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Over 63% of businesses consider a lead generation to be their top priority, with contact forms being the most significant source of inbound leads for most companies.
Without a contact form on your site, you are missing out on an opportunity to get in touch with your prospective leads. On the contrary, a well-designed contact form helps businesses boost their conversion rates and makes it easier to collect essential info about prospective clients. Contact forms also provide an alternative way for existing customers to get in touch with you, as well as share their thoughts and concerns on their current projects.
These factors make contact forms a major component of any well-converting website.
In this article, we will explore 8 major benefits of having a contact form on your site. We will also provide you with some tips on how to create an effective contact form to boost your conversion rates.
Curious to know why having a contact form is a must for any website? Read on!
What Is a Contact Form and How Do I Make One?
A contact form is a snippet of code placed on different pages of your site or as a popup. It allows you to collect the essential information about your users through custom input fields.
Once a user fills out the contact form, you will receive a notification about the lead submission, which will be stored in a separate database. If you wish, you can create automated response messages for people who submit their information. You can even export all the leads’ data with one click.
There are two different ways to create and add a contact form to your site:
- Using a Plugin (simple but less customizable): You do not need to know how to code to build a web-based contact form. There are hundreds of different visual form builders that allow you to create appealing forms using drag-and-drop editors. After you complete your form, all you have to do is copy and paste the code directly on your site. WPForms and MightyForms are both great options.
- Custom Code it (more complicated but fully customizable): If you know HTML and CSS, or have a team of developers working on your site, you might want to use a custom-coded solution. While this approach takes more time, it will also give you full control over how your contact form works and feels. With custom code, all form elements (overlay, placement, design, buttons, animations) can be customized. If you are running a well-known brand that is easily recognizable for its color palette, custom graphics, and unique designs – this is the way to go.
If you’re still not sure how best to implement forms on your website – you can reach out to a full-service marketing agency to get this done for you.
8 Reasons to Have a Custom Contact Form on Your Site
Now we’ve looked at how contact forms work, let’s take a closer look at the main benefits of including a custom form on your website.
#1: Get to Know Your Users and Increase Website Engagement
Submitting information via a contact form is a convenient way for your users to inquire more about your services. As a business owner, contact forms provide a streamlined way to manage prospect and client communication. It centralizes the collection of essential information through one main channel.
Communicating through forms is a simple and engaging way to connect with your users. In fact, 49.7% of all US businesses deem contact forms the most significant source of incoming leads.
PRO TIP: Research has shown that five-field forms drive the biggest conversion rates. If you exceed the five-field outlay on your form, you are at risk of increased form abandonment rates (when users close your forms before submitting them).
#2: Save Your and Your Clients’ Time
Having your email or phone number thrown onto the footer of your website is not a very convenient way to connect with your potential and existing customers. Emails are time-consuming to compose, while phone calls can be long-winded, costly from a resources perspective, and frustrating if customers have to wait in line for a while. Moreover, emails and calls do not help your customers understand from the get-go the kind of information you need from them to better address their queries.
This lack of clarity slows down the process of capturing essential information about your users. Form fields, on the other hand, tell users exactly what kind of information they need to provide so that you can respond to their queries effectively.
#3: Make Your Website More User-Friendly
Having an easily accessible contact form will make it quicker for users to get in touch with you if they have any questions. Whenever users face a problem- they can always reach out to you for a solution, even outside of business hours. As for companies, contact forms make it easier to streamline the information flow and storage of your leads’ data.
PRO TIP: If your business has multiple departments and a reasonably complicated product or service structure, you might want to create separate contact forms for the different products or departments. This way, messages about completely different aspects will never get mixed up.
#4: Reduce the Spam Coming to Your Website
If you decide to leave your email on your contact page instead of opting for a contact form, you will put yourself at risk of spam bot targeting. In fact, 46.7% of all worldwide emails in Q1 2021 were spam emails. Disclosing your email openly on a contact page makes you an easy target.
Forms, on the other hand, have effective anti-spam solutions that you can implement into your contact form:
- Captchas – Are you a robot? We all had to answer this seemingly silly question at least once. Put a Captcha into your contact form to prevent the spam submissions of traffic in just one click. The downside is that your users will have to tick one more box and wait 1-2 seconds more before submitting the form.
- Honeypot – Unlike Captcha, this solution does not alter the look and feel of your form in any way. Instead, Honey Pot uses complex algorithms to capture spam leads and block the traffic coming from hackers. Please note that this is a more advanced solution to avoid spam.
- Anti-spam plugins – If you are running a WordPress solution, one of the easiest ways to block spam traffic would be to download and install an anti-spam plugin. These plugins have various settings to block incoming spam in seconds.
#5: Grow Your Newsletter List
Most web form builders have a convenient “subscribe to our newsletter” checkbox. It is a simple way to get some extra newsletter subscriptions that requires no effort from your side. Around 2% of visitors who fill out the forms end up subscribing to a company newsletter, which makes contact forms a hassle-free extra source of leads for your campaigns.
#6: Automate the Lead Nurturing Process
You can program your forms to send automated responses to your leads. For instance, whenever someone submits a form requesting more info about your services, you can send them an automated email with a service pitch deck attached. If you connect your form to a third-party email marketing tool (like ActiveCampaign), the possibilities for automation become limitless. Such tools allow you to create custom workflows depending on the information that leads submit in the form.
For instance, if you are an online sports equipment reseller, you can create a separate email flow for people who submit a query about skydiving, and a different email list for leads who enjoy dirt bike riding. This way you can guarantee the right content is shared with the right audience.
#7: Look More Professional and Reinforce Trust
Think of your contact form as the continuation of your brand – it is one more opportunity for you to communicate your central values through form graphics and copy. A clear and well-created form leaves a long-lasting and positive impression, while also reinforcing trust in your products and services.
On the other hand, simply including your email and phone number in the footer of your website is not recommended from a UI or UX perspective. Users can easily miss this information, which puts you at risk of losing a potential lead.
#8: A Dedicated Database of Your Clients
Let’s face it – managing your leads directly through email is a highly chaotic process:
- Emails can get lost in your inbox. You will need to spend a lot of time sorting and filtering them manually to make sure you don’t miss anything.
- Emails and calls are not stored in one place, which makes the process of following up with customers slower and more complicated
On the other hand, the information captured from lead forms is all stored in one separate database at all times. You can easily export this data into a CSV file at any moment and streamline your responses. Best of all, you can connect your lead form directly with the CRM of your choice. This way, all your leads’ data will become instantly available to your sales team, making it much easier to nurture potentials.
Ready to Increase Conversions from Your Forms?
When done well, you can implement contact forms on your website to harness all of the benefits mentioned. After all, lead generation forms are not only a great way to engage with your audience and get more leads, but they can also help you in many aspects of your business, by:
- Saving time and money
- Providing better protection from spam
- Automating lead nurturing activities
- Growing your newsletter
- Increasing the user-friendliness of your site
- Streamlining client communication and feedback
If you still don’t have a contact form on your site, there’s no time like the present! Having a limited budget or a lack of coding knowledge is no excuse either. You can start with a form builder and then transition to a custom contact form when the time is right.
Setting up a custom form solution can get a little technical, but partnering with a trustworthy software development agency is always a great option.
