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Have you ever heard of the Seahawks’ 12th Man? Those who follow football know that only 11 players from each team are allowed on the field at any given time. However, Seattle’s fans have been branded as the “12th Man” because of the profound effect their vocal presence and support has had on the Seahawks’ games.
That’s how we feel about websites. They might not be a living, breathing team member who can call leads and attend company meetings, but they are still a very important part of a business’s sales, marketing, and customer relationship efforts.
When executed well, a WordPress website will help businesses achieve a number of those goals. While the goals may vary based on the type of business or services offered, there is one universal goal that every website strives for: lead generation. And to generate leads, you need to offer a way for customers to engage with you, whether that be through a phone call, email, live chat, social media inquiry, or by filling out a form. It’s the latter that we’re going to focus on today.
The Logic Behind Contact Forms
Today’s consumer prefers a multi-channel communication approach. What does this mean exactly? Well, consumers want options. Gone are the days of phone book searches in order to find a business’s contact info. There are now more options available –and consumers expect to have access to them. That’s why a website is an essential contact point for every business, from the independent blogger to the multi-chain retailer.
When someone Googles the type of service or information they’re looking for and finds your website, that’s the first step in their customer journey. It’s then your job to guide them through the rest of that journey and to the end-goal: contacting you. Regardless of which method of communication visitors to your WordPress site prefer, it’s important to have contact forms at the ready. And when these are planned out properly, landing those conversions will be a piece of cake.
7 Reasons You Need Contact Forms
Every business and, consequently, every website, wants to achieve the same thing. They want to reach the right audience—the audience who needs their services, information, or products and are willing to contact you to learn more. There is a lot of work that goes into driving the right traffic to your site, but once they’re there, it’s your job to call them to action.
Contact forms are a very popular form of CTA as their inherent nature is to help businesses and customers (or prospects) more easily engage with one another. And because of this, there are a number of benefits you can expect from using contact forms on your WordPress website:
Make It Easy: By including simple forms that require minimal contact info in exchange for what visitors want, you’re giving them a no-fuss solution to reach you. It also puts the onus on you to make that phone call or send that email, which many customers will find an attractive option.
Protect Yourself: Spammers and spambots are known for sweeping websites in search of mailto: tags, so publishing your email address information on your website may be opening you up to a number of vulnerabilities. To save yourself the hassle (and possible security threats), contact forms are a great alternative for the visitors who want to message you online.
Save Time: There are many ways contact forms help businesses save time: 1) Less of a need for cold calling. 2) Less data entry when contact forms are linked to a CMS. 3) Less need for back-and-forth when FAQs and next steps can be shared during or after the contact form submission process.
Collect Consistent Information: Whatever information is needed from a visitor (general contact info or perhaps more comprehensive answers regarding their needs), contact forms ensure that businesses are collecting the same info from everyone, every time.
Stay Organized: Contact forms are a great way to help businesses keep their customer and lead information organized with electronic records from every submission.
Generate Leads: Even if you’re using forms for content giveaways, surveys, or some other more creative purpose, contact forms still provide you with a way to collect new lead information for future use. (e.g. If they signed up for a white paper in the past, they may be interested in hearing about your services when you contact them in the future).
Increase Engagement: If there’s anything social media has taught us, it’s that consumers want to engage with brands. A contact form offers them an easy way to do that and demonstrates to your visitors that you’ll be there when they’re ready to take that next step.
Remember: when used correctly, contact forms can be a very powerful sales and marketing tool; i.e. your 12th Man. Now it’s time to figure out what type of form will work best for your site.
Choosing the Right Contact Form
Many websites will use a mix of contact forms in order to convert visitors through different means. What you end up choosing for your website will depend on what you have to offer. Consider the following:
Basic Contact Form
This is the generic form you’ll find on every website. It usually appears on the Contact page, but will also be present after blog posts and at the bottom of special landing pages that want visitors to take a specific action. If your purpose is to entice visitors to contact you, this is the form to use.
Giveaway Form
The giveaway form is for businesses or marketers who can give something away for free and get visitors’ contact info in exchange for it. So for marketers, you usually see this in the form of a “Free White Paper” that requests an email address in exchange for the free collateral piece.
For other businesses, the perfect example of this is when a website offers up a chance to win a free trip [gift, assessment, etc.] in exchange for the contestant’s email address as an “entry fee.” Or, as in the example above from Hubspot, you can sign up to receive a free creative brief template.
Purchase Form
Any website dealing in the selling of goods or services online will have an order form. Depending on how extensive the ordering process is, these types of forms can become quite lengthy and this is usually where you’ll find multi-page forms put to use.
Calculator Form
When sales people talk to customers about how their product will help them save X amount of dollars every month, they will almost always have a tried-and-true formula in place to back that up. So for websites hoping to land sales (or just get the conversation started), having a calculator form on the site is a great way to get those prospects interacting, discovering what they can gain from those services (or lose without them), and ultimately reaching out for more info.
Login Form
For websites that offer memberships or special access to parts of their website to partners, customers, suppliers, etc., a sign-up and login form is a necessary piece of that process.
Survey Form
Survey forms can serve a number of purposes. They can serve as a way to get visitors engaged with an interesting or informative topic. They can serve as a way to help you collect information for building case studies and reports. And they can serve as a way to learn more about what your audience wants and help you adjust your business model accordingly.
Subscription Form
Websites that produce regular updates to their content will usually offer short subscription forms. So for someone who produces a lot of blog posts or a regular newsletter, this form is a great way to stay top-of-mind with visitors as new updates are pushed out while collecting information for future use.
Google Form
Chances are you’ve seen a Google form recently. They’re very easy to set up and very flexible in terms of the type of information you want to collect (job applications, surveys, service requests, etc). Stored in the cloud with all your other Google documentation, these forms provide websites with a free way to collect information from customers (as opposed to a CMS) and keep it all in one place.
Pop-Up Form
For those trying to maintain a minimal site design or for those simply wanting to put a form in a hard-to-miss location, pop-ups are a great alternative.
Multi-Page Form
Many of the form types above could potentially take up multiple pages (especially anything having to do with the ordering process). The ultimate purpose is spreading a form submission out across many pages is to make the process of filling out so many fields a little less daunting for customers. It also helps to ease them through different (but logical) phases in order to reach the end-goal.
For more information on how to add or update forms on your WordPress website and to discover some helpful tools that will give you more flexibility and creativity in your contact forms, keep reading.