How Contact Forms Help or Hurt Your Online Business

Published September 6, 2010 by Doug Mansfield

If your business depends on sales leads, or in the case of attorneys potential new clients, then having a contact form is essential. Yes, you need a phone number, a street address establishes you as a “real business”, and an email address is good too, but the contact form holds a special significance and potential. And so many business owners, or the people they employ to build the website, get it wrong.

It has been my experience over years of testing that when given the choice between a contact form and a phone number, most people will use the contact form to ask for a quote, inquire about a potential case, or set an appointment.

Those in the yellow page and phone tracking sales industry will disagree. I’ve had many conversations with these folks and I usually hear that 80% or so of visitors prefer to dial a phone number. It will vary depending on your business but flip that number and you’ll be closer to my real world experience.

Why Contact Forms are Often Preferred

It may seem counter intuitive that people prefer forms. You may think people would prefer to speak with a live body when shopping for big purchase or service requiring a bond of trust. If you think that, or if that is your experience then consider this question – Has your web page, not site, established clearly that you are a trustworthy real business, or have you left that open for debate? You’re not still using that 90’s stock photo of the picture-perfect smiling operator or a cluster of suited professionals gathered around a laptop, people who obviously do not work there, are you?

Another reason why contact forms are used so often, and maybe a bigger one, is that the web allows people to browse products and services at work, when the kids are asleep, while carpooling, times they don’t want to have a discussion with a salesman or attorney. Using the contact form is a way of bookmarking a company they intend to get information from when it becomes convenient.

The Biggest Mistake With Contact Forms

There is one mistake with contact forms I see over and over, a mistake made far more often than any other. A mistake that could be costing you a significant number of leads and that is easy to correct. That mistake is asking for too much information on the form.

People hate long forms. Drop everything you don’t ABSOLUTELY need to know at this stage. And I can tell you what you absolutely need to know. Without knowing your business or what you sell, I can tell you. You need a name and a phone number, period. Those are the two fields that should be required for forms by most businesses. I personally add an optional email address and comments field in most cases but that is all.

As an example of what not to do, start browsing personal injury attorney websites. It won’t be long before you encounter this form – Date of injury? Medical treatment required? Nature of injury? Location of accident? Police report filed? And it goes on, sometimes much further. That’s a showstopper.

Were you not going to ask those questions again when they called anyway? Did you need to frisk your potential client at the front door to your firm? Is your intake department so busy you have to screen out callers? Never mind their privacy concerns, which they do have, you are turning business away. Get them in the door and let a trained professional sell your business.

And a few more tips to close this out – Do put a form one every applicable page; Stop using forms that require CAPTCHA; Do have a privacy policy which states how information will be used. Follow my advice and maybe you can gather a few more leads from the same traffic and the same budget.