Nobody lands on a contact page by accident. They have read enough, decided you might be able to help, and gone looking for the way to say so.
That makes it the most valuable page on most websites, and it is very often the least considered. It gets a form with whatever fields the template came with, a heading saying Contact Us, and no indication of what happens after the button is pressed.
Two jobs, then. Make it easy to reach you in whichever way suits the person, and tell them plainly what to expect next.
Ask for less than you want
Every field is a small negotiation, and each one loses you a few people. Some of those people were going to be your best customers, and you will never know.
For most businesses the honest list is three things: a name, a way to reply, and the message. Everything beyond that needs to justify itself.
The usual suspects worth dropping. Company name, unless you genuinely only sell to businesses. Phone number as a required field, which stops anybody who does not want a phone call, so make it optional and say why you might use it. Both a phone and an email as required. Budget, which most people cannot answer honestly at this stage and which reads as a filter. How did you hear about us, which is a question for later, not for the moment somebody is trying to make contact.
A subject dropdown is the one worth thinking about rather than dismissing. It earns its place only if it genuinely routes the enquiry to a different person or produces a different reply. If every option lands in the same inbox and gets the same response, it is a tax on the visitor for the benefit of nobody.
Give people a choice of route
Some people will never use a form. They want to see an address they can copy into their own email, because that leaves them with a record of what they sent, or they want a number to ring.
So put the email address on the page as text, not hidden behind the form, and put the phone number there too if it is answered. If you have premises people can visit, the address and the opening hours belong here. If you do not have premises, do not invent the impression of one.
Only offer the routes somebody is actually watching, which is the whole subject of the previous part of this series. A contact page listing five ways to reach you, two of which nobody checks, is worse than one listing two that work.
Say what happens next, and mean it
This is the part almost everybody skips, and it is the cheapest trust you will ever buy.
Tell them when they will hear back, in words you can live with on a bad week. “We reply to most enquiries within one working day” is worth more than “we will get back to you as soon as possible”, which promises nothing and is understood as such.
Tell them who replies. A named person, or at least a person rather than a department, sets the tone for everything that follows.
Tell them what will happen. If your first reply is usually a couple of questions rather than a quote, say so, because somebody expecting a price and receiving questions feels stalled.
And if you do not work weekends, say that too. Somebody who sends an enquiry on Saturday evening and hears nothing until Monday morning is perfectly content if they were told, and quietly annoyed if they were not.
Fill in your own contact form as a stranger, then wait. Do not tell anybody. See where the enquiry lands, how long it takes to be noticed, what the automatic acknowledgement says, and whether the reply matches what the page promised. This is the single most useful thing on this page and almost nobody does it.
Do not let an auto-responder pretend to be a person
An automatic acknowledgement is genuinely useful. It confirms the message arrived, which is the one thing the sender cannot otherwise know, and it is the right place to repeat when you will reply.
What it should not do is impersonate a human being. A message signed off as though somebody has read it, when nobody has, is a small deception that gets found out the moment the real reply arrives hours later. Make it obviously automatic, keep it short, and let it say something useful while they wait, such as where to find the answer to the question you get asked most.
Handle spam without punishing people
Contact forms attract rubbish, and the instinct is to put a puzzle in front of it.
Resist that. The tests that ask people to identify bicycles or type distorted letters are hardest on exactly the visitors you should be most careful with, and a genuine customer who fails one twice will simply leave. There are quieter methods, including invisible checks that most real people never see, and they catch the overwhelming majority of automated submissions without asking anybody to prove anything.
The other thing worth doing is checking where the form actually delivers, and whether those messages are landing in a junk folder. A form that works perfectly and delivers to spam is indistinguishable, from the outside, from a business that ignores people.
The page after the button
Clearing the form and showing a small green tick is not a confirmation, it is an ambiguity. People are left wondering whether it sent.
Say it plainly, on a page or panel of its own. Confirm what was sent, repeat when they will hear back, and give them somewhere useful to go next rather than a dead end. If it makes sense, tell them to check their junk folder for your reply, because that is where a fair number of first replies end up.
Where to start
Count the fields on your contact form. If there are more than four, work out which of the extras you have genuinely used in the last twenty enquiries, and take the rest off.
Then read your page as somebody who has never met you and ask whether it tells them when they will hear back and from whom. If it does not, that sentence is the highest-value thing you will write this week.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on how enquiries reach you and what happens to them once they arrive, get in touch, or read more about how we look after business email.