This is not the snappiest of titles for a post, however it does cover a very important issue.
For any business that generates a healthy percentage - or perhaps even all - of its leads online, having an effective process in place to receive and manage messages is crucial.
First of all, you should ensure that you have a contact form on your site that is easy to fill in, intuitive and takes the information you need, without overwhelming the visitor and putting them off by requiring too much detail from them.
But then what do you do with the messages that you receive? In 99% of cases having spoken to many webmasters, the messages they receive through their online lead forms simply go straight into an inbox. Then, they will be read by someone who will hopefully reply to them. And that's it: if the lead replies then great, but there is no ongoing organisation or management of those leads.
The best way to organise your leads in my opinion is to automatically store all your website lead contact messages into a database at the back-end of your website. Then whenever someone fills in your contact form, all the details are stored in the database.
You then have a very useful and powerful record of all the contact messsages you've received, and depending on your system can manage them through it: for instance sending email replies, noting down when you replied and what you said, marking whether a message needs a follow up and so on.
Many companies do not follow up on their leads, and so if they don't hear back, the lead is lost. By marking messages for follow up you can remember to do so even a month down the line when the email has long been lost in the inbox or accidentally deleted. Storing messages in the above way also ensures you have a useful log of messages you've received should you email inbox accidentally get deleted.
I hope this information is of use, if anyone needs help with a contact form or logging messages to a database please let me know.
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Web Design |
