Why should I use a website contact form?
Lots of designers and developers still don’t use a website contact form to allow clients and customers to get in touch. I think they’re wrong:
Mail from your website contact form goes to the right person
When you leave a customer to find an email address on your website, they might end up sending mail to the wrong person. Sales enquiries shouldn’t go to Sally in customer services. Billing enquiries don’t need to reach John on the technical team. When a customer fills in your website contact form with a predefined recipient, the e-mail goes to the person it’s supposed to.
Ensure your mail goes to the right place with custom mail forms for every department, team or contact.
Can help reduce spam
Having your e-mail address public on a website can make it easier for bots to scrape your details. This could mean your email address is added to spam mailing lists that are not relevant to you. My PHP mail form is processed on the server so your email address never becomes public, keeping it out of the ‘wrong hands’.
Data (information) control
You can set the fields on your contact form and can customise exactly which are required, ensuring you get the right data from your customers. Have a think about what you need to further an inquiry — maybe it’s just a name and phone number — and make sure you get that information straight away.
(Longer contact forms with lots of required fields can negatively affect conversion rate. Don’t create a “road block” form!)
It’s quicker for a customer to get in touch via your website contact form
It’s easier for a customer to type a few words into your contact form than it is to copy and paste (or click) an email address, open an email client, create a new mail, type out the mail, click send, wait for the mail client to connect to the server… and so on.
In an age where site speed affects conversion rates, a 1 second delay can cause millions of dollars of lost revenue. You might not be expecting millions of dollars in revenue, but it’s logical to assume that slowing your customers down could mean the difference between making a sale and not.
Contact forms are extendable
Once you’ve got a web form in place you can connect it to external providers. As well as receiving email, you can add customers to your CRM; subscribers to your newsletter tool; orders routed to a payment provider; and so on.
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With positives like these there’s no reason to avoid a contact form. Why not give my free contact form a go and see how it can improve your website today?