Last year I wrote a post on some of the reasons a website’s contact form might not be working. I highlighted some quite technical reasons why a form might not be working, and why you might not be receiving business through your website.
However, I felt this point was worth reiterating as, even now, I come across websites for small businesses where their contact forms simply do not work, and the business owner has no idea.
Imagine spending money on a website – whether it’s a very small amount of money or a very large amount money makes no difference – and receiving absolutely no business through it. Imagine investing more money in Google paid ads, Facebook ads, printed material, email marketing, SEO or some other form of advertising and still receiving absolutely no business from it.
Imagine writing blogs for your website or, worse yet, paying someone else to write them for you, and then sharing those blogs via your social media channels and still receiving absolutely no business from it.
Imagine doing all of this for several months, maybe a year or more, and still receiving absolutely no business from it.
Then imagine it was because your contact form didn’t work, and you have no idea how many people have tried to contact you and failed. You have no idea how much business you have lost as a result.
That, sadly, is the case for many business owners. They assume their contact form works. Why wouldn’t it? If something worked when it was designed, built and put live, you would expect it to still work now.
That’s not the case. As my previous blog stated, there are a number of reasons why a contact form may suddenly stop working. That’s why, at Engage Web, we check the contact forms on all of our SEO clients’ websites every month. We check they’re working, and that the client receives the message.
We also monitor contact form submissions in Analytics to track the sources of the enquiries. If you don’t know where your business is coming from, how can you hope to increase it?
So what can you do?
First of all, set yourself a regular task each month (or each week, if you have time) to check your website’s contact form. Fill in the form as though you were a potential customer. Make sure the form works, and that you (the customer) see the correct confirmation message. Then make sure you receive the message where it should be received.
Also, make sure the message you receive contains the necessary information, such as the name of who sent it, what they’re looking for and how you can contact them.
If you don’t receive it, contact your website host (or website designer) immediately and let them know. They should be able to fix it for you. If they can’t, give Engage Web a call.
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