About Your Contact Form (Spam Collector)
Does your "Contact Us" from do anything for your marketing, or just collect junk from solicitors?
by Dave Maloney
You've learned that through Inbound Marketing your website can be an awesome tool to attract new prospective buyers to your business and generate new leads. Landing pages are pages on your site that have a form which interested visitors can fill out and submit. When they do, you now have their contact info in your leads database, and you can try to sell them something. Your "Contact Us" page is technically a landing page, but is it bringing you any business? No one is filling out your form and you don't know why.
Look at it from your visitor's point of view: "Why would I contact you? What's in it for me?" or in terms of an exchange: "What are you going to give me in exchange for my contact info? (I'm not going to fill a form for no reason!)" No one wants to give your their email address or phone number so you can try and sell them something. You have to offer something to make it worth their while. Even "Request an Estimate" is more direct than "Contact Us"; it specifically offers you an estimate in exchange for filling out the form.
If "Contact Us" is the only form you have on your site, you should try adding more specific forms on other pages. If you have Services pages, try a signup form to request a free 15 minute consultation or on Products pages, try a "Request a Demo" form. If you have more info that you can provide like a product brochure, offer a free download in exchange for filling out a form on a page (a landing page!) designated to explaining why they should sign up for it.
Be specific with your offer and direct in your instructions of what you want your visitor to do: "Sign up for a ..." The more obvious your message is, the better chances you have of getting them to fill out and submit. Make it overly simple; don't assume they'll be able to figure out what to do! Besides not offering anything in return, "Contact Us" is incredibly vague, and most of us have no idea what to do without a little direction. And make sure that form is readily available; if they have to look around at all for the next step, you've lost them.
Do you even need "Contact Us"?
Since companies began to realize in the mid-nineties that they should have a website, it's been standard that all websites have certain foundation pages in their navigation like "Home" and "Contact Us." Even though with SEO we don't need to have a page called "Home" anymore, as humans, our brains still need to know there's one there. Same with the "Contact Us" page: without one, the whole company might seem fictitious. But, if the only "leads" you are getting from the form on your "Contact Us" page are spam or other companies trying to sell you something, try going without the general contact form and try to entice some real people with more to-the-point messaging and specific offers.
©Pagetender LLC - Inbound Marketing - All Rights Reserved.