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Why add a contact form to your website?
With a custom fill-in-and-click style form you are providing your visitors with the fastest and easiest possible route of contacting you. Just count the steps someone has to take in order to send you a message from an independent program such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird or via a web based email account like Yahoo Mail and Gmail. The visitor must open a new browser, go to their email provider, sign-in, cut and paste (or worse, re-type) your email address into a message, and then finally fill out and submit the message. If your website doesn't have a web-based custom contact from and your competition does, chances are that you won't receive an inquiry but your competition will.
Too many steps and too many possible ways to become distracted. We've all seen homepages of email providers such as Yahoo and Aol. They're filled with advertisements and news stories and they run substantially slower than simple html and php/mysql driven websites. How often have you yourself gone to a web page for a specific purpose and ended up 15 clicks deep into something you had no intention of searching for? Its happened to me more times than I can count.
Not only is it useful to have your own custom contact form on your website in order to enable visitors to make inquiries and access information from you or your company, but they give us the capability to access information ourselves.
Custom contact forms can easily serve as a medium for surveys and poles and with a little insentive, it isn't difficult to motivate you website's visitors to send you beneficial information that can often be essential in improving and expanding your services and even adding content to your website.
Online business is about understanding the consumers behavior. To make a sale on the Internet you must keep your potential customer focused on your product or service and not willfully provide them with a means of distraction. A custom contact form is just one little step toward optimizing your site for maximum performance but as many business consultants will tell you, its the little steps that make the big difference.
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Nowadays online business and online purchases are becoming increasingly popular. It does not matter what business is your web-site about but feedback with customers or visitors is extremely important especially when the competition is very tough (Potts, 2007). One may or may not be aware of the benefits of using a contact form in the website opposed to simply providing an email address for your visitors or customers. A contact form is the element of the website that lets visitors fill in details under a number of fields. A typical contact form may have fields for the user to enter their name, phone number, email and query, then a customer clicks a button or link that submits this information to the website email (What are HTML forms and Contact Forms, 2008).
Why use a contact form?
First, lets look at why one must have a contact form on the website. They offer a number of advantages over merely offering your telephone number or email address to visitors. Your visitors are lazy; many of them will probably put off your website and your services at the smallest hurdle. While it is true that many clients like to discuss matters over the phone, not offering email communication is a big mistake (Chak, 2003). By the time the customer has got his phone and dialed your number, he might well have decided to look elsewhere for a similar service. Of course, offering email is good, but similarly, by the time a visitor has opened their email client, they might decide they would rather look elsewhere than type out an email to you (The Importance of A Contact Form on Your Website, 2008).A contact form within the website generates the highest response rate and the same time eliminates these worries: a visitor is likely to enter their name and a brief inquiry from within the browser than they write you an email or pick up the phone. You have removed several “barriers” between their experience on your website, and them getting in touch. They do not have to open any software or think too much. Even if their inquiry is very limited (a name and an email for instance) you have their contact details, you know they are interested and you are in a good position to follow up (Addison, 2005).
There are other advantages as well. Bots regularly scour the internet, picking up email addresses to spam. You can disguise your email address on your website by adding in spaces, but this can confuse some of your less computer savy visitors. Contact form is an effective tool in avoiding spam which has become a real disease now (Clark, 2003).
One step up from email is the contact form. This is an online form in which users can fill in their inquiry and contact information. The advantage of contact forms over email is that you can specify what information users are required to provide (Mumaw, 2002).
At a basic level, you should ask users to submit a message and to specify how they want to be contacted (either via a phone number or email). If you frequently get inquiries of a certain type, such as customer complaints or sales inquiries, you might consider having additional, specialized forms that ask additional questions to resolve the inquiry' more efficiently (Andersen, 2003). The caveat, however, is to make sure you don't combine these specialized forms with your general inquiries, so that users can just send in a message by itself if they want to (Cameron, 2008).