Improve your enquiry form – make your website sell
For many websites getting someone to fill in their enquiry form is the ultimate goal because that counts as a lead you can follow up. So, think of your enquiry form as the last step in your website’s sales process. It’s a little like having done all the selling but now needing your visitor to sign the contract. Getting your enquiry form right helps overcome the last bit of resistance in your visitor’s mind to taking that final action. Here are a few techniques you can use to make your enquiry forms convert more of your visitors into active leads.
ENQUIRY FORM TIP #1:
Keep your enquiry forms simple. Don’t ask your visitor for their dog’s name, inside leg measurement and their favourite colour when the most important thing to you is probably just a name, telephone number and email address.
ENQUIRY FORM TIP #2:
I’ll illustrate this tip with a quick story. We had a customer who had one enquiry form which had seven questions to it. When we looked at his web statistics we noticed that whilst lots of people were visiting the contact page only about 20% were filling in the form. Something was wrong. When we spoke to him we discovered that he was only really interested in getting basic information (name, email address and telephone number) all the rest was useful but not vital. The solution was to divide the form in two: the top part was titled “Quick Form” and only contained the three primary questions and the form beneath was titled “More Details (Optional)” and contained the rest. Very importantly, there was a “Submit” button underneath both of the forms. After a few weeks we went back and looked at the results to find that the number of people filling in the form had jumped from 20% to over 50%. That’s more than twice as many leads and absolutely no cost to his business. This is a great example of how making minor changes can generate major results. It’s also a technique worth testing on your website.
ENQUIRY FORM TIP #3:
Check out your web statistics. In the above example we would never have known that a problem existed with his enquiry form unless we had reviewed the web statistics. There were three very important pieces of information that helped us and would help you.
The first is the number of people visiting your contact page. That tells you how many people were interested enough in what you do to think about making contact.
The second is the number of times the “Thank You” page has been viewed. That tells you how many times enquiry form has been successfully filled in. (Incidentally, check that that number is the same as the number of enquiry emails you got.)
The third is the result of the first two and is the percentage of people who filled in the enquiry form. That then tells you how effective the form is.
(Number of Visitors to the Thank You Page)/(Number of Visitors to the Contact Page)×100
Once you’ve got this statistic you have a measurement which you can use as a baseline for your improvements.
Put all three tips together and 2014 should get off to a rocketing start!
Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.
