The Best Contact Form for Your Site: a Smart One

Why a custom contact form is mandatory

You can’t rely on an email address on your site. Not only it is an invite to be spammed, a lot of surfers today avoid using traditional mail clients such as Outlook Express, Windows Mail or Apple Mail. They use Gmail, MSN Live, or even GoogleWave. All those web apps do not work well with the traditional mailto: link. (Oh, I know you can install some apps that allow to follow mailto: links with Gmail and the like, but get serious, how many ordinary people would do that?)

So far I haven’t said anything new or interesting, I know. But let me share an experience that may surprise those among you who have never had to deal with online clients asking for informations about a product.

People don’t read websites and don’t even try to ask meaningful questions

Okay, I know this statement is strong. A lot of people reads, and some writes meaningful emails. But to the largest extent you will not receive mails like this:

“Hello, I’m interested in Widget A, the red version. I need three of them. Currently it seems there are only 2 widgets in stock, but I don’t want to pay shipping twice. May I preorder it and have all three widgets shipped at once?”

Instead, you’ll receive this variant: “I need three, but the cart only adds two.”

No, I’m not kidding. No one will ever explain what are they writing about, because they KNOW what they are writing about. And you are supposed to know what they are writing about, if you want to sell.

That’s why a SMART contact form is mandatory. And with smart I mean a custom coded tool that will at the very least take the Title of the page the mail is being sent from and add it to the body of the message. So you’ll be able to decipher what is really behind “I need three” connecting the dots to the “Red Widgets Cheap – Only 2 in stock, hurry!” title page.

Or even smarter

I saw smarter contact form developed for a small business that routinely received requests for “more info”. Their developer added the query string with which the user found the site, as well as the last checked product page (as opposed to informational page). This made the task of customer caring much easier.

Tags: best contact form, contact form website, customer care, deal with clients, find the query string, how to create a contact us form, sales prospect contact forms and management, what should a contact form have on it