If you have a business website, a travel blog, an online shopping platform or any other type of website, then you know the importance of communicating with your visitors. Whether to inquire the price of your services or praise your photography skills, your visitors would also appreciate the opportunity to communicate with you. To make it possible, you can add a contact form to your website.
What is a contact form?
It is basically a set of questions the visitors of your website fill to reach you. It is usually found at the end of the landing page or on an individual page. When visitors fill the form and hit submit, an email will be automatically sent to you.
Why should you create it?
While simply sharing your email in your website does the same job, having a contact form option is essential for the following reasons:
- Security: The most important reason for having a contact form on your website is to reduce spam. Spam is the ban of online existence. Spambots crawl through the internet looking for unprotected emails. Contact forms will keep your website and email box secure from such problems.
- Information: When you add a contact form to your website, you can control the information you receive by adding an additional field to your contact form that specifically asks for what you want. For example, if you have a publishing house, you can add options so the users select between authors, readers, bookstores or agents. By doing that you can easily filter inquiries and save a lot of time.
- Convenience: Simply sharing your email or phone number on your website will make it possible for users to contact you 24/7, which is great for them but highly inconvenient for you. With a contact form, you control what and when you receive via email. It can also be more convenient for the users, as they only have to fill out the form and hit submit without opening an email software.
How to create a valid contact form?
Contact forms vary depending on the website platform you used to build your website. Some require a simple plug-in while others need some HTML CSS coding. Whichever website builder you used, your contact form should include the following:
A functional unique design
The design of your contact form can be straightforward and functional or it can be unique and creative. It depends on what the purpose of your website is. For example, if you have an interior designing business, you can show off your work by including pictures of it in the background. If you have a law firm, on the other hand, the form should be more to the point.
Name
Of course, you would want to know the name of the person contacting you. Additionally, if the user contacting you is a part of a company, you can ask for the name of the company they are representing, the position of the sender in it and what type of business they have.
Type of inquiry
As we said earlier, you can use contact forms to organize the types of inquiries you get by adding information fields to the form. You can ask if they are selling, buying etc. It would make much easier to filter the inquiries and forward the right email to the right person.
Contact information
You can ask users to list their contact information in the form, in case you want to have further communication with them. You could ask for their email addresses and phone numbers. Furthermore, you can use a phone number validator to check if the phone numbers they shared are correct and callable.
Address
If your business relies on sending people products, then you must add an address field to your form. This will make it easier for you to know where the inquiry came from and for your visitors to know how long it may take for their purchases to arrive. It is, however, essential for you to use an address validation service, to ensure that the addresses shared with you are valid and reachable.
Attach a file
If the users contacting you are facing a problem in your website, they are going to want to send you a screenshot of that problem, or maybe the users would want to send you a contract, a video or a presentation. Whatever the reason behind the contact, they might want to attach a file with it. So make sure they can, by adding an “Attach a file” field.
Message
The person contacting you is going to have something to say, so give them a box to fill out with comments. You can put a character limit on the box to keep the messages you receive short and straight to the point.
Call-to-action button
After you decide which fields you want to add to your contact form, finish it all with a call-to-action button. It can be witty saying something like “Contact a Human” or simply “Submit”. That depends on you and your website.
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