What is the main purpose of your website? Unless you are selling products through the site, it’s likely that the primary purpose of your site is to get people to contact you. It’s great to let them see the services or products you offer but ultimately you want them to get in touch. That’s what your contact form is for.
With a contact form visitors can send you a message direct from the site. They don’t have to pick up the phone or switch to their email application or decide to make a cup of tea first. If people are searching online for the services that you offer, it’s likely they’re looking at several sites one after another. It’s far easier for them to quickly fill in a form than to pick up the phone and make a call.
The key word here is ‘quickly’. The fewer fields you make your visitor fill in, the more enquiries you will get. Only ask for the absolute bare minimum of information, ideally just your visitor’s name, email address and brief message. You can then follow up with an email and initiate a full discussion. Asking people to fill in their addresses, how they found your site, or what they had for dinner last night is just off-putting and will cost you money.
We’ve taken it a step further on this site. If you click Contact, the form will appear over the current page. That way, once the visitor has sent their message, they go straight back to the content they were looking at without having to fiddle around with the ‘Back’ button to find the page they were on. It makes the experience that little bit nicer and hopefully keeps the visitor on the site longer.
Be kind to your users – give them a nice short form to complete. It will pay for itself many times over.
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[...] isn’t a shop. Often it’s simply that you would like people to contact you, in which case your contact form needs to be clear and simple to use. Other possible outcomes to sites might include user contribution – e.g. on forums or in [...]