If you’ve been asked to draw up a digital sales proposal, then paying attention to good user experience (UX) design is important. 

By sticking to a small number of rules, you can make sure that your audience finds the great content in your digital sales proposal easy and enjoyable to read.

To maximize the readability and effectiveness of your microsite-hosted digital sales proposals, we recommend adhering to the following design tips:

• Aim to male your site as easy to navigate as possible 
• Design with user experience (UX) in mind
• Remember that digital media like websites are mostly scanned rather than read 
• Provide your users with a reliable and consistent experience 
• Test to optimize your design

Let’s look into each of these points in more detail.

1. Make Sure Your Site’s Navigation Is Clear

One of the key gauges of usability and solid UX design is how easy the site is to navigate. If users are unable to find the information that they need, they are unlikely to spend much of their valuable time searching around for it. 

And with sales proposals, the last thing you want is for your potential client to struggle to find your message. Clear navigation reduces drop-off, which can mean more sales and therefore higher revenue.

That’s why, if you’re building a digital sales proposal, making it easy for the various types of readers to find the content they need is an essential step.

After all, sales proposals are often passed around an organization and read by people from a range of backgrounds in a multitude of roles. 

If you’re building a microsite rather than a static document, it’s likely that your proposal will be seen by team members in functions ranging from accounting, to finance, and from sales and HR all the way to the executive suite.

Because different departments are likely to be interested in different parts of the site, it’s important to think clearly about how to best organize the content on your website so that it reflects a logical hierarchy, or structure. 

Research by Gerry McGovern suggests that good site navigation might be even more important than having a good search function on your site. According to research conducted by his team, seventy percent of test users started an online task by clicking on a link as their initial step. In contrast, only 30% of users began with a site’s search functionality.  

To summarise, make sure that your site is organized according to a logical visual hierarchy. Link between pages in the right places. And make sure that your choice of navigation works correctly across all device types (e.g. desktop, mobile, and tablets of different sizes) by taking steps like implementing a hamburger menu rather than inline nav for small devices.

2. Design For User Experience (UX)

It’s important to design websites while considering how people are likely to actually use them in reality. The same applies to digital sales proposals, marketing microsites, and similar products. 

Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on speculation to know how. At Zoomforth, the team has drawn upon a considerable depth of design experience in working with companies to develop microsites in order to put together our site design best practices. 

Some recommendations based upon these best practices include:

• Making sure that your site’s visual hierarchy reflects a logical organization of text, images, and other elements such as any embedded video
• Avoiding empty grid columns, which could be distracting for users
• Using enough whitespace around each element to prevent the website appearing overly crowded

Additionally, it’s also key to consider how users are going to be interacting with the content. For instance, it’s important to build responsive websites that look good whether they’re displayed on mobile or on desktop. 

In some instances, you may be confident that your proposals are going to be read primarily on mobile devices or tablets. In such cases, you’ll want to make sure to test for usability on mobile.

Alternatively, If you’re including presentations on your microsite, you may want to make it as easy as possible for users to download that content for offline viewing, potentially as hard copy printouts. Make sure that there are enough well-placed download buttons on your site for file-based content.

3. Remember Websites Are Scanned (Not Read)

“People don’t read online.” 

You’ve probably heard that countless times. And it’s true. People don’t read online, at least in the traditional sense. Rather, they skim. Research from the Nielsen Norman Group, among other studies, confirms this; 79% of users tested scanned a web page rather than reading it linearly.

To take account of this, those preparing online copy and other forms of content should follow a few best practices:

• Write in shorter paragraphs. These are easier to skim through than long reams of text
• Highlight keywords of particular significance
• Break up paragraphs into sections with plenty of subheadings
• Use shorter words, sentences, and paragraphs than you might in conventional writing 

This doesn’t mean that everything you write has to be short and skimmable. Users can still embed resources for download. But copy that is going to be read in a web browser should follow these conventions. 

If you can present your ideas more concisely with a few well chosen words, why wouldn’t you? 

4. Provide Users With A Consistent Experience

Users want a consistent and predictable user experience (UX) when visiting your website. 

When online shoppers are adding items to their digital shopping cart, for instance, they expect their shopping cart to look like a shopping cart and be located in the top-right corner of the page. 

There are conventions like this that people may not be consciously aware of but nonetheless intuitively understand for almost any task on a web page.

If those same users go to your microsite they’ll expect an online experience that their past browsing has prepared them for. Similarly, If your team sends multiple proposals, even to the same pool of recipients, you’ll want to make sure that the look and feel doesn’t vary too dramatically between builds.

In order to achieve this, you’ll want to firm up on exactly what your visual branding guidelines are. Design teams will often crystallize that in a formal visual branding guide that officially declares the font and color palette that the company will be using on all its online communications. 

By using well configured templates as your starting point for each digital sales proposal, you can make sure you keep to the same conventions from site to site. 

5. Test To Optimize Your Design

Like most things marketing-related, there’s no need to rely on guesswork to figure out what works and what doesn’t for your website’s UX. There are plenty of excellent resources available to help you learn quality UX design principles, and these offer a good starting point for a non-specialist. You’ve already started by reading this post. 

To take things further, you might want to:

• Run A/B testing on UX elements: A/B testing involves randomizing two variations of something and then seeing which performs better in relation to achieving your end goal. For a digital sales proposal, that might be as simple as an increase in sales, but it could also be more modest such as increased interaction with the page or more time spent engaging with it. Microsite designers could A/B test two versions of a site navigation menu, for instance, in order to determine which users have an easier time interacting with. 
• Convene recorded UX testing sessions: Another popular option to help improve UX is to convene testing sessions. In these, users unfamiliar with your company and its offerings are recorded navigating through your site, sometimes commenting on what they like and don’t. Their behaviour is of even greater importance. All that’s required for this is screen recording software and a microphone. Those organizing the tests can use heatmap analytics to drill deeper into users’ engagement. 

Better UX Leads To Better Results

User experience (UX) is a vital part of developing effective digital sales proposals and digital products like websites more generally. Now that you’re familiar with these core concepts you’ve got a headstart in designing microsites, landing pages, and other digital documents that will impress those reading — or skimming — your content.

If you are thinking about purchasing an interactive content platform (sometimes known as a content experience platform) for your organization then it’s important to choose wisely.

If you’re using this tool to send bid responses, after all, it’s going to be storing a lot of important and commercially sensitive data. Security, performance, and pricing are all going to be paramount concerns.

Here’s a checklist that you can use to assist during the evaluation process. 

1. Platform security

Perhaps the first thing on your purchasing evaluation list for your interactive content platform should be the security and integrity of your data. That depends heavily upon where it’s being stored. Some important questions to ask would be:

• Who is the CMS using to host their data with? Is it a trusted cloud provider or are they hosting the application themselves, on their own infrastructure? If the latter — what infrastructure are they using?
• What encryption standard is being used?
• Does the company have a track record of securely hosting other sites?

Most content management solutions are offered through a software as a service (SaaS) model. This means that you are renting access to the software which is being hosted on infrastructure managed by the company — so all you have to worry about is paying a subscription and logging in through the internet.

Usually, in order to provide this, the company is actually renting server space from a dedicated infrastructure provider — such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure. Sometimes, though, SaaS companies operate their own infrastructure. Knowing these details might seem like getting stuck in the technical weeds, but is important to helping your security team evaluate whether the platform is secure and trustworthy enough to use for hosting business critical data.

Zoomforth hosts customer data with Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is considered one of the most secure infrastructure platforms in the world — and it’s one of the most widely used. It’s so secure, in fact, that the US intelligence community trusts it to host its data. Zoomforth uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt data to and from its servers.

2. Content platform uptime

In addition to making sure that your content experience platform is hosted on a reliable and trustworthy provider, it’s important to evaluate the host’s uptime performance. Uptime is the percentage of time during which the platform is available. Things like service interruptions and hardware failures can cause downtime — which could mean that your website is off the internet. 

Questions to ask include:

• What has the host’s uptime been over the past 12 months?
• Does the host guarantee an uptime percentage?

Zoomforth’s interactive content platform has experienced 100% uptime over the past 12 months and guarantees 99.9% uptime. As Zoomforth’s architecture is built on AWS, even when we’re updating and maintaining the website your sites remain fully accessible.

3. Business Continuity Management (BCM)

If you’re evaluating a technology partner that is going to become a critical part of your business operations then you’re creating a business dependency in your day to day operations. If your business has a business continuity and disaster recovery plan, then you need to make sure that your technology partner’s plan for disaster recovery is congruous with your objectives, including your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).  

Ask:

• What is your prospective partner’s RTO (how long business systems are unavailable before they declare a disaster and begin a restore process)?
• What is your prospective partner’s RPO (how much data loss is acceptable before a recovery process will be initiated)?
• What disasters the firm has planned for? These should include natural disasters such as pandemics as well as cybercrime and human error. 

Backups and disaster recovery plans need to be tested in order to be effective. Ask your prospective technology partner how often they test theirs — and don’t be afraid to ask for proof. Zoomforth is happy to share details of its disaster recovery plans and risk assessments.

4. Auditing

After asking “what is a microsite platform?” and finding your best pick, It’s also a good idea to ask whether the technology partner you are thinking about working with subjects themselves to regular audits. Ideally, audits should be conducted to a recognized standard such as SOC 2 or ISO 9001. 

Because many auditing standards are internationally recognized, this allows you to compare providers based in different countries.

Zoomforth’s interactive content experience platform is audited annually against the SOC2 standards. Copies of its latest audits are available upon request. 

5. Pricing 

As great as your prospective content engagement platform partner might be, it’s not going to be much use to your business if it’s outside your budget. 

Before including or ruling out a solution for consideration:

• Check that there are no hidden costs
• Ask for a quotation that covers a variety of potential pricing models

When evaluating pricing, ask whether the per-seat charge covers everything required to operate the service. Are there charges for the traffic you receive, provisioning the infrastructure necessary to deploy your sites, new features or even the number of sites you create?

Zoomforth charges a flat annual seat price, per user, which includes everything needed to use the platform including unlimited sites, visitors, and storage.

6. Support 

Support isn’t just required when something goes wrong. Proactive customer support focuses as much on the onboarding phase as it does upon issue resolution and troubleshooting. If you’re looking at hosting your content experiences on a third party platform, it’s worth asking whether the company is prepared to allocate support resources towards ensuring that you enjoy a successful onboarding. 

Other questions you might want to ask include:

• What support methods will the company be contactable through? Can you reach them through email? Live chat? The phone? 
• What are the support hours? And in what time zone is the company based?
• Will you have an account manager or dedicated point of contact?

Zoomforth offers custom training sessions on its interactive content platform by video call, a personalized onboarding program for every signup, and custom templates to help your team get up to speed fast. 

7. References

Your potential partner of choice has great things to say about themselves. But does anybody else?

It’s important to ask what other firms are using the platform you’re thinking about signing up for and asking if you can speak to their users. Firsthand recommendations and references can put your mind at ease — and convince you that the platform is as good as it says it is! Zoomforth can provide references upon request.

Better Content Experiences Await

If you’re currently putting together remote sales proposals, then — as we’ve discussed before — you’ll want to make sure that your content comes across as personalized and authentically as possible. 

The good news is that the two go hand in hand — so the more you can do to convince your target audiences that you’re speaking to them, the better your message is ultimately going to be received.

Another important factor to bear in mind is who is going to be evaluating what you send over in your tender response or buying communication. Different personality types have very different preferences in terms of communication. Thankfully, there are some well-established models for helping to categorize your potential recipients and understanding these can lead to better results.

 
Understanding more about who is reading your proposal will help you communicate in a more impactful manner. In this post, we’re going to look at personality types through the lens of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) © system. Here are the main personality types you should keep in mind. And how to write to them in a way that will get your message across.

The Myers Briggs © Dichotomies

The 16 personality types under the Myers Briggs paradigm are based on four basic dichotomies which form the distinguishing letters for each personality type.

Those are:

• Extraversion (E) vs Introversion (I)

One of the most fundamental personality differences that springs to most people’s minds when they put people into ‘boxes’ is that between extroverts and introverts. Extroverts draw their energy from being surrounded by and interacting with other people. Introverts, on the other hand, are more comfortable with the solace of their own inner world. For them, being in social situations with large amounts of unfamiliar faces can be draining — whereas extroverts thrive on this kind of experience and are energized by it.

• Sensing (S) vs Intuition (N)

People process information and make decisions in different ways. Those on the sensing side of the scale prefer practical information, facts and details and they focus on the present day. Those who are more intuitively minded prefer concepts, theories and high level ideas, with a focus on the future. 

• Thinking (T) vs Feeling (F)

Decision-making is another area where people differ markedly one to the other. Thinkers prefer logic and analysis. Somebody who makes decisions by feeling focuses instead on their personal values, relationships and how they are affected by the world around them. 

• Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P)

People also organize their world in different ways. The ‘J’s’ of this world prefer structure and control. Those with a preference for ‘P’ favor flexibility and spontaneity.

How to Communicate For Each Group

Whether your sales team is trying to sell to a buying committee of several different personality types or is just laser-focused on winning over one individual, assessing that person’s personality can be a strategic advantage in communicating with them to win influence.

The good news is that microsites are the perfect medium for communicating simultaneously with people with different personalities: creating iterations, and tailoring copies to individual members, are both readily achievable with a few clicks.

When doing so, these are some guidelines as to ways to communicate best with each of these groups.

Extroverts / Introverts

Extroverts will tend to be more engaged by interactive content than by static resources like documents or ‘wall of text’ style resources. They tend to experience the world in a less linear fashion than introverts. Building rich content experiences with lots of graphics and embedded objects might be a great way to pander to their energy.

Conversely, those on the more introverted side of the scale might be easily overwhelmed by interactive content that prompts them for input. To them, this can feel like a social interaction with an unknown person — which they are likely to find draining and negatively stimulating. These individuals prefer to take home resources and mull over them. They are interested in sitting with information and slowly processing it in order to try extract the deeper information. For this group, consider offering key resources as downloads. PDFs and even podcasts are popular choices. 

If you know that different personalities are in charge of different functions in your buying audience, then you might consider developing different pages or sections of the microsite for each function.

Sensing / Intuition

How people prefer to process information is key to how they make decisions. Those who are biased towards sensing enjoy facts and live in the here and now. For them, direct on-site and detailed resources are the most effective means to communicate with them. Show them milestones, project charts and action plans – they like to know how you’re going to get from A to Z.

Those who are biased towards intuitive ways of processing information respond well to headlines, executive summaries, concepts and analogies. They need to understand the bigger picture before they are prepared to engage with the detail so create layouts that draw them to the key points of your message. 

Again, you can adopt both strategies in the one website to cater to both sets of buying audiences.

Thinking / Feeling 

Those biased towards the thinking side of the scale take decisions based upon rational information — such as balance sheets and profit and loss accounts. Show them pricing tables, forecasts and bottom line impacts. 

On the other hand, those who experience the world through feeling are less swayed by logic and analysis and more influenced by ‘softer metrics’ – such as impressive personal biographies which might instill confidence in particular resources and team members.

Judging / Perceiving 

It’s also important to think about how the information you present is going to be carried over into your readers’ day-to-day lives. Those with the Judging preference prefer structure and control. 

If you’re trying to build a content experience that works for these types, make sure to include timescales for delivery and clear plans to get there. 

Perceivers on the other hand enjoy the freedom of being able to do things, and take decisions, on the fly. For this group, don’t forget to include things like contingency plans. While perceivers like the liberty of being less constricted, they also like to have a backup plan if things don’t pan out as expected.

Speak To Your Buyers

It’s important to take into account the unique personality of your buyers when communicating with them.

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) © system is just one of several that can guide how to target potential customers.

Whether you prefer to work through a formal personality categorization framework or just trust your intuition, you can build better and more personalized content experiences when you know who you are marketing to. Use some of the tips above to better guide your microsite building.

Reasons to convince your executives it’s time for a different approach to content

You know that it’s time your business adopted a fresh content management system (CMS). Your colleagues might too. But you still need some compelling arguments that will win over upper management.

At Zoomforth, we’ve helped countless organizations move from putting together individual static documents to designing navigable and feature-rich microsites using our platform.

In this article, we present some helpful reasons you can offer to your team to make the case for an exciting new content experience platform that will empower you to make the most of your online presence.

Increase revenue

Digital sales proposals tend to do better than static presentations in terms of winning over recipients and encouraging them to award business to your organization. 

Relative to text-heavy resources such as PDFs or presentations, microsites or CMS-developed content:

• Allows you to create more engaging content experiences for buyers by integrating multimedia elements and other assets
• Allows marketing departments to run A/B tests in order to test out variations of a page and target their readership with the most engaging version
• Gives teams the freedom to create individualized business proposals targeted directly at individuals or smalls groups within a company (account based marketing)

All the above translates into a greater ratio of won bids and higher income for your business.

Decrease costs

Software as a Service (SaaS) involves companies making software products available over the internet in exchange for a subscription fee. In order to make their services accessible through a login on the internet, the companies behind SaaS products provision the underlying technical infrastructure necessary for this to work. 

This frees up users from the hassle of having to take care of servers, other hardware, and networking. Additionally, users can rest assured that the SaaS provider is making necessary updates to the platform and maintaining its security. 

For smaller organizations without an in-house IT team, using these services can be a great way to not have to worry about keeping applications and infrastructure secure. 

SaaS has revolutionized computing (think of Gmail), but it’s not only webmail providers that make their services available in this way — many CMS companies, including Zoomforth, deliver their technology through this model.

Using Zoomforth, companies can design and create compelling microsites using an easy and attractive website builder. Because hosting is included as part of the subscription package, users have no infrastructural worries or associated costs. They only need to pay an ongoing fee to retain access to the software. The result of this more efficient delivery model is cost savings / easier budget management for users.

Speed to market

These days, many large companies contract the design and upkeep of their sales and marketing assets  to internal or external design agencies. There are costs associated with this. 

For one, the update process can be tediously slow. Busy agencies juggle dozens of active projects and even a small text edit can become another item on their to-do list. The result is that many frustrated pursuits managers report waiting weeks for agencies to make simple changes to their content. 

Using Zoomforth’s what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG editor), just about anybody can learn how to design, duplicate, and update microsites. The simple drag and drop interface makes it easy to both create and update pages. The results are that this task can be brought back where it belongs: under your competence. 

Costly agency retainers can be replaced with Zoomforth’s simple per-seat licensing price model. The results are freed up budget for your team — and having to wait minutes, rather than weeks, to make important content updates.

Reduce risk

These days, cybersecurity is on everybody’s lips. No company wants to be known as the one that breached privacy rules or spread malware to others.

Sending information as attachments to email has known vulnerabilities — for one, if the computer sending the file is infected then the file might be, too. Sending a link to a microsite containing that information is a safer strategy.

File scanning (for viruses) can be taken care of server-side (another task you won’t need to worry about!). The files can be stored encrypted and access can be secured by second factor authentication (2FA) — making it much harder for unauthorized parties to gain access. 

Sharing information through microsites reduces the risk that businesses will breach compliance regulations. 

Improved user experience

For your recipient, the microsite presentation reduces friction and is a much more enjoyable way to consume the content that you wish to transit. Compare viewing a microsite, for the recipient, to trying to piece together various emails from several different senders — the microsite experience comes out on top every time. This is particularly true if you are trying to transmit business proposals.

Additionally, a microsite makes it easy to bake in your brand guidelines to your communication. Users can customize their styling to create the exact look and feel that best reflects their company’s brand. Achieving this kind of standardization with file based communications like PDF and PowerPoint is significantly harder. 

It’s a differentiator

Finally, using microsites to transmit business proposals is an easy but effective way for you to differentiate your business from the competition. Many companies are still sending out long (yawn-inducing) PDF documents to potential buyers. The content might be compelling, but static documents confer several disadvantages — for both sides.

Sending over a microsite, especially a personalized one, targeted to the organization, is likely to resonate very well with buying audiences — particularly younger ones. Many B2B buyers are millennial or Gen-Z digital natives and they will be particularly appreciative of this new and engaging way of sending over information. This brings us back to our first point – increased sales income!