There is nothing more frustrating than going to a website, finding out that whatever the company is offering is interesting to you and then clicking on the contact page only to see a long list of phone numbers and email addresses. I like contacting online. It is easy, it is fast.
Now this is obviously personal preference but there are real reasons why there should be a form on the contact us page – a short form that is, followed by a separate page with a thank you message.
There are a number of Analytics programs out there but for simplicity sake (and because I am most familiar with it) I will use Google Analytics as the analytics program of choice. It is free and collects really great, useful data.
Say you have a website, you have added all the Analytics code to the pages of your site and you are just sitting back, collecting data. Now let’s say you don’t have a form on your site. You can collect endless amount of data but at the end of the day, what have you learned? How many visitors are coming to your site? How long they stay? Which page they like the most? Which page they like the least? This is all great data but so what! Have they bought anything? You don’t know. Have they contacted you? You don’t know.
Of course, you can keep track of how many phone calls you received and how many emails Joe got on Tuesday but you have no idea where these leads came from. You know that you received 100 visits from Google Organic. OK, that’s great. But did any of these people contact you?
By simply adding a form to your site and adding a goal in Analytics, you take away a lot of the guess work. You will now be able to see where the people who competed the form came from, how long they spent on your site, which pages they enjoyed etc. etc. etc.
This is especially true if you are doing any paid advertising. Google AdWords, Facebook – all of these can be tracked in Analytics but you will only know whether your efforts are worth it if you can see conversions and how much you are paying for each conversion.
Forms are simple to add and you will get a lot of value out of them!
