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The Evolution of the Contact Form
Contact Us, the eternal call to action used by web designers everywhere to bring the audience to initiate a connection. How has it changed over time? How can it be altered and better utilized in a modern setting? These are the questions we will answer and also add in tips you need to utilize in your websites for user friendliness.
Contact Us: The Page Title
Contact Us is usually the title of the page that a user clicks to find the contact information for the business. Here may be the most important tip in this article:
- Tip 1 – Keep your contact information on every page.
By keeping your contact information on every page, your prospects and clients are never wondering how to get ahold of you, wasting time with an extra click, or worst of all, searching for the information.
Contact Us: The Email Address
Listing an email address on a website is the oldest way of assisting your clients in contacting you (after the phone number of course). It works well for causal interaction and the [mailto:] code in a link is a handy way of assisting clients in opening their email programs.
But their are two issues with this method:
Issue 1 – Your email address is visible for any old ‘robot’ spam mechanism to come along, collect and abuse.
Issue 2 – What if your client’s mail program isn’t configured or is configured incorrectly?
What if your client or prospect has Outlook, but hasn’t set it up? What if they use a web mail interface? And worse yet, what if their computer is barebones, lacks ram, and/or they have 101 programs open leading to the deadly computer stall, or even worse: the crash.
You really don’t want to be a part of that.
Contact Us: The Contact Form
- Tip 1 – Get as little information as necessary.
Do not make the common mistake of using a bulky contact form. Too often we see ridiculously long contact forms with more information than anyone can use, and how many times have you had submission of a form, or worse yet an entire paragraph you wrote on a web form, misfire? That is a nightmare. Plus you want to make it easy for the client to initiate a relationship with you (even if the relationship continues via email), then you can request more information from them.
- Tip 2 – Use these in targeted marketing pages to request free information, a quick call, to download a form, or other – but again, make them simple.
Contact Us: When You Don’t Want to Be Contacted – FAQ
When a website gets extremely popular, then the owners will look for ways to address issues WITHOUT contact, interestingly enough especially with the questions that 90% of the users are asking. This data usually comes through accurate call tracking, and then those issues can be answered before they are asked.
- Tip 1 – Keep your FAQ’s organized and up to date with answers to current issues.
Searching an FAQ is generally easier than searching a forum or submitting a trouble ticket, so keep it easy.
Contact Us: Stay In Touch A Little Longer – RSS Feed and Email Subscription
Great new options exist that are simple for the client, highly informative and non-intrusive – and are even easy for the web administrator or business owner.
The first one is the RSS Feed, which is a website content publishing system that comes integrated into blogs, and can be added to most other websites. Users are able to use feedreaders to view the feeds they subscribe to and can view the information anytime without leaving that program. A couple examples of feedreaders are Google and Yahoo’s own, NewsGator and others.
Issue 1 – Only tech savvy people utilize feed readers today.
- Tip 1 – Suggest your favorite feedreader with a link.
Email Marketing is clearly growing, and the key is offering unique valuable information. Out of the 5/10 subscriptions I have, only 3 do I truly value at this point. I could find more with value, but in my ‘browsing’ and subscribing this is what has landed in my primary box. Two have good product information as they are retailers with wholesale prices (www.Newegg.com and www.TigerDirect.com) and the other is a marketing statistics reporting service from a marketing company (www.emarketer.com). For our clients and ourselves, we must truly offer value in every communication and this is our goal – more on that later… Email marketing has some unique abilities when you use the right program. We use iContact ourselves, and it tells us who opened the email, who clicked on a link, and who responded what to our surveys – so it is very powerful.
- Tip 1 – Make every email you send out truly valuable.
- Tip 2 – Do not overbombard your client list.
Contact Us: The Technical Options – Forums and Trouble Tickets
The most common new and technical ways for clients to contact you through your website are are through frequently asked questions pages, forums for issue research where issues are widespread and their is community participation, and trouble ticket systems for issue submission to technical support teams.
- Tip 1 – Brand your forum well, moderate it heavily.
Forums can generate a lot of traffic to your website, help build your brand, and create a community involvement with your company in new and powerful ways. But they can also attract a lot of naysayers which can hurt your brand if you don’t keep the forum topics positive and goal oriented (for issue resolution) and visually appealing. Without moderation and brand building, forums can become a haven for the naysayers of your products or services – especially if their problems go unaddressed.
- Tip 3 – Trouble Ticket Systems are great, just don’t take to long for a human response.
The client feels important when they are issued a real problem # of their own. It assigns a necessary individual response to their issue, and they feel like someone is going right to work on it – as they should be. These great feelings can be megated when a human response to their inquiry takes too long.
Contact Us: The Conclusion
So with all of these contact options, displaying them all on every page becomes less of a possibility especially with any explanation. The menu system should of course have links to the FAQ, Forum, Support, etc. But again it becomes clear that the contact page should have a good layout and explanation of the customer’s best options to get ahold of your company to effectively resolve what they need personally.
Also we hope this article has cleared up some confusion about and/or offered tips on how to use some of the contact tools availble on the web.
Consider These Options For Your Contact Us Page:
- Phone Number
- Locations
- Mailing Address
- Feed link
- Subscription Box
- Easy Contact Form
- FAQ
- Forum
- Support Page
3 Responses to “The Evolution of the Contact Form”
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“Northwest eSource internet marketing methods get astounding results, and for pennies on the dollar compared to traditional marketing. We gave the go ahead on multiple forms of online advertising they recommended, and started closing big deals right away.”
- John Paliy, Owner of Comprite, Portland Computer Stores
Nice information. I have started including contact forms inline with the text of the webpage. Makes it real easy to contact me if needed.
Funnily enough I have a contact form inline in my FAQ page.
John.
I love it John, inline on the FAQ