Is your website contact form working?
Today’s small business website tip focuses on your website contact form. Imagine the lost leads and opportunity if your online submission form isn’t working. What’s worse, most form errors have to do with the delivery of the form results to your email and not something on the user’s end. So from the perspective of your potential customer, they think they have successfully reached out to you. And then crickets. They will interpret those crickets as you not being interested in their business. Not good.
So, the most obvious first task is submit your own contact form. Did you receive the results to your email quickly? If so, fantastic. You can jump down to the making the most of the contact form.
If you didn’t receive the form results, reach out right away to your website provider. You’ll need their help in tracking down the issue. There can be a range of roadblocks along the pathway between the submit button and your inbox. You’ll need to professional to diagnose and fix the issue.
Making the Most of Your Contact Form
Now that you have a functioning submission form, how can you optimize it to make it a high-performing lead generator for your business? The answer is to keep it simple. Make it easy to use and as engaging as possible. To help you assess your form, use the checklist below.
Is it as short as possible?
Only ask for the barest minimum of information you need in order to provide a meaningful response to the lead. You’ve been there. You know what I’m talking about. If you see a contact form, and it has what feels like 100 fields to fill in, are you going to fill it out or hit the back button? If the potential customer needs to be contacted, a form that gathers their name and basic contact information is sufficient. You can gather all the other details later on once you’ve had a chance to interact one-on-one and start a relationship with them.
Do you have a custom thank you page?
When the website visitor hits the SEND button, what happens next? Something generic? Nothing at all? Consider spending a little time in creating a custom “thank you” page and crafting a message that continues to build rapport. Don’t be afraid to show some personality here. In an online interaction, you don’t have the opportunities you have in a face-to-face meeting to convey your brand through body language, conversation, etc. Aside from simply saying “thank you,” use this as one more way to establish rapport and communicate the personality of your brand.
You will likely need your website provider to help you with this item, but it is worth it. Some form plugins allow for custom thank you pages and others don’t. You’ll need to upgrade your forms if yours doesn’t allow for this. We like Formidable Forms, and it allows you to set a custom “thank you” in the settings for each form. Once you have a compatible plugin, you can create and designate a custom “thank you” page.
Do you have a goal in analytics tied to the “thank you” page?
Once you have your custom “thank you” page all set up and loaded with personality and gratitude, you can track the users that use your form by creating a goal in Google Analytics for someone landing on that page (no one gets there unless they’ve taken the action you intended by reaching out using the form). You can even assign a value to each form submission so that you can track the ROI of your marketing activities.
Today’s small business website tip has just three items in the checklist (ok, four if you count confirming the functionality of the form results delivery), but they can really make a difference. You invest hard-earned time and money in building and maintaining your website. If you aren’t making the most of the users that are ready to take the big step to go from casual browser to active lead, you are missing a lot of opportunity.
