The quality of an offer has an impact on conversions. The question, however, is how to evaluate what makes a good offer stand out and what has the greatest impact on whether it allows you to increase your company’s profits. Not sure what to do to improve your conversion rate when offering? If so, start measuring the results as soon as possible to maximize your offering to meet the expectations of potential customers and clients.
| An offer is not equal to an offer
At the outset, it is worth adding what the offering actually is, which plays a huge role in this article. Well, it is making an offer or proposal to induce a customer to make a purchase or order a service. It can involve making an offer of cooperation or work.
Offering is more official in nature and refers to public contracts and tenders.
| What has the greatest impact on the success of your offer?
A good offer is usually comprehensive, tailored to the needs of the recipients, provides favorable financial terms, and contains all the most important information about the products or scope of services, as well as the deadline for completion. In addition, it arouses interest because it is clear, aesthetically pleasing, and written in the language of benefits. Besides, it is also essential that it is specific. However, is it enough just to prepare a perfect offer to be sure that customers or contractors will decide to start cooperation or purchase products? That would be too easy. Unfortunately.‡.
It is significant to realize that when offering, a number of very important factors have a big impact on the end result, such as – psychological factors, external factors, and even technical aspects. It is imperative to pay attention to all of these issues as well when measuring the effects of offering.
Psychological factors
Offerings are subject to subjective opinions. After all, they are opened by people with different tastes, expectations, and needs. Therefore, even aspects such as the appearance of an offer or unreadable texts can affect the success of an offering. In addition to this, of course, it may turn out that the offer involves higher financial expectations than the recipient expected.
So, on the one hand, it is crucial that the document is presented in a clear, minimalist manner, in order to increase the chance that it will meet the expectations of various recipients. On top of that, it becomes important to research expectations beforehand, such as the finances of the target group, in order to tailor your proposal to their financial resources.
Format and technical issues
Even the best offer won’t help if you don’t take care of technical issues. Sending your proposal in a difficult-to-use or niche format can make your counterparty discouraged and simply unable to open the document.
A simple Excel file would be a good idea, as it can be opened in many programs. PDF is also a popular option.
When you send a quote in the form of a computer application or online wizard, test it on various devices (including mobile) and browsers. On the one hand, it’s about checking whether the offer is reproducible, but after that, it’s important to make sure it doesn’t lose quality. Remember, the first impression is key!
External factors
Sending an offer has a lot of obstacles in front of it. Another one is various external factors. These can include such issues as – a lack of organization in the email inbox, a flurry of employee duties, forgetfulness, important company events, etc.
Therefore, it may happen that your offer, despite the fact that it was the best, simply will not be analyzed or will be forgotten. How to counteract this? After sending an offer, it is best to wait a few hours or days and then call to see if it has been analyzed. Take the initiative!
| How to measure and optimize conversions when offering?
The key to success, and certainly an opportunity to increase the effectiveness of your offering, is to measure the impact of your offering on customers making a purchase. Conversion rate plays a big role when you want to make sure you’ve adopted the right strategy.
Sending an offer in an attachment is not the best idea when you care about measuring the effects. In that case, it will be useful to check in the settings that the system sends a message to you whenever a customer reads an email. Based on this, you will count how many messages were sent, how many were received, and on top of that, how many of them resulted in the purchase of goods or services.
When you share an Excel spreadsheet with customers, you should opt to host it using Office 365 Online or Google Sheets. With this solution, you will be able to track changes to the offer or set an alert when an offer is opened.
If you make the offer available using online wizards and browser-based web tools, you will be able to take advantage of numerous features, such as:
- recording your session, i.e., the process of viewing the offer,
- you will find out exactly when the offer was viewed, how long it took to browse, what elements the customer focused most attention on,
- you will find out that the vast majority of customers first focus on the price, and only later check briefly the individual parts of the offer,
- when you know that a customer is reviewing an offer, you can react quickly to negotiate the price or terms included in the offer, so you don’t lose the customer.
One more method that will increase the effectiveness of the offer is to do a trial on a smaller target group and check their reaction. It’s also a good idea to send the document to neutral and unbiased representatives of the target group, such as friends, to express their opinions on its design and content.
