If you’re not pushing sales online, it’s likely that online enquiries AKA ‘leads’ and calls are the goals that your website is trying to push. If this is the case, it’s important to ensure that your website is not only easy to navigate, but aesthetically pleasing and optimised for conversion.
What is a contact form?
Contact forms are a feature that most leads based (and some ecommerce) businesses will have on their website, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s been done well. If it is done well, it can help to increase your lead volume and therefore the conversion rate of your site. From experience, often users no longer wish to contact a business via phone; whether this is due to consumer concerns about scam calls or because users are craving convenience. Contact forms are a way to enable communication between the business and buyer, via a website. As well as simplifying the process for people to get in touch, they also help to improve the accuracy of conversion tracking, as it is a simple process to identify the source of the enquiry.
Incorporating a contact form into the website also allows customers to be specific in their requests and it can direct the flow of enquiries. This efficiently filters the information, allowing for the replies and follow up conversations to be more directed as the poor leads can be excluded or redirected to the relevant section of the website. User experience will be improved, as the direct contact can allow for timely responses from the business, meaning that customers can gain the answers they were looking for quickly.
Designing a Contact Form
You might feel like you know exactly what a contact form should include for your business, it’s easy right? There are lots of things that could be included in an enquiry form, but does that mean you should throw everything at the wall and see what sticks? Probably not. We have compiled a list of the features we suggest you try. It is a good idea to test different variations of a contact form to see which generates the highest quality leads. You can conduct A/B testing in various experiments as well as for your contact form, such as ‘which colour button should I use on my landing page?’ Or ‘which image should I use on my ads?’. There are a range of blogs available, if you are wanting to understand what A/B testing is.
Below is a list of the components, we suggest that you include in your contact form:
- Name and contact information
- When and how they would like to be contacted- email, phone etc
- The reason they are contacting, so the product or service they are interested in.
- Exclusionary criteria (e.g. location: can you offer your service in their area)
- A ‘broad’ message box for any further information they might see as relevant.
Including the above components will allow you to collect the useful information you need to action the response. Another way to keep it simple and appear doable for users is to consider the position of the form on the page- make sure that it is prominent, accessible and towards the top of the page to engage with the user’s eyeline.
You can easily go too far with all the information you want to get from a potential customer, for example, a 5 page form is likely to have a low conversion rate because people would rather talk to you first before filling in all of that information, if you could initially just capture their name, email address and phone number and then contact them to discuss in more detail, they’ll be more likely to engage and give you all the required information.
Monitoring Your Contact Form
Once your contact form is live and running on your website, you need to continue to monitor it, to see if it is working as intended. You should consider a thank you message that also informs the customer about how quickly to expect a reply. You can use a ‘thank you’ page url or the tracking form submissions as conversion events to track. This allows you to monitor how many people use the form in Google Analytics. You can also create hidden fields, which are free features that can use existing data to assist you in tracking information such as traffic sources (e.g GCLIDs). You should review heatmaps by using tools such as Hotjar (requires payment) and Microsoft Clarity (free to use), as they show recordings of how the user has been interacting with the website. These insights into any problematic areas or aspects that the users aren’t agreeing with, allow you to implement changes to rectify them.
Contact us about your contact form
If you have any further questions about contact forms, whether it is about optimising your current ones or starting from scratch, please get in touch with us and Improve your website conversion rate today!
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