedded on your website. Choose a platform that helps you create on brand calculators.

Component Number 4: The right goals

Before building anything ensuring that the calculator helps your organization reach a truly desired goal is key to the long term success.

If your too focused on generating newsletter recipients while the rest of the organization is only focused on driving sales and revenue, then you might end up with a very successful calculator, that generates tons of newsletter recipients that nobody cares about.

Ensure your calculator focused entirely on helping your organization reach one of it’s goals.

Outline a realistic customer journey leading towards this goal.

(Note: The customer journey can include newsletter recipients, but that is rarely a goal by itself).

More often the goal is to generate new sales.

Ask yourself this question:
Does my calculator project help my company earn more money or or improve our bottom line?

If not: Rethink your customer journey.

Start from one of the two main goals: To earn more money or to improve the bottom line.

And align your calculator project to one of these goals.

Component number 5: Stakeholder buy-in

When the goal is aligned with the primary goals of the company you have a chance to get stakeholder buy-in.

If the goal of your calculator is to drive Sales Qualified Leads that your sales team will close then getting buy-in from your head of sales will be key to the success of the project.

If your sales team hates your project from the start they can definitely kill it – simply by not calling the leads.

Get your head of sales on board and define expectations to each other.

Expectations can be something like:
– All leads are contacted within 24 hours.
– All leads comes with name, email and verified phone number

Measure as much as possible to help you get approval to continuing your project while waiting for sales to close enough deals.

(Note: Calculator leads might be very early in their customer journey. This means that it can be a good idea to call them, but to initiate a positive dialogue and to fuel leads for long term success). This means that initial call have to start with a high level of curiousity from your side and less hard sales tactics.

Component number 6: Tracking and traffic

Calculators are great content. Interactive, interesting and educating.

This gives you a great potential when it comes to driving traffic directly towards the calculator from social media and search engines.

To give these platforms the best possible way to measure how much your calculators are loved by their users it’s important that your calculator sends as many signals back to these platforms as possible.

This helps the platforms identify who to show your calculator to tomorrow.

Tracking is typically done by a technical task including embed code insertion, javascript etc.

With modern calculator platforms tracking is built into the platform itself – making it easy to add tracking – helping you get the most out of your marketing budget.

When tracking is in place it’s time to hit the calculator with some traffic.

We recommend using social media ads as a source for the early days. The advantage is that they are free to launch and generates traffic fast and early.

This means you can test your setup extremely fast giving you feedback on a daily basis before launching it on television or through long-term strategies as SEO.

Component number 7: A truly interesting calculator – that’s easy to use.

The main component is of cause the calculator itself.

Here’s what you need to focus on when building your calculator:

1) Make it easy to input. The most important key to success is not to lower the amount of input. The most important key is to make ALL input so easy to answer that the user never starts thinking. If the user has to think or find information before inserting the input the conversion rate drops with a factor 10-20.

2) Asking for contact information at the right time.
The right time is more often than not before showing the result. Waiting till after the result is shown will decrease conversion rate massively. We believe this is actually because the result itself makes the user think. As soon as the user starts thinking logically they stop interacting.

3) Make the calculator match what the user needs – where they are in their user journey.
A cost calculator designed for leads, that are early in their customer journey – calculating a rough estimate based on few inputs will often generate more leads than a very precise calculator with many input fields.

4) Design the result-page for conversion.
When the user sees the result they might be ready to move on the an accellerated next step where they book a meeting your sales rep, want to download a dynamically generated report with their results or explicitly asks to be contacted. All initiatives that you can use to accellerate their customer journey and get fast results in terms of sales and revenue.

Tip: Checkout pre-validated calculator funnels in the LeadDoubler template library

Getting started

Get your calculator idea validated and get a clear path to success – with our help and expertise.

We’ve seen it all before and are happy to help you get your calculator idea validated – before you risk time and money on ideas that doesn’t fly.

Book a 1:1 meeting where we’ll go through your calculator idea and validate whether it will work for you.