When you are visualizing your website, you must be thinking about the Home Page, the Design of the site, the Content, how you’d make money from it, will it be successful or not and many other things which you deem important. Is there even a slight thought on the Contact Page? How your followers will contact you? How will they post their concerns and the most important, how will you get your Fan Mail? If not, then you seriously need to start thinking about it. The degree of how good a site really is, how user-friendly the site is, is generally done by measuring how good its customer service is. There are many other uses of the much-neglected contact page. It makes your site looks professional and open for comments and feedbacks. It helps in getting new subscribers for the site. It can also bring new and unexpected employees who liked your site or idea and want to work with you. Having these kinds of people together makes the job a tad bit easier.
So, if you took your contact page for granted then here are some pointers that will help you create the perfect contact page. The kind which just forces people to contact with you.
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Two is better than one
It has been observed that users tend to leave that site early (or at least its contact page) whose contact page is a single, long-form asking them to enter information which they might feel is too much. An alternative or better option that is trending right now on the internet is creating a two or multi-step contact page.
The first page or the landing page asks the user for some vital information, which also helps the site to create personalized content for the user, it then sends them to a new page or form which has the remaining fields to be entered. Although both forms may ask for the same amount of information because it was broken into two steps the user feels less fatigued and aggravated.
2. Be Trustworthy
Keep in mind that you just asked a person for their most personal information over the internet. They don’t know who is behind that computer collecting their information, so you must show yourself as someone they can trust on. Make your Contact page more engaging and interactive. Display your contact info, mail id and address to look more a person than a robot. This would help reduce tension and friction between you and the user.
Also, a user generally puts their information on the form when they have probably looked all over your site for the solution and still didn’t find it. So, if someone contacts you regarding a problem so try not to redirect them to another page and clarify the solution directly. This is how you gain trust.
3. Ditch the Asterisk
People hate it when something is forced on them. Same goes for their information. It is globally known that not all information is “mandatory” for the site. You can leave some if not all fields optional for the user to fill up. It builds trust in the user when he knows that it is in his hand to decide which information he wants to share.
4. Don’t ask too much
Since its mostly online contact the first time, you don’t need to know where the user lives, or what is his phone number or his age. Those are the things that you can do without, at least till the initial stages. If further contact is needed or is demanded by one party, then only you should ask for more personal questions. In the beginning, the target is for them to click “submit” and initiate contact.
5. Flexibility
There are a huge number of smartphones and tablets users who surf the web primarily on these devices. Hence your contact page must be optimized to work on those devices also. Apart from a long contact page, an unattractive contact page also loses visitors, and if your contact page is not optimized for the smaller devices, then visitors will have a tough time figuring out the form.
6. Keep it simple
Never overdo your contact page. It is just a page with blank fields which are filled by the users. Try to leave it as minimalistic as possible. Don’t add ads or fancy graphics or drop down menus because they might slow down and cloud the page.
7. Complement your bran
Sure, it said that you should keep your contact page as minimalistic as you can above, but it doesn’t mean that you make it just a dull white page. Your contact page should complement your brand and your ideas. It should be designed so that it continues the tone of the site and doesn’t stand out.
8. Innovate
The contact page may look like the most unlikely place to concentrate your creativity on but in reality; it is very important that you pour your creative juices all over this page. Because this is the one page which is kind of the same on all sites. So, you can’t expect your site to stand out from others if it doesn’t look different from other sites.
9. Change your Call to Action
Call to Action is like an instruction which provokes the visitors on your site to provide immediate information. This is mostly done by words like “call now”, “submit” or “read more”. You can bring more versatility to the site by using a creative word like “Go”, “it’s done”, “click here” etc.
10. No Captchas, please
Captchas are there to eliminate spam and junk coming through your site. It looks like a great option to stop spammers, but it also affects the common user who is only there to surf the web and resolve any problems or concern.
Although it is showed here that having a good, well thought out and engaging contact page is necessary for the site, that doesn’t mean that the contact page is laden with graphics and visuals and mixed fonts just to make it spectacular. These things increase the friction of the page and make it a little unresponsive. In the end, you’ll find that your conversions improved a lot when your contact page did.
