Does your contact form help you land a sale? Your contact form is the bridge between your product and your customer. They like what they see, and they want to continue their buyer’s journey. The next step is contacting you. Have you built a bridge with your contact form that makes them feel safe or does it cause them to hesitate with uncertainty?
If you want to increase the traffic across your bridge here are five questions to ask yourself to evaluate your contact forms. To increase lead conversion rates, ask:
- Can customers easily contact me?When you are promoting a product or a service, your customer should be able to contact you with little effort. After your customer has evaluated your product, can they contact you immediately or do they have to jump through hoops? This is what we mean. Do they have to click multiple links to get to a contact us form or is the form readily available on the product or service landing page? Your contact form needs to be like a salesperson on the floor. It needs to be right there and ready for the customer to engage, but not in your face.
- Do my contact forms collect the information that matters?One of the biggest obstacles that prevent customers from filling out the contact form is the amount of information that is requested. The landing page contact form’s goal is not to close a sale, so you need to evaluate the stage of your sales process and make sure your contact form is asking for relevant information at that point in the sales process. If the landing page is an entry point to attract a customer, only ask for contact information like name, email and phone number. Asking for the right information is more welcoming than too much information.
- Am I tracking user behavior through the form process?Many times, organizations sit in a board room and wonder why they are not converting leads through their website contact forms. Their content may be right according to customer data, but the contact form submissions are not coming. We recommend that you integrate a tool like Crazy Egg to monitor user behavior on your landing pages. User behavior tools track mouse movement and form engagement. It will show you where customers are dropping off or if they are abandoning a form after a certain field. This data will help you optimize the form and ask the right questions so customers will complete the process.
- Is my contact form integrated with a CRM?It is very easy to overlook a contact form submission in your inbox when you get so many emails per day. This is why it is recommended to have your contact forms integrated into a CRM. The benefits of a CRM form capture include automated follow up based on your CRM configuration, the contact can be assigned to individuals, keeping record of their buyer journey and, most of all, the responsibility of follow up and management does not follow upon a single person. Even if you are a one-person company, a CRM platform can help you streamline your sales process so that you can more effectively close sales.
- What is my response time to a contact form submission?When you receive a contact form submission, do you follow up quickly or get to it when you can? If it is the latter, chances are you forget to follow up more often than not in a timely matter. Your response should be in a timely manner. We recommend that your response to a contact form should be the same business day or first thing the next business day. Any longer than that and you may have already lost them as a customer. We also recommend that in your form reply you state your response time, so the customer knows when to expect a call or email.
If you want to increase lead conversion rates, you need to remove preventable obstacles. By asking these five questions and making changes according to your answers, you will improve your customer’s buyer journey on your website and increase lead conversion rates. If you have questions about contact forms and inbound marketing strategies, contact us. We would love to talk to you.
