Are you worried that your contact form doesn’t seem to be utilized very often? While it is true that people nowadays often prefer other methods of getting in touch (e.g. social media), it may also be because your contact form isn’t optimized.
To start optimizing your contact form so that it actually encourages responses you should focus on making it easy to fill out, and making it look easy to fill out. Both are important – and the following steps can help:
- Shorten the form by removing unnecessary fields
The first thing you should do is go over your contact form and identify any fields that it can do without. In most contact forms the only fields that are truly necessary are the name, email address and message fields – though in some the subject can help too to segment responses.
By reducing the number of fields, you’ll make your form easier to fill out. On top of that it will very visibly look easier to fill out as well, making it doubly helpful.
- Arrange elements in a single-column layout
Try to use a single-column layout for the elements in your form. A single-column form will look less complicated than multiple-column forms, and can be filled out faster as well. Keep in mind that not only the fields should be arranged in a single column, but also their labels.
- Do not use generic error messages
One of the main problems with many contact forms is that they use generic error messages. Because of that should an issue arise, the responder will have to figure out what went wrong by themselves.
Instead of that you should make sure your error messages are helpful, and clearly identify the problem. For example instead of a generic ‘Error in form’ message, you should be more specific and state ‘That is not a valid email address’, or ‘The name field is incomplete’.
- Make sure the design is responsive
Increasingly a lot of the people who use your contact form will be on mobile devices – and the form needs to be mobile-friendly. That is why it is important that its design is responsive, allowing it to adapt its layout depending on the screen size of the device.
To optimize your contact form you will need to be able to edit and customize it. That may seem difficult if you don’t know how to write HTML or CSS code, but there are graphical form builders that will make it easy to learn how to make a contact form in HTML. For example you could try the AidaForm Online Form Builder.
If you optimize your contact forms in the ways described above, you should be able to see an increase in the number of responses that you obtain. Of course there are other factors that are at play as well, such as the placement of the form and the overall web design too – and you should look into them if you want to improve the response rate further.
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