Your homepage is your website’s most important page. Your contact page is the second most important.
OK, well for e-commerce/shopping cart sites it might be the third or fourth most popular page, but either way your contact page is jolly important. The ultimate purpose of many sites is to encourage potential customers to make contact with you. Think of your contact page as a lead generation form.
The key to a successful contact page is simplicity and accessibility. It’s important to include clear contact details. Adding an email link is often a good way to go, but if you want to elicit further information, then you need to be sure you have a great contact form.
1. Keep contact forms short and simple
It’s really tempting to require users to fill out every bit of information about what they are looking for and what they need from you. While this info would be great to have, the longer your form is, then then less likely it is that anyone will fill it out.
2. Be friendly
Contact forms generate user engagement: this is the first thing that should be considered with respect to contact forms. Don’t order people around or DEMAND. Say please and thank you and all the good stuff your mum taught you.
3. Be yourself
Don’t just copy a form from a website you like or a competitor. Make your questions relevant to your product and your company. Be personable and try to connect with your website viewers.form field
4. Place labels on top of fields
For best results, locate labels like this:
5. Use informative error messages
Test your form when people miss bits out. Give them precise instructions on what form field pages.
For example, “There was an error processing your credit card; we were unable to verify your card number. Please check your name, credit card number, and card expiration date for correctness. Remember, these must match the card exactly.”
6. Have a call to action at the bottom of every page
You want as many pathways to your contact page as possible. So always put a call to action at the bottom of every page. After the body copy put something like “If you’d like to know more about XYZ, then contact us today.” Link to your contact form whenever possible.
In Conclusion
View further reading about Webform Useability or check out, CForms, one of the best WordPress form plugins.
After you’ve gone to all the effort of making a great contact page and form, then be sure to reply to people quickly. Surveying has shown that the longer you leave your reply the colder things will go.
Contact forms can either make a website usable or unusable, because they stand in the way of the user achieving their goal: reaching you. You wouldn’t leave your shop front door half open and the shop lights off, now would you?