by Howard Yeh
One of the reasons most websites exist is because they want to get leads through their ‘Contact Us’ page. However, a majority of these websites don’t have a strong contact us page, one that can convert visitors to web customers. They are often hidden in the header or footer, waiting for visitors to explore them first and then engage. These contact us pages get very little to zero attention from visitors.
Contact Us Page
To know whether your site’s Contact Us page is helping you convert, you need to ask the following questions from yourself.
Is your Contact Us page doing enough to generate leads?
Are you generating as much leads through the Contact Us page as much you expected at the time of writing your business plan?
Does your website offer robust functionality for enhanced visitor experience?
If your answer is No to any of the above, then you already know that you are in trouble. A website failing to generate enough web-initiated sales or offering little to zero Contact Us leads will suffer from lack of customers. The most obvious reason for this could be your failure to grow your Contact Us page with the web technology. Despite all the magic around the web, your Contact Us page still has the same old feeling – there is nothing NEW about it.
Contact Us pages should be proactive instead of being reactive. Reactive pages wait for visitor to interact while proactive pages will offer a step-ahead with call to action through the Contact Us page. For instance, a Contact Us menu in the footer is reactive, meaning visitors will engage only if it takes the pain to search through the website menu. On the other hand, a bold and obvious Contact Us call to action on main page right in front of visitor’s eyes will directly engage the customer, thus generating the desired activity.
These proactive concepts vary in design and implementation but all of them aim to improve the number of leads generated through website’s contact section. Once positioned and designed the right way, these interactive Contact Us pages can bring in massive response from new customer prospects by replacing simple ‘Contact Us’ with interesting call to actions such as ‘Contact Us for a Free Quote’, ‘Contact Us for a Free Consultation’, etc.
Tips for Improving your ‘Contact Us’ Page to generate more leads
Improving your Contact Us page experience will not only go a long way to accomplish your business goals, but it will also bring a substantial return on initial investment. Here are some simple steps that you can take to enrich overall website experience for new customer prospects.
Make your contact experience easy to find. Now that your potential customers have found your website, make it easy for them to talk to you. Help them take the next step to contact you. Make the actionable item obvious unlike the old custom where webmasters would bury the link in footer or header somewhere. Additionally, make sure that each page of your website provides easy and direct access to Contact Us page.
Add social profiles on your website, close to the point of contact. Potential customers are going to want to reach your business. Social media websites such as Facebook, Yelp, and LinkedIn are one of the first places people go for that research. Make this easy for them by putting links to your social media profiles directly on the Contact Us page.
Make sure your contact solution is mobile-friendly. Does your Contact Us page look good on a cell phone or tablet? Does it even work on mobile platforms? Mobile has already gained massive market share. Facebook generated 30% revenue from mobile in the last quarter. Make sure your Contact Us works smoothly across all mobile platforms so that you don’t miss on any potential leads.
4 ways to interact effectively with leads generated from your Contact Us page
So. now you’re generating enough leads but you are not sure how to handle them, or respond to those leads. Most businesses fail to react quickly and lose potential customers. Here are some tips that will help you to generate effective communication with leads generated through your Contact Us page.
Respond quickly to new customer inquiries. Typically, leads have higher chances of converting into customers when they receive a reply within a few hours of making the query. Taking too long to reply means you are giving the customer reason to choose someone else. Ideally, you should set-up an auto-responder email to reply immediately. However, you should try to respond in person as soon as possible.
Send a regular newsletter to your existing customers. There are plenty of good tools out there that can send your newsletters to customer lists. If you are not using any tools for your newsletter, try Constant Contact, MailChimp, or AWeber to see what works best for you. With free trials available for these tools, you can easily try out all of them without having to buy. Your Contact Us page should flow right into your newsletter system.
Generate and track your inbound phone calls through your Contact Us page. A lot of businesses generate most of their sales initiated by unsolicited inbound phone calls from potential customers. It’s important that you’re able to identify the source of your calls, and track whether or not the leads generated from these calls turned into new business.
Invite your customer prospects to call or visit you in addition to submitting their query through the form. Tell your customers about your location. Let them know when you are open. Display your contact number of the Contact Us page so that customers can call if they need. Make sure you have a strong call to action, something like ‘Call Us to talk to an expert’ or ‘visit us to see magic in work’ etc.
Before the Internet, we had Yellow Pages. They were an excellent way to find contact information about different businesses. Now there are websites, which provide an even better option to find businesses and contact them. But, if your website doesn’t do it the right way then customers won’t call you or fill in the Contact Us form after visiting the website. In this case, you’d feel that you were better off without the website.
Call your webmaster today and work on some of these improvements. They will pay off.
Howard Yeh is the co-founder/co-president of ContactUs.com, Inc. He is also a director of PeopleFund.com, an early-stage venture investment company. He was previously co-founder and COO of BrokersWeb, Inc., which was a top vertically-focused PPC advertising network serving the insurance vertical. There, he led publisher acquisition and online marketing from the earliest stages to meaningful scale.
BrokersWeb was twice honored as an Inc. 500 recipient, growing revenues to $16M in 2010 and $55M in 2011, before being acquired in 2011 by Vantage Media. While at Vantage Media, he led Paid Marketing across all verticals, overseeing over $2M+ of monthly advertising spend.
Photo Credits
Stuart Miles | photostock | freedigitalphotos.net | Howard Yeh