You could be forgiven for thinking digital marketing was all about rankings in search engines. The way some people describe what they do – especially in blog posts, social medial posts and email pitches – that can appear to be all it is.
However, you don’t increase your business just from improved search engine rankings. That is merely a means to an end. One such end is the contact form on your website. If your primary goal with digital marketing is to receive leads via your contact form, you’ll need to ensure yours works, is easy to use and gets used often.
Many business owners, and indeed digital marketing companies, fall down at this part of the process though. Your rankings may have increased, your traffic may have increased, but have your enquires? Are you getting the leads?
If you’re not getting the leads you want via your website, here are seven of the main reasons why:
1. Your website lacks credibility
Does your website have a clearly visible contact number, email address and physical address? If you expect someone to trust you enough to fill in your contact form and send you their contact details, they need to know where you are and that you’re real. Whether or not you want people turning up at your office, or calling you on the phone, you need to display a physical address and a contact number. The absence of one is suspicious, and will reduce the number of enquiries you receive.
2. Your contact form captcha is too difficult
Nobody likes to receive spam through their contact forms. This is why many forms use captcha, to stop automated spam being sent through them. Incidentally, ‘captcha’ is an acronym and stands for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’ – with Turing being Alan Turing, the inventor of the modern computer.
Some captcha tests are genuinely difficult and annoying, such as the wavy words you need to copy out correctly, where the number 1 could easily be a capital I. If you get it wrong, you need to try again. Nobody wants to do that. Then there are the ones where you have to select the boxes that contain road signs, or ladders, or bicycles – some of the pictures are unclear, or blurry. They’re hard for humans, never mind robots.
We recommend using Google’s reCAPTCHA v3, as it’s completely hidden from the user’s view and works in the background. There are no tests for people to do, and it does eliminate spam.
3. Your contact form is hard to find
If someone lands on a page of your website from a Google search, how easy is it for them to find your contact form? Can they enquire from the page they have landed on? They really should be able to. Do they have to click on a contact link and be taken to another page? Is the contact link even easier to spot?
If you’re making it difficult for people to even find your contact form, is it any wonder you’re not getting enquiries?
4. Your contact form is too long
In order to receive an enquiry, there is a certain level of information you will need, such as the person’s name, their email address and their contact number. However, do you really need their company name, their address, the subject line of their enquiry and how they found you? The longer you make the form, and the more fields you ask people to fill in, the fewer enquiries you will receive.
Make your form as short as possible. If you’re not absolutely certain you need a particular piece of information, remove it from the form.
5. Your form styling looks poor
Is your contact form a nice, inviting form for people to fill in? Are the fields nice and big? Is the text style within the fields easy to read, with a clear font and strong colour contrast with the field background? Or is your form unsightly, small and dark? Are the fields really tight, with a small font and a tiny submit button?
Try filling in your own contact form using your smartphone. Is it easy to do?
While we’re on the subject…
6. Your form doesn’t work properly on a smartphone
With over half of all Google searches now conducted on tablets and smartphones, it’s essential your contact form works just as well on these devices as it does on a desktop computer. It needs to be clear, and fit the mobile screen perfectly. Also check for anything that covers the form, or stops it from working, such as mobile menus, cookie notices or floating graphics.
7. Your form validation isn’t clear
This one seriously annoys me. You’re filling in a form, you’ve taken some time over it, you’ve pressed submit and you get a validation error telling you something has been missed. What’s worse, it was something you didn’t know you needed to fill in.
It could be a dropdown on the Title field, where you needed to select Mr., Mrs. or whatever else was required, and this wasn’t selected by default. It could be a check box you didn’t know you needed to fill in. It could be the request for a home number that, for some reason, was also required even though a mobile number had been filled in.
If you have required fields in your form, have them clearly marked as required. Don’t make fields required just for the sake of it. Anyone who gets a validation error may well not bother to try again.
There are a number of reasons why your contact form may not be getting used as often as you’d like and, at Engage Web, we’d be happy to take a look for you and diagnose the reasons you’re not getting the enquiries you want through your website. Give us a call on 0345 621 4321 and we’d be happy to help you.
Or you could use our contact form… where was that now? Oh yes, right here!
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