How to take advantage of your web traffic with a simple online form.

When we created our first website for our business 8 years ago, we made sure to add an online form to the contact us page and all project pages. It just seemed like a no brainer to have a place convenient for people to get in touch. Three years later we realized that no one had ever really filled out the form. Back then, most of our leads were coming in through word of mouth or picking up the phone and calling us. When we redesigned our website, we decided to get rid of the online forms since the only thing it was bringing in was spam at that point. We replaced all forms for a contact us page with a link to our email address, our physical address and a phone number.
 
Over the years our traffic has increased and become more qualified. This past year we’ve jumped into inbound marketing and we decided to review our traffic with intentions to get more leads from our website. We took a look at what pages had the most views, and the second most popular page was the contact page. With close to 100 unique page views per month, we knew we could take some serious advantage of that traffic. So we decided to bring back the contact form.
 
But we didn’t just add a few fields for their name, email and a brief message. We made sure this online form was well thought out. Here’s what we did and how you can take advantage of your web traffic with a simple online form.
 
1.) First, add the essential fields; name, email, company, phone, etc.
 
2.) Come up with list of questions that will help you understand your visitor’s needs. We thought about the things we would like to know to figure out if they were the right type of client for us.
 
3.) From that list of questions, choose your top 5 questions. Extensive forms are a turn off and you don’t want to scare too many people away.
 
4.) Make sure the questions are as easy to answer as possible. We had a check box or a drop down option wherever possible, and only a text box as an option for any additional details if they have them.
 
5.) Lastly, create an even shorter online form as another option. This is for the people who might not have a project in mind but want to connect anyway. Or maybe they just have a comment or want to say hello. We wanted to make sure there was a place for this as well.
 
6.) Make sure to add an option to subscribe to your blog on both online forms. Asking visitors to subscribe is a great way to keep you on their radar.
 
Within the first month our new online forms were on our contact us page, 60% of our new leads converted using those forms. It turns out, people want things to be easy, and picking up the phone can be hard. So put a well thought out contact form on your contact page and the hard work is done–they don’t have to start a conversation, they just have to answer some questions. Take a look at how our contact page turned out.