Create an ROI Calculator: How to Build One Online for Free
For a B2B firm, your ability to demonstrate the value of your services is critical to the survival of your business. Your website allows you to showcase previous work and glowing client testimonials, but digital marketing gains renewed power with hard data. When thoughtfully designed and implemented, an ROI calculator provides a compelling illustration of the benefits of working with your organization.
For prospective customers evaluating your firm, hard numbers don’t lie. And the best way to demonstrate what sets your business apart is the information gathered from an interactive return on investment calculator.
An ROI calculator provides a vital first step toward establishing an early foundation between you and the prospects your business needs.
Allowing users to view costs, savings, impact, or performance rates delivered by your services, an ROI calculator transforms your product offerings into hard data. Through a carefully considered design, an online calculator doesn’t just allow your customers to better understand how your products or services fit with their business. It provides a vital first step toward establishing an early foundation between you and the prospects your business needs.
10 B2B ROI Calculator Examples
Interactive calculators can demonstrate your B2B’s unique value to prospective clients by allowing them to envision exactly how your products or services will impact their business. Here are some of our favorite examples from numerous industries.
How an ROI Calculator Enhances Your Digital Marketing
Capable of acquiring critical details about your users, your website is the most powerful marketing tool at your disposal. Create an ROI online calculator for free and you can successfully evaluate the effectiveness and optimization of your lead generation channels.
With the addition of an online calculator, you can communicate details about your business in a way that facilitates stronger engagement with your target audience.
At its root, an ROI calculator illustrates the costs of working with your firm versus the expected rate of return. In the B2B tech industry, a “return” could refer to cost savings, performance gains, or any other KPI critical to your customers’ needs.
No matter your business, online calculators help provide an effective, easy way to exchange information with customers. By capturing the results of its calculations, both sides of a prospective engagement gain additional clarity about each other in a way that a case study or client testimonial could not have provided.
Online ROI Calculators Generate Leads for B2B Firms
An online calculator can serve a variety of purposes, but primarily it acts as a vital lead generation tool. Once your site visitors input their information, they’re identified as viable prospects who are exploring whether what you’re selling fits their needs.
For your sales team, the ability to acquire this information results in more productive initial conversations. At the same time, your customers gain a better understanding of your offerings and the potential gains at stake.
In most cases, calculators are designed to illustrate cost savings for your prospective clients. Drawn from contrasting the commitment of purchasing your service or product with the expenses a firm would otherwise incur, a calculator demonstrates to customers the annualized ROI from working with your team.
By establishing this early baseline for working together, your subsequent sales conversations grow that much more targeted and productive.
Once your site visitors input their information, they’re identified as viable prospects who are exploring whether what you’re selling fits their needs.
How to Create an ROI Calculator: Best Practices for Developing an Online ROI Calculator
Developing the right ROI calculator for your business and its offerings requires a level of investment in its own right. But even if a calculator delivers just one new client, the design and implementation costs are quickly offset by the resulting gains.
However, if you create an ROI calculator without these 4 key ingredients, it will be a nothing more than a costly addition to your website.
1. Accurate Results
The right online calculator will demonstrate the value of your services in a way that’s easy for people to understand. But calculating ROI is only as good as its conclusions.
When working with an agency like Clear Digital to create an ROI calculator, our first requirement is to work from a spreadsheet that provides all the appropriate computations. No matter whether the calculator is determining cost figures or promised performance gains, each result must be tested and verified. If you want your calculator to display its results with accompanying graphics, those must be corroborated as well.
Whether your firm draws its calculations from Excel or Google Sheets, every result from your spreadsheet will be duplicated in the calculator. If the calculator’s figures don’t add up, your data must be revisited, which can result in expensive production delays.
2. Ease of Use
Though your online calculator is designed to target a specific customer base, it should deliver a simple, clear, and easy-to-understand experience. This should be an important consideration when you create an ROI calculator.
Depending on your industry, you could request server totals, number of employees, or storage level requirements. As your users engage with the calculator, they should receive prompts indicating the type of input that is expected and have no question how to proceed.
At the wireframe stage of design, you can determine the results of each interaction and how much information to share. Your calculator can deliver complete cost breakdowns, a shareable PDF, and other specifics, depending on your business goals. Or, you can withhold some details and only offer a complete report after a user completes a form. The specifics of how much user data to collect and what results to generate in a given format are up to you.
Though your online calculator is designed to target a specific customer base, it should deliver a clear and easy-to-understand experience.
3. A Custom Design Consistent With Your Brand
Online calculators don’t need to be restricted to traditional layouts of their real-world counterparts. Web-app development tools such as Angular, React, and Vue allow for calculators to offer intuitive user experiences and expansive capabilities.
When you create an ROI calculator, the crucial requirement is ensuring your calculator’s features and results are readily understandable and reflect your brand identity.
In the B2B tech industry, the customization possibilities for online calculators are limitless. Recently, Clear Digital designed and developed a total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator for the data management company Cohesity.
Using sliders that allow users to specify their storage needs, the calculator offers a real-time graphic that illustrates the savings made possible by working with the company. And, to encourage further engagement with its content, the calculator’s landing page offers to provide a more detailed breakdown after the user completes a form. Customization is one of the advantages of getting a calculator from an expert like Clear Digital, as opposed to when you create an online ROI calculator for free by yourself.
4. Capture User Information and Further Customer Connection
In addition to encouraging conversions, ROI calculators also provide a wealth of data about your users. Using marketing automation programs such as Marketo and Act-On, you can organize and retain this information and identify specific users as potential prospects.
By asking for input such as company size, location, and other details within your calculator, your marketing and sales teams learn and gain a better understanding of your customers’ needs. And, in the process, gain a better understanding of their viability as a sales lead as well.
It’s important to create an online calculator that can also be designed for users to retain its findings for future use. By allowing your users to refer back to the calculator through either a link or downloadable image, your users can share their findings with the decision makers within their organization. Consequently, both your sales team and your customers avoid the additional legwork of a cold call.
By taking the time to learn how to build an ROI calculator, you’re taking the time to invest in your website.
With an ROI calculator, your website can provide practical details about your business to the customers and companies you need most — and vice versa. If this sounds like a support that adds up to a benefit for your organization, contact us to find out more.
