How to improve a contact form for more conversion?
What is the first thing that a website visitor or your user or your reader looks into your website when he faces some issue?
Your “Contact Us” button. And if you made it difficult for him to contact you, it is a big loss for your organization. As fellow marketers, product people, and owners we put on each and every effort possible to attract more number of website visitors, generate more leads, more conversions and yes, more money. But sometimes in the midst of all this we forget to optimize the very important contact form and make some huge mistakes in it.
Ideally, a contact form serves as a bridge between your potential leads and your products and services and the easier it is to contact you through it, the better. Your visitors can contact you for anything like sales request, support request, press request, getting in touch for demo, or any other reason hence you should make it accessible and contactable for all.
A contact form acts as a Salesman for your business which acts 24*7 without even being noticed.
So, if you craft it strategically the right way, it can also act as a sales funnel for your business. But the question again arises, how can I optimize my contact form for more conversion and sales?
Well, the one-liner answer will be “Keep it short and simple!” but there is a lot more to it, besides keeping it short and simple.
What Should I do to Improve My Contact Form Conversions?
Well, to understand this in depth, let’s take a brief survey. Answer the following questions in your mind and then we will figure out the best and feasible option, together.
1. What is one thing that attracts you to go to the contact form and send the message?
2. What acts as a turn off when you are on the contact form and then you come back without sending the message?
3. Which details will you hesitate providing to the company you are contacting?
4. Do you feel your information is safe with the organization?
5. Will I even get a reply from them?
So, these are some of the questions that a person is generally concerned about while filling in contact details in a contact form. And some of these concerns ultimately lead the person bouncing back if he remains confused on your contact form. So, how to address these concerns?
1. How Does Your Contact Us Form Look?
Well, you might be thinking, does this really matter? I understand, design is something not everyone is concerned about BUT when it comes to conversions, design helps you to boost conversions!
Yes, a form design is a part of the overall user experience of your website and happy users and customers are always the ones who had a great time visiting your website.
If you design your form attractive and eye catching it shows that your company is tech savvy, stays up to the trends, is thoughtful and attracts more customers.
If you open a contact form and unfortunately it looks like A what is the first feeling that you get?
Ah! Nevermind, and if it looks like B, you won’t even get a feeling (negative or positive). You’ll just focus on what you’re here for, contacting.
But in case of A you might get a bit of confusion about the business and will then explore more or let your second thought overcome a bit and explore further before contacting. So, a bad user interface on a contact form also affects the decision making capability of a user.
Research shows that the User Interface is directly related to the credibility of your business. No matter how great product or services you have, a bad user interface takes it all away.
Don’t hesitate trying beautiful designs and colored CTAs in your contact form.
2. What is the Position of Your Contact Form
Position of your contact form also plays a major role in conversions. If you perform a depth analysis of your website, you’ll see that a major portion of the traffic drops after the first fold. And only 20% of the visitors make it to the end.
As you can see, the placement of the contact us form is also a vital factor in calculating the conversion rate. Hence, a contact form should always be placed in the first fold of the Contact page and other elements should be strategically placed around it.
If your contact form serves you a major role in conversions, like the ones for sales request, it should not be placed at the bottom of the page, as it might not be visited by majority of your visitors.
It is advised to use a separate Contact-us page having a contact us form. It makes it easier for visitors to navigate and contact.
3. Limit the Form Fields
Length of the form directly affects the user and user can make a decision impulsively after seeing a long contact form. It is a proven fact that the more the number of fields in your form, the lesser the conversion.
Decreasing a single form field can help improve the conversion rate by 50%. So, if you look from conversion’s point of view, it becomes important for you to ask the users only for the very important information in lesser fields. Contact forms having 3 form fields have proven to be the most converting.
So avoid asking user for unnecessary fields and information and try to keep the contact form short and simple.
4. Using Captcha, Nah!
Including a captcha on your contact us form helps you avoid spam and robots attack at one place, however, sometimes it can be a bit annoying. I myself, being a human (real 😉 ), am sometimes unable to pass the captcha test in single attempt and it is really annoying.
If this is the case with your users as well, they might not even submit the form even after filling it. Just like I do. 😉
According to a study by MOZ,
When CAPTCHA’s are on, the company could possibly lose out on 3.2% of all their conversions!
Hence, we need to make the process easier for the users, they should not be annoyed while filling out the form or while submitting it.
So it is advised to make it less painful for the users.
5. Does it work in All Devices Well, Including Mobile?
Compatibility of your contact form with all devices is one thing which we miss out on sometimes. If we create the best contact us form, suitable for most conversions, optimized it, stuck to all the rules and design it and once the user gets to know about you while surfing the internet on his phone, laying in his bed, he opens the website, plans to contact you and ah! your form breaks on it! Can you imagine the scenario?
Not just this, the form fields on your contact form should be such that they do not create trouble on your mobile. Say, if you have a field for selecting country, you’d not want the users to go through a list of 160 countries in order to reach their respective country.
Or you’d not want to bother them in date selection anywhere where they have to zoom the screen and select the correct date. The form fields should be made mobile compatible as majority of your audience will be coming through mobile. Once you make it mobile friendly, do not forget to test it on various mobile platforms like android and iOS as one form might work on one device but can create problems on the other.
You can use a tool like LambdaTest which provides you a platform to test contact forms and web pages on various mobile and desktop devices.
6. Create Trust with Your Customers
If your customers are reaching out to you through a contact us form, you might be familiar with them or you might be a completely new entity for them. If it is the latter case, they are reaching out to a completely new entity on the internet and if you’re asking them personal details like email ID, phone number they will surely be hesitant providing you this information first. So, you’ll need to build trust with them. Tell them that their data is safe with you! Assure them and build a relationship with them.
Let them know that you’re there to help them. They can contact you whenever they need and create a personal touch with them.
A way to create trust and make them believe that you’re safe to contact is to include your contact details like phone number, address, and your map to the contact page. These elements when placed strategically near your contact form helps the users to believe you’re real and trustworthy.
If you look at these contact forms by PixPa and TopTal, you’ll get a sense of their originality as compared to a simple form. There is nothing wrong with creating a simple form with no more details, but, these small things make a change.
7. Avoid Distractions on the Page
Since from the beginning, we’re talking about more conversions on contact page, so in such a case we can not miss distractions. As distractions are one of the major factors that cause your audience to bounce back from your page without contacting you!
Avoid using other CTAs and popups on your contact us page or near the contact form. Provide just the relevant information near to it.
8. Tell them What Comes Next?
Once your user has submitted the contact us form, it is your immediate step to tell them what comes next?
Send them a Thank You note and tell them that they will hear back from you soon! An email for additional details like request ticket number, estimated time for the revert serves as icing on the top. They feel safe and ensured that you’ll get back to them. Just a small gesture can add a lot of value to your business and helps customers trust you more.
9. Phone Number and Address?
There is no surprise that adding phone number and address to your contact form fields decreases conversion rates. In a study on 40000 pages, it has been reported that adding phone number results in a drop of 5% in form submissions. One more study was conducted to address the same and surprisingly, it was found that addition of telephone in form fields caused 37% abandonment of form. However, if you keep the field “optional” or just remove it, your conversion rates can double.
If you’re asking for personal details like the place where your users live, it is quite predictable that your conversion rate will go down. It is likely to see a drop of 1–5% in conversion rate if you ask for address in your contact form.
10. Use Autofill
What is better than the form that fills itself?
Enabling autofill saves the customers from typing some basic details which can be easily filled by autofill.
Details like First Name, Last name, email address, contact number(if you’re using one), Organization name can be easily filled by autofills. So, save your users from the pain of typing these basic details and help them select using the autofill.
11. Test Shortcuts like Tab, Enter on Your Form
Users are so used to using shortcuts, they almost get irritated if the shortcuts on your form doesn’t work. Shortcuts add to the accessibility of your website or contact form and users don’t like to switch between keyboard and mouse everytime they select a new field (and if the form is longer, it is even worse).
It is normal human tendency to go for tab and press enter as hard as possible after filling the form, it is like a winning situation when someone press a hard enter at the end 😉. So, to make your form more accessible and user friendly, test if the keyboard shortcuts work as predicted.
In short, making a contact form user friendly and simple is the key to more conversions. Try keeping cognitive overhead in your design to as little as possible and avoid user from putting too much stress in filling your form. Make a trust with the user, help him through the way and assure him of the best. If you keep the following in mind while designing a contact form, you’ll grab the best conversion rate for your contact form.
In the end, go back to the beginning of the article and ask yourself, if while designing have you answered the five questions? If yes, you’re already a step ahead in improving your contact form conversions!
If you have any questions or would like to add anything, let me know in the comments section below.
Happy converting!
Originally published at: https://education.microsoft.com
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