Did you know that many sales are lost just because of a poorly implemented contact form? To a potential customer, a form that’s hard to use or has glitches may be just enough to set them skittering away to your competition.
Here’s 11 handy tips for developing solid contact forms.
1. Don’t make people think too much
Use radio buttons, check boxes and multiple choice form elements wherever you can to shorten the amount of time an enquirer needs to spend completing the form.
2. Sufficient options.
It’s not uncommon to come across forms where dropdown boxes and other multiple choice features don’t include options relevant to the enquirer. Options such as “other” or “not sure” should be included for those people who may be confused with choices, or to whom the other choices do not apply.
3. CAPTCHA readability.
CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” and is often used on forms to reduce spam. It’s a great idea, but some CAPTCHA implementations use images that are nearly impossible to read. Ensure you use an image set that is easily human readable or include audio options.
4. Thank you pages – that work
How many times have you used a form, hit submit and then be presented with a “404 file not found” error page? This is really frustrating for the enquirer as they don’t know if their message got through. Ensure you test your thank you page each time you edit your contact form. A thank you page is also a good place to let people know when they can expect a response from you.
5. Minimum compulsory fields
I’ve seen some contact forms that had so many compulsory fields, it’s made me suspicious of what the company would do with the information. Only make compulsory what you really need to know, all other fields should be optional. Even then, keep them to a minimum – there’s nothing like a foot long form to scare people away.
6. Provide instructions
If you have form fields with validation rules, don’t make these a surprise. Give people tips on how to complete the field if you need information in a particular format.
7. Correct validation rules
Ensure the validation rules you have enough flexibility. A good example is where US merchants have have phone number validation rules that aren’t compatible with international number formats.
8. Relevant validation alerts
When using validation rules, ensure any alerts contain useful information as to why the input was incorrect rather than just stating “error”.
9. Validation timing
There is nothing so infuriating as completing a form, submitting it, getting a validation error, being returned to the form and finding all the info you entered is gone. This happens mostly with server side validation that’s been poorly implemented in the form processing script.
If this happens on your forms and you can’t fix the script itself, add some client side javascript validation. It’s easy to do and as that will be executed first before the form details are submitted to the server side processing script, it will avoid the problem.
10. Correct tab order
The tab key allows people to move from field to field in a form, check yours to ensure tabbing follows the form sequence.
11. Easily accessible
Your contact form should be accessible with a single click from any point on your site. People look for contact form links under menu items such as “company”, “about” or in the footer.
A good contact form is such an important part of the sales process and client retention;, so it should be given special attention rather than hastily slapped up.
