Make the most of the contact form on your business website...

First of all, it is a must these days to have a contact form rather than simply listing an email address.

Whilst it is easiest just to have an email address, you have no control over the message that people send you, it looks less professional, and even more importantly it will be harvested by spam bots that will merrily inflict several reams of spam on your inbox each and every day.

So, having a contact form is a given. If you're not sure how to add a contact form to your website, then we can help:
http://www.clarity-media.co.uk/website-contact-forms.php

First of all, you need to work out the questions that you will ask on the form. There is a trade off here between asking enough questions to give you the information that you need, whilst not having too many that you put off potential leads who don't want to spend half the day filling out your form.

Therefore stick to the essentials: name, email, phone if you need phone numbers (not everyone does) and then of course the nature of their enquiry, potentially with a drop-down of categories to choose from. There may be other information you absolutely must have, but try to keep it to a minimum.

Once the form is filled in, you should automatically store all leads in a database so that you can keep tabs on exactly who has contacted you, and when. Use that contact form database as an intelligence centre which you can use to log when you reply, how successful the lead was, and whether it resulted in business for you.

It is also useful to log the search phrase (if applicable) that the person who contacted you used to reach your site. You may see interesting trends over time appearing that show surprising searches are the ones that actually lead to the most enquiries. Once you've done that you have very valuable information as you can bias your site towards that phrase or those phrases that perform best for you in terms of lead generation: more often than not these are not actually thes ones that you tailored your site around.

If you have any questions or thoughts about web contact forms, or would like to share any experiences of how you get the best out of your contact form then post here. Also if you want others to take a look at your contact process and suggest improvements this would be a good place to post.
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Web Design

Re : Make the most of the contact form on your business website

Thanks for the contact forum..!
Its pretty nice.
Thankyou.
Mariahlinda

Re : Make the most of the contact form on your business website

Definitely agree about logging the search term people used when they go all the way through to contacting you - it can be very surprising and offer priceless information.

For instance it could turn out that quite an unexpected keyword you have not really targetted is leading to the most enquiries: by then targetting that term you can up your most valuable leads considerably.

Re : Make the most of the contact form on your business website

The hardest thing I find with contact forms now are those boxes with obscure letters in that are almost impossible to make out... are they called 'captures' or something like that?

I don't know who invented them but if I see them I usually just don't bother getting in touch!

Re : Make the most of the contact form on your business website

I have a number of forms on my site and like the idea of retaining the search term used. How can I do that?

An example of a form is http://www.drachsi.com/mystery-shopper-survey.htm

Drachsi
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www.drachsi.co Your Virtual Webmaster

Re : Make the most of the contact form on your business website

Most referring sites pass on the referrer in the metadata, which is accessible through HTTP_REFERER: just log that and you're done

Re : Make the most of the contact form on your business website

Not sure if I read something about google has stopped passing on referrer data though, or just sometimes? Not fully sure

Re : Make the most of the contact form on your business website

Chris - that depends whether the request is made securely or not.