Success Strategies – Rethinking Your Website Contact Forms

Let’s have a little chat about your website contact forms. I would love to help you rethink the purpose of these forms and supercharge them so you can use them more effectively in your business.

For many people getting started with a blog or their first website, the contact form will be the only entry into your sales funnel (and yes, everyone has a sales funnel).

Maybe you are not selling products or serivces yet, but you are definitely selling YOU, so it is important to treat your contact forms as more than just a way to ‘get in touch’. They should be thought of as a lead capture tool.

Rethinking Your Website Contact Forms

If you think of your contact form as the entry to your funnel, you will start to look at them differently.

Most contact forms are leaking. Meaning, they pass through the information on the form to the owner, but that’s it. That information is not being stored anywhere and it gets lost over time.

Here’s what many people miss. If someone has shown enough interest in you or your business to fill out a form, there is value there. That, my Actionist, is a Prospect, and a slightly warmer one at that! You want to be sure you capture and store that prospect for use in your marketing strategy. Even if that strategy doesn’t yet exist, you still want to start building your list.

We all know the importance of “the list”, right?

Instead of just letting those prospects leak out, store them in your CRM or Email marketing software. NEVER use something like a simple contact form which only passes the information through. For WordPress users, I see this as something like Contact Form 7. If you are using that plugin for your contact forms, I want you to stop and immediately replace these with forms from your Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, Drip, Aweber, or any of the like.

Your contact form has to always capture and save these prospects.

Don’t Leave Them Hanging

After you have captured the prospect, you want to be sure to follow up. It is important to, at minimum, create a quick welcome email to thank them for getting in touch and set the expectations for what will happen next. Set this email to go out immediately after they fill out the contact form. This lets them know when you’ll be in touch, how you’ll be in touch, etc.

Start Your Segmenting Strategy NOW

Now that you understand how to plug the leaks, we need to talk about Supercharging your contact forms. Again, since this is the entry to your funnel, you should consider how you can start to segment your prospects rights from the start.

Segmenting will become more important as you become more experienced and your marketing becomes more refined. It gives you the opportunity to speak to ‘segments’ of your audience differently. If you are a blogger, you may find that some people enjoy one category of your blog more than another and you can send more of what that person likes to them and send less of what they don’t want to see. It keeps them engaged and coming back for more of what they want.

If you sell products or services, you may find one prospect seeking one service, while another needs something else. You want to speak to these 2 prospects differently and only about the products or services that interest them most.

Segmenting your prospects from the moment they enter your funnel will help you do all of this.

Super Simple Segementing

The simplest way to segment is by adding simple questions to your contact form. If you are a blogger, you use your content categories. If you are a coach, you offer your different products. If you are a service based company, you offer your different services. You really only need to add one extra question to your contact form to accomplish this:

“What [Category/Products/Services] are you most interested in?”

Then list them out. That’s it! Easy Peasy.

Your prospect will identify with what they are most interested in, and you can then use those choices to identify them inside your email marketing software or tag them inside your CRM. Assign different tags to each choice you have on your list above. BA-BAM! Your prospect is segmented. Now, when you want to talk to just those people on your list who are interested in Product A, you can do that without offering it to those who are not. Make sense?

I hope this article has inspired you to rethink your website contact forms and use them more effectively and start capturing and segmenting those prospects on your list.

Have a question? Leave me a note in the comments below and please share if you think this article can help others.

Have a productive week Actionists!