Making Your Contact Form a Success
Most websites have a contact form? Do your web visitors ever use the form on your website?
If you’re a typical web owner, your answers might be “we get very responses from our contact form” or even “I don’t have a form, just an email address.”
If that sounds like you, please read on. We have a few ideas that might help.
Why Should My Website Have a Contact Form?
Let’s start with the obvious. “Why bother with a contact form at all? Isn’t providing my email address enough for customers to get in touch with me?”
No, not really. A plain email address is often more of a barrier than an invitation. For some people, it’s like a blank piece of paper staring up at you, waiting to be written on. For many people that’s a daunting prospect.
There’s can also be a technical barrier. A clickable email address assumes the person visiting the website has their email account set up in a traditional email program like Outlook or Windows Mail. Very few people do that. Now, most people use a web-based system like Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook.com and your email link simply won’t work for them. In fact, it may cause a confusing error. By the time they’ve sorted that out, they probably won’t care about contacting you anymore.
Why Doesn’t Anyone Fill Out My Contact Form?
While this is a complex subject, even knowing a few fundamental “dos and don’ts” can make a big difference, Manu website owners and designers disregard these rules every day.
Did You Ask Them To Complete the Form?
If you don’t ask your web visitors to do something, don’t expect them to do it. Guiding users to what they should do is known as a “call to action.”
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When it comes to your contact form, you need to ask people to use it.
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You should have a “Contact Us” option in the website’s menu or near the top of the page and you should be encouraging people to use the contact form on every page of your site. Your call to action needs to be placed in a very specific location on each page.
It’s not an actual physical location, so many pixels down and so many pixels across, rather it’s a conceptual space. You need to ask the web visitor to take action after you’ve made your case that your company is the answer they are looking for.
You might even double up your call to action by adding your phone number in the mix.
Our service team is standing by. Call us at 555-856-9821, or visit our Contact page for the help you need. Do it today.
Did You Ask for Too Much Information?
People want to give you as little information as possible…and you want as much data as you can get. You need to know a lot to set up that tour, create that proposal, or find the right package for your customer.
Keep it short. Let the visitor enter as little as they want. The more you ask for (and require they provide) the less anyone will use the contact form at all.
And make it easy. Use check boxes and radio buttons targeted at the customer’s perceived need for service, not your need for data.
Visitors are more willing to click a few checkboxes telling you that they need help than typing in a detailed explanation. Ask them for the best way to contact them (email, phone, cell phone). Follow up promptly to get the information you need.
While there is no perfect rule for every contact form, short is best, and ask for as little personal information as possible, just enough to get back in touch with them.
Submit?
The word “Submit” is commonly used on buttons for contact forms. But it’s not the ideal word. It does describe the process, but it’s not really useful from the user’s point of view. “Send Now” or “Send Message” is more specific, telling the user exactly what they are doing when they click the button.
Additionally, “Send Now” and “Send Message” have a more positive connotation than “Submit”.
Consider Adding a Short Form to Every Page
Grocery stores sell candy and drinks at the checkout aisle because people are impulsive. You can take advantage of this behavior too. Consider placing a very short, direct contact form on every page of your site.
Once they find information on your site that convinces them to contact you, make it as quick and easy for them as possible.
CAPTCHA and ReCAPTCHA
CAPTCHA and ReCAPTCHA are those annoying blocks of squiggly text you have to fill before submitting a form. While the concept is good – spambots can’t read squiggly text – and it keeps spam out of your inbox.
The problem is that people have a hard time reading squiggly text too. Anything extra that you ask a web visitor to do decreases the odds that they will do it. To the average web visitor CAPTCHA is a pain and it benefits you, not them.
If you’re contact form is suffering from severe spambot attacks, yes, you should consider using CAPTCHA. If you receive a handful of junk contacts once in a while, just hit delete. It’s better you are inconvenienced rather than the potential customer.
Promise Privacy
Visitors have to fill out forms all the time. They often realize that they are opening themselves to receive “junk mail.” Assure you visitors that you won’t sell their email address to a hundred other companies, or even that your company will begin emailing them every other day.
If you have a privacy policy and contact frequency policy, state it clearly on a policy page and provide a link so that people can see that interacting with your company won’t become a major annoyance.
Leverage Your Thank You Page
When someone does complete your Contact Form, it should take them to a confirmation page to let them know their message was successfully sent. Think about that. You now have someone who took the risk and time to contact you. Ask yourself: what can I do now, in addition to saying thanks, to reward that behavior and enhance the opportunity for engagement?
There’s no one answer, only the opportunity to be imaginative. You might give a phone number and the hours the number is manned, encouraging them to call for immediate help. You could offer a download link with additional information, provide the opportunity to enter a contest, give away a freebie, or provide an interesting offer or coupon.
So…Take a Look at Your Contact Form
Contact forms can be a great way to acquire leads from your website, but like any other aspect of web marketing, it can take some thought, experimentation, and imagination to make your contact form a success.
Don’t set it and forget it! Track the success of your contact form by keeping a log of changes and tracking if you got more or less submissions (and sales) with each change.
Over time, you can hone your contact form(s) into useful tools instead of forgotten add-ons that no one ever sees.