When looking to maximize the effectiveness of your website, one of the things you will benefit from is using a contact form. With this type of form, you will be able to get prospect information, which will help generate a number of sales leads.
Your website might already have one in place and therefore it will be important to use the sign up form to your advantage. However, you will need to find out if you are using this as effectively as you can. In order to get the most out of a contact form on your website, follow a few tips. These tips will help put you in a better position to attract more customers on a regular basis.
1. Keep the Contact Form Template Simple
According to the Usability Hour, one site, known as Expedia, once had a field on its site called “Company” on its checkout page. As a result, many customers were confused about this part of the site and believed that Expedia wanted their banking information. The customers would go on to fill out the next part of the form with their bank information. This caused the credit card verification to fail and make things more complicated for customers. Expedia realized this and then decided to remove this section from their site immediately.
With Expedia eliminating this section of their site, they made an additional profit of $12 million per year in revenue.
With this, you will want to keep in mind that you are often better off asking for basic contact information when looking to get the information. This will allow you to find out what the customer wants and needs. As a result, you will be in good position to get what you need in order to best assist your customers with a contact form.
2. Sign Up Customers for a Newsletter
Although signing up customers for a newsletter is very helpful to your business, you shouldn’t send it to them without making it clear to them they will be receiving it. However, if a customer agrees to a newsletter, then you will be able to send it to them, and educate them on their issues and how you or your product solves it.
3. Offer Something for Free
Most people love getting things for free. With a direct to consumer business, it will benefit you to give a random newsletter subscriber a free gift card every month as an initial incentive. A business-to-business company might try to offer a free consultation or a free e-book in order to win over new customers. As long as you offer something that will benefit potential customers or clients, you will give them a reason to fill out the form to inquire about your offerings.
You will probably want to know how to add a form like this to your website. If you are a business that uses a content management system, you will be able to set up a contact form or install a plugin that will allow you to create one.
When there is no such option, you will want to consider using a top email newsletter provider such as aWeber and Constant Contact. These will supply you with HTML code to put in your site. What makes these very enticing is that they are quite affordable, as you can get them at $20 per month along with a free trial.
There are ways in which you can prevent spam in website forms that are used for comments, feedback, inquiries and other methods of contact.
Form Validation Fields on Your Site
When looking to install a contact form, it is very important to have one that is secure. Having a form that is secure will allow you to have strict validation of all of the fields. When you want to have the visitor enter their phone number, instead of having a text box, you can direct your web developer to add a form box for numbers.
With an email address, you will need the form to only accept valid email addresses. If anything abnormal is entered in the field, then the site will reject it and not accept anything until the information is correct. As a result, the contact form will prevent any malicious information that can be put into the site. This feature will also prevent things such as automated bots from being entered into the form.
Captcha
Website owners who are looking to prevent spam from their contact forms, it will be important to enable a Captcha at the end of the form. With a Captcha, website owners will require users to enter words or numbers to verify their inquiry. The feature will help prevent automated systems and bots from sending in forms without verification. Since bots are unable to detect text in images, they will fail to correct Captcha text, which will prevent the form from being submitted on the site.
If you are looking to learn more about how to devise a contact form on your website, as well as keeping it secure, then you should contact our company today for a free consultation. We will help you learn more about how to more easily get customers with a simple contact form. This will help you get more business and allow your company to expand with effective website marketing.
