The contact form is one of the more tried-and-true lead generation tools that one can include on their website. It’s a fairly simple yet effective tool for gathering the information of potential customers. Website visitors enter basic contact information such as their name, phone number, email address and a brief message. Depending on the form’s purpose or complexity of the business’ products or services, more information may be required. The expectation, however, with any contact form is that the customer will receive a response back from the business within a reasonable period of time.
After following up on the potential lead, businesses can utilize the information gathered through the contact form in several other ways.
If email marketing makes sense for the business, it might be worthwhile to target the contacts gathered through the contact form with a campaign offering discounts, specials, promotions or just to thank the customer for his or her business. In any case, be sure to always include the option to unsubscribe, as many people don’t respond well to out-of-the-blue marketing emails.
Marketers can also use the information collected via the contact form to supplement their demographics database. If mailing address is a required field in the form, marketers can use this information to get an idea of where their potential customers reside. Another subtle way to acquire this information is making the phone number a required field – by doing so you will receive the customer’s area code, thereby giving you a ballpark of where they live.
Getting back to the overall purpose of the contact form, content management systems such as WordPress afford web designers the ability to really customize their website. In the context of contact forms, this means the ability to have more than one type of contact form present on the website. For example, if you are a local contractor who offers a wide variety of services, why not have separate contact forms for painting, plumbing and electrical work? Having separate forms also lets you to keep track of which services you are receiving the most submissions for, effectively allowing you to make needed changes to pages that are not generating many leads.
A final added benefit of contact forms is that, built properly, they are great attention-grabbers. A shared goal of every web marketer is to keep visitors onsite long enough to convert. Thus, in theory, the more contact forms you have throughout your website, the better chance you have of collecting leads.