No matter how good our intentions, sometimes answers to the biggest mysteries sit right under our collective noses. The noble contact page often gets ignored when it comes to evaluating and improving your site’s user experience, and ultimately conversion rate.
Why do we shirk contact pages toward the bottom of the priority list when it comes to website optimization? We underestimate the power they have. If someone comes to your website and wants to reach out to you, they are more than likely one step away from conversion. If you make accessing and using your contact page easy and safe you can take advantage of living leads.
When you optimize your website for conversion you seek to establish an organized pathway for potential customers to follow toward whatever action you desire. In very much the same way, your contact page should guide users toward inquiry. Continue reading for tips for designing a user friendly, lead generating contact page.
• Your Contact Page and Conversion
• Defining your Contact Page’s Goal
• Contact Page Navigation Tips
• Form Field Tips
• Communicating Trust with your Contact Page
Think about what a contact page actually does. Contact pages invite anyone who uses your site to communicate with you. You can never beat organic feedback, so create a great contact page and make use of this free advice. When someone accesses a contact page they make direct contact with the site owner, and often their inquiry involves questions regarding whatever service the site offers. Thus, contact pages play a role in moving users along the conversion pathway. An improved contact page will generate leads with questions that you can answer to guide them toward conversion, so don’t sleep on the importance of crafting them. A well presented contact page can even increase conversion rates by about 26%.
What does your site do? What service or product do you offer? You should ask yourself these questions when you design your contact page. Why, you may ask, should my service dictate how my users contact me? It’s not how they will contact you; most contact pages contain the same methods like email, phone, and social media. You must be concerned with why someone will contact you. So think, what do I want to offer in my contact pages? Is it an inquiry for consultation, employment, or product questions? Craft the copy surrounding your contact fields to communicate those defined goals. For example, this contact page asks which services you’re interested in, what kind of project you’d like to apply those services too, and even includes different email addresses for different types of inquiries. By defining your contact page’s goals you guide inquiring user’s toward whatever conversion you’d like to see.
Even if users have a dying need to tell you something they won’t persist if they cannot find your contact info. You want to make your contact page as accessible as possible, but what goes into this? First, you want to link your contact page to your whole website. Therefore, it can be helpful to include some sort of contact info at the top and bottom of all your website’s pages. However, you may need a full page for all of your definitions and info fields, so you may want to designate your contact info to one page, and place navigation links for it at the top and bottom of all other pages. That way wherever a user looks on your website they will see a way to reach your contact page.
Make sure you supply your contact page with only the most relevant and needed fields for users to fill out. The above contact page takes the less is more approach and only asks for name, email, subject of inquiry, and the message itself. However less is not always strictly more when it comes to form fields on contact pages, it really depends again on the service you provide and the goals you define for your contact page. Whatever info is most important to you, provide fields for. However, a good tip to remember is that too many fields at once can detract users from inquiring at all. Multi step contact pages can help. On multi step pages, users fill out some general contact info, click enter, and then are redirected to a page with the fields of info your site needs to get a better idea of the user’s inquiry.
With all the concerns people have about protecting their personal information, it makes sense they may be wary of just giving out contact info to some website that wants to sell them something. Therefore, your contact page should instill an air of trustworthiness and transparency. One way to do so is to take advantage of humans’ tendency of reciprocative altruism. Said another way, this is the, “if you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours,” phenomena. If users see that you don’t hesitate in sharing your contact info with them they will be compelled to reciprocate, and provide theirs. So be mindful to provide your email, phone, and address on your contact page. Another way your contact page can establish trust is by smart design. Clunky contact pages without well defined goals will not communicate trust to the user, as well as overly minimal contact pages where the rest of your sight is vibrant and well designed. Keep your contact page consistent with the rest of your site, because consistency will communicate trust as well.
Crafting and maintaining a good contact page can do wonders for user engagement and conversion rates. If you have any other tips for improving contact pages please comment them below!
