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We’ve heard a lot of excuses for why companies don’t like to use contact forms on their website. The list spans from taking up precious space to only receiving submissions from spambots.
Okay, the latter is a pretty legitimate reason to hate your website’s contact form, but that doesn’t make it okay to completely delete it. That is, unless you don’t care about increasing your conversion rate.
Now I’ve got your attention, huh?
Contact forms have been proven time and again to either have a positive or negative affect on conversion rates. Neil Patel recently described a 26% boost to his contact form conversion rate from one change alone. Imagine what your company can do with an entire contact form overhaul!
So if you’re still interested in making your website visitors significantly more likely to willingly give you their personal contact information (and perhaps even their money), then check out our top three reasons for having a contact form on your website and how you can make the most out of every transaction.
Convenience
You might think an overarching contact page is pretty convenient for your website visitors, but in reality, you’ll only be creating obstacles and distractions that can turn potential customers away. Making a user navigate to a dedicated contact page and then either composing a new email or reaching for their cell phone are all time sucks that you might not be able to afford. In other words, every obstacle makes it less likely for even an interested visitor to contact you.
Make it your primary contact form goal to have a convenient, intuitive process that shouldn’t take longer than a minute (if that!) for a user to fill out. Only ask for the basic information, such as name, contact information, and specific request or inquiry. Also, Captchas might seem pretty great, as they filter out the bots and spammers, but they are just one more inconvenience that could prevent a potential client from ever contacting you. For added protection, you can always add a hidden field to rule out those pesky spambots.
Efficiency
A contact form can actually make your company run more efficiently. Instead of having all submissions sent to the same inbox, forcing you to sift through each one before forwarding them on to the right person, you could create a contact form that figures out what a user needs and which employee will be most apt to help. You’ll cut down on wait times for your potential customers and allow employees to manage their time better.
Include one or two fields in the contact form that narrows down a user’s question or request and have the various answers direct submissions to the right person or team within your company. Be sure not to pigeonhole user submissions, however. Leave a field for “other” or “miscellaneous” requests just in case.
Conversion Tracking
We’ve come across quite a few companies that have developed specific landing pages for Google AdWords, social media purposes, or otherwise, but then they’re left scratching their heads wondering if those landing pages ever did them any good. In just about all of those cases, the same key ingredient was missing. You guessed it, contact forms! How else can you measure the amount of conversions, where they came from, and what they’re looking for in one place? Unless you’re a mind reader, you need a contact form to help you understand conversions and to continue turning those qualified leads into a bona fide transaction.
For Google AdWords users, there are several built-in tools that allow you to track conversions, pull reports, and analyze data to improve the usability and success rate of your contact form. If you’d like to track other contact forms on your website – and you should – then explore the options in your specific plugin. Usually, you can either track how many times a specific function happens (ie: hitting “Submit” button) or track how many users are sent to another page, perhaps thanking them for entering a submission.
There are hundreds of different plugins you can use to incorporate contact forms on your website. Our favorite happens to be Gravity Forms: easy to set up, includes more advanced settings if you want to get fancy about it, and looks great. And it’s specially made for WordPress – we’re all about that!
RumbleLink believes in connecting companies with consumers. It’s the only way to run a sustainable marketing campaign that can propel itself forward. To really get into the nitty-gritty of contact forms and conversion rate optimization, we like to utilize Split Testing, data analyzing (our favorite!), and constant fine-tuning. There are many ways to begin the conversation between you and your customers, but a simple contact form can be the ultimate icebreaker.
How has your company improved its contact forms?
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