Improve Your Contact Form In 6 Steps
We have already established the great reasons why you should have a website, now we need to turn this visitors into customers and help them reach out to you effectively.
Most websites have contact pages where users can get in touch with you. Ideally, they will contact you by telephone but most will submit a contact form of some kind.
This post has been updated to include the GDPR regulations coming into force in May 2018.
1. Get It Prominent
Before we move on to the best way to have your form you need to make sure any visitor to you want to get to your form can find it easily, big calls to action to lead them there from any page on your website is crucial. Keep it simple, your contact page needs to be always one click away from any and every page on your website.
2. Keep It Simple
A relevant contact form doesn’t need to ask a visitor much information for it to become a valid lead. Think about the minimum amount of information you require to get them through your process. You can see from our own contact page that we simply ask for their name, email, telephone and nature of the enquiry, that is more than enough.
We have already established that they are on our website to speak about the services we offer and we only really need a summary of requirements.
We have seen lots of forms where they ask what type of enquiry it is amongst other bizarre requests for information about location, age, gender. This kind of information is not required and just puts a barrier in front of the user.
Remember above we spoke about GDPR and the legal basis of asking for certain information. Also, take away the fact that a potential customer maybe filling in 20 of these contact forms today getting quotes, make yours the easiest to complete and it will go a long way!
3. Mobile Friendly
Make sure that your contact form looks and works great on a mobile device, you see some of these forms that cannot be read on a mobile device and that is not good for your contact form conversion I am sure you will agree.
4. Keep Your Email Address Out Of It
We have seen hundreds of these. Where website owners put something like contact me on bob@mywebsite.com - There are a few reasons why this is not cool:
- A website bot will swing by and harvest your email address within a few seconds meaning that your email address will receive an unprecedented amount of spam in the future.
- Even if a genuine visitor clicks on that you may not get all the information you need.
- it just doesn’t look that professional!
5. To CAPTCHA or not to CAPTCHA
You would have seen these questions to prove you are human, the old style ones asks you to complete maths questions, read weird characters, select animals and cheeseburgers etc.
Luckily, there are newer tools like Google’s reCAPTCHA that you can install on your contact page that will only pop up if the visitor is not genuine (a bot), they have pretty much nailed this so your visitor should never be asked a “Are you a human” question again.
6. Measure The Success
If you use a system like Google Analytics you can create a goal to measure the success of your form. It will track users through your website from your homepage to your services, onto your contact form and a successful submission.
Summarising, remember to keep things simple. Humans are creatures of habit, we love filling out short forms because we can copy, paste and go. Get your contact form right and you will reap huge benefits because you will get relevant enquires from your website.
For an example of a simple contact form, take a look at ours below
We ask for the bare minimum so we can make contact with a potential customer about their enquiry. Let’s keep the web simple!
For more information about making your website contact form work for you, speak to us at Pebble, you can call us on 01733 902070 or indeed filling in our contact form!