Contact Page: What to include

Always give people multiple ways of contacting you. If you only provide a phone number you may loose potential customers as so many browse the Internet during the evening or late at night. If you only provide email the person who likes to do business over the phone won’t be getting in touch.

Contact Form

It is also a good idea to include a contact form. This means people don’t have to go through the hassle of copying your email address, opening their email client, pasting the email address in, then sending their message. With a contact form they just fill it out and click submit.
The other advantage of using a form is that you set the rules. You can decide what someone has to fill out. You can choose whether an email address is required or not. If it is required the form won’t send unless they provide a proper email address. If you have common questions you might include a subject box with a number of options for the user to choose from. This also means you know straight away what the message is related to and can respond better and quicker to people.
And also you can integrate your contact form into a database which will store details of everyone using the form to contact you. This can be useful if you plan on building a large list of clients to send newsletters or special offers to.

Stay in touch

Keeping in touch with people is so important in business. Providing ways for people to stay in touch avoids the painful cold calling that nobody enjoys. Ask yourself what interests do your clients have ? How do they communicate ? Do they email or prefer phone ? Do they use Twitter of Facebook. If so provide your twitter account details so they can connect with you. Only provide them if you also actually use these services. If you post on Twitter about subjects your clients have an interest in they will get more value from you. They will tell others about the free value you give. Also when you have a decent following you can post questions about proposed new services or products and get free market research from your followers. I will go into social media in kore detail in another post (and no I won’t be preaching myself as a social media guru. I will give basic advice and telling you what works for some people not a get rich magic pill)

Map

If your customers come to your office it may help them if you provide a map on the contact page. Not everyone knows how to get to your location. If you are a shop owner and someone can’t find your shop you may never know about that lost business. Better to provide something incase rather than worrying about “what if”.
DC Print are a printing company based in Tallaght, Dublin 24. Their number one issue was their location. People always had trouble finding them and often involved one of the staff giving directions over the phone. This time could have been spent doing something more productive. I added in a directions app to their compact page. Now people simply enter their own location and click enter. This then provides a step by step list of directions right to the front door of DC Print. The directions can be printed out and also include maps. Now when someone asks “where are you ?” they are asked if they have access to the internet and then asked to visit the contact page and input their location. This has already saved so much time for DC Print but more importantly the people who use the directions app on the website love it and they feel valued because the company took the time to address the issue.