The Contact Us page plays a critical role in most websites. For many organizations, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the entire website exists to support the Contact Us page. But how usable is your contact page? Despite its central role, Contact Us often fails to get the attention it deserves at a number of levels.
First, are you giving proper prominence to the Contact Us link? Users have come to expect a link labeled “Contact Us” readily available on every page, so place it in the primary navigation or quick links in the header and/or footer, and don’t give it a cute name. Usability demands we give users what they expect.
Second, with regards to the actual content of the Contact Us page, are you steering users to contact you in your preferred method? If you want phone calls, you should feature a single number prominently so users don’t have to sift through a bunch of explanatory text and department labels to pick from among different numbers. Is your brick-and-mortar location important? Then an interactive map and directions will help. If you want emails, there are advantages to providing a Web form instead of simply displaying email addresses.
Finally, providing a Web form can be valuable in a number of ways:
- It lowers the barrier to contact by saving users the step of opening their separate email program.
- Also, your form provides clues indicating to the user what information you need to be able to serve them well, and that info can be used on your end to respond to the inquiry in the most appropriate way.
- You get the additional benefit of asking users to opt in to your email marketing.
- Streamlined business processes (see below).
It is essential, however, to avoid scaring them away with a huge Web form. Increase your chance of a submission by collecting the absolute minimum you need to make the form useful.
GA custom report showing Web form submission rate (goal1)
Is your website analytics package set up to monitor your contact page? If you use Google Analytics (free), you can define a Web form submission as a successful conversion, and thereby report on its performance. Then you can answer questions like what is my conversion rate? What traffic source leads to the most conversions? Do users abandon my site from the contact page? Could my Web form be too intimidating?
Using a Web form provides abundant opportunities to streamline your business processes around contacts received via the website. One popular approach is to eliminate data re-entry by routing the form data directly into your CRM, and even setting up automatic responses to common requests (how many times have you sent out the same PDF info packet?). SalesForce, for one, makes this super easy, and we’re fielding many requests for help getting this and other SalesForce customizations into place.
