Contact Us forms on a website are great and in many ways, so exciting.  If you have a form on your web site for potential customers to contact you, isn’t it a great feeling to receive an e-mail notification that someone is attempting to contact you?  It feels almost like a free lead that you didn’t have to do anything for.  You can almost count the additional revenue being added.

It’s such a great feeling to get online communication through web forms that you would definitely want to increase the number of messages that you receive?  But what’s the best way to go about it?

The very first thing you need to do is to look at your forms and decide what is truly necessary.  While it is great to automate the process and do as much qualification as possible, this is more than likely reducing the number of messages that you are receiving.  Tests routinely show that by reducing unnecessary fields, the number of conversions you make will increase.  For example, if people are requesting that you call them back, do you really need to know about what product/service they are inquiring about?  Couldn’t you ask them that on the phone?

One of the most simple methods we apply is that once we get the basic info (usually just name, e-mail address, and phone number) we also ask for comments or description.  This is a free-form text area in which visitors can describe exactly what they’re looking for.  We found that this works even better than a set of custom fields.  Visitors can describe exactly what they’re looking for and this often provides even more detail than the questions we could ask about.

So if you have contact forms on your website, make the following 2 changes:

1. Look at all the fields on the form and determine which ones are really necessary and which ones you can get from the visitor when you e-mail or call them.
2. Add a Comments/Description text area to collect any additional information that the visitor may want to supply.

If you enjoyed this post then make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed.