I am a huge fan of contact forms on WordPress blogs and sites, and have been for years. If you go to my site and look at one of my pages, you’ll see what I mean.
WordPress has some very nice simple contact form plugins, like Contact Form 7 and Simple Contact Form, but for versatility and robustness, I prefer forking out a few bucks for Gravity Forms.
So what are the benefits of a installing premium contact forms?
Done right, contact forms go way beyond just getting information from a reader, customer or client. You can use them to encourage a customer to dig deeper into your offerings, give her ideas for even more uses for the products or services you provide, even answer questions that will help you improve content, delivery and service.
Here are 5 tips for powering up your contact forms:
1. Make it easy to find by putting a “contact us” in your navigation bar.
Sounds obvious? In reality, especially on blogs, I find that contact information is often hidden at the bottom in—6-point font.
When you do that, you are saying, “I don’t really want you to contact me so I’m making it as hard as possible.”
Who would want to do that?
2. Make your main contact form more robust.
A little over a year ago one of the social media gurus said on his blog, “By simply giving your readers more choices, your contact form will generate more contacts”.
Well, yes, but it’s not such a new idea. Some of us have been doing that for quite some time.
Instead of just asking for name, email and a space for comments, give them check boxes or a drop-down menu with options. For example, “I want to hire you,” and “I have a question.” If you are a designer, perhaps, “I need a quote for a site redesign,” “I need a logo,” and “I want to migrate my site to WordPress.” You get the idea,
This will plant ideas in your readers’ minds and get them thinking more specifically about what they want. Heck, you may just give them an idea for something they didn’t even realize they needed—until now.
3. Consider installing more than just one contact form.
On my site, whenever I create a page with a service or product, I place a form there, on that page, so they can give me more info of their needs. It gives them the opportunity to act now, and once they submit the form they are redirected to the payment page.
Remember, the more click-throughs someone has to make, the more likely it is that they will abandon the transaction.
4. Think beyond the basic contact form.
The more robust contact forms, like Gravity Forms, can be used in many different ways. How about creating a questionnaire for your potential clients, asking them more specifics about their needs? Or creating a multi-page questionnaire asking for feedback on your services—or something else?
The possibilities are practically endless.
5. Consider using CAPTCHA.
Now I’m not a huge fan of CAPTCHA (that old “copy these distorted letters and numbers” box), especially when you are using it for comments on your blog. But for forms, I use it to weed out the spammers.
Otherwise, you are going to get people filling out the form to sell their SEO services to you. CAPTCHA doesn’t stop it all, but it does cut it down.
There you go. Five ideas for making your contact forms work harder for you.
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About Bob Dunn
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