To increase conversions, put as much thought into your contact page as you do the rest of your web design & marketing efforts
Depending on your business model and marketing objectives, your contact page could be the most important page on your website, yet most web design companies provide a contact page only as an afterthought in the web design process.
There are several reasons why a consumer may want to use a contact form to get in touch with you – before and after the sale:
- Unanswered Questions – If your website has failed to answer pertinent questions for your visitor, the lack of a contact page in your web design could prevent a sale. If there is no place for people to take their unanswered questions, the user will be off of your website, searching out another website that is more prepared to answer those important consumer questions.
- Questions About Product Or Service Delivery – People who have just bought from you may have questions about their product or service delivery. The contact form or contact point will be imperative to preventing charge backs from existing customers.
- Lead Generation – Some websites provide a form strictly as a method to gain sales leads or customer contact information for use in their marketing efforts. To get this all-important contact information from your visitors, a contact form will be essential to your success.
Few web design companies appreciate the whole picture of Contact Form Abandonment. Industry publications track Shopping Cart Abandonment across various Internet-based businesses, and that rate is a whopping 60%-70%! One would think that Contact Form Abandonment would be much lower, but the truth is that the reservations that consumers have that lead to the prevention of a purchase may also stand in the way of a consumer making direct contact with the company.
While it might be easier to get contact information from a prospective customer than it is to get their credit card number, if you make the contact form too difficult or too much effort to complete, you will lose the opportunity to establish an ongoing relationship with them and miss your marketing opportunity.
The following 3 web design tips will help guide you through the minefield that is laid down by most webmasters when they build a contact form for potential or existing clients:
- Web Design & Marketing Tip #1: Reduce Word Counts and Distractions – Your goal here should be plain and simple, to get the consumer to tell you who they are and how to contact them! No more – no less. Many web design companies make the mistake of leading up to a contact form with a Terms Of Service. When people arrive on the contact form, their only interest is to contact you. But if you feel obligated to throw up a 2000-word TOS in front of the contact form, people will abandon the contact, because they don’t want to read a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to get to the form. This is an example of poor marketing and web design practices. As a side issue to this, you don’t want to provide any outbound links on your contact page either, except perhaps to your home page and FAQ page. The point is not to distract the consumer from their goal of getting in touch with you.
- Web Design & Marketing Tip #2: Kill the Captcha – If you are not familiar with the term, Captcha’s are: “A distorted image of letters and numbers used to prevent automated use of websites; Anything that a human must do to prove that they are not a computer. ” Google Captcha’s are the worst – you read the funky letters, type it into the box, hit Submit, and then Google tells you that you did it wrong! Sometimes, people with poor eyesight have to play the game 5 or 6 times to get Google to validate you as a person. One of the easiest ways to Kill The Captcha is to provide a hidden image on the form or a PHP Session Key that can be passed with the form to the Submit Script. This is an example of a good web design and marketing, since the spam safeguards do not interfere with the user’s experience on your site, allowing them to complete the desired behavior – providing your with their contact information.
- Web Design & Marketing Tip #3: Offer Freebies To Encourage Completion of the Form – When people have a reservation about giving you contact information; the reservations are usually powered by unreasonable fears. One of the quickest and surest ways to overcome the final obstacle to getting your form completed by the consumer is to offer them some type of freebie if they fill out the form. Tell them quickly what they will get, why they will want it, and how they are going to receive it from you (complete the form below and submit it to us – download available on next page). This marketing tactic encourages users to overcome their reservations and convert.
Let’s be honest. It was hard enough to get the consumer to your website in the first place. Perhaps you even paid for the online advertising that brought that visitor to your site. If you were not able to develop a sale when the person visited your site, often the only opportunity that you will have available to you in the future to be able to follow up with this person is their contact information that they give you in the contact form.
So, it is imperative that you give them all the reason they need to fill out the form and send it to you, but more importantly, for your web design and marketing tactics to be successful, you must take away every element of your contact page that will create additional resistance to your offer in the mind of the consumer. Be sure you utlize these tips or communicate them to your web design company in order to ensure you do not lose a sale!