What are the best practices for contact forms
So you want to design a contact form for your website? This means you’re probably a service based business and/or entrepreneur, and possibly looking to book (more) clients. It is crucial you make sure that you do the following for contact form best practice:
Engage your prospective and ideal clients effectively
Gain the right information from prospective clients
Attract your ideal clients
Teach your clients how to work with you
Ask the right questions
Define your Website Goal(s)
Before you start to design your contact form, you need to clearly and specifically define what goal(s) you want to get from your website, for your business.
If you’re looking to create a contact form, it's obviously for clients to get in touch… right? So, your goal(s) may look something like this:
Book (more) clients for your service
Grow a following or community
Sell a product(s)
To be honest, this is a fundamental aspect of website design as a whole. Before you’re able to start the site design process, you must know what you hope to achieve from the website that you’re about to build. Once you know this, you can design a contact form with direction.
Speaking to your Clients
It's only once you know what your site goals are, that you can translate this on to your contact form design, and therefore communicate well to your ideal clients (we’ll get onto what ‘ideal clients’ are soon!).
At the top of your contact form, you may want to come up with a friendly and witty statement that is reflective of what your business does, and what you have to offer your client.
Make it clear to your clients what you offer and what you don’t. This will also start to filter out those clients that you don’t want to work with.
Ideal .. and not so Ideal, Clients
Your ideal customer is someone who understands the work you do and stand for. They are your perfect audience, and usually take less convincing to purchase your services in your pitches to them.
The ideal client usually has these traits:
They’re clear about their own business goals
They understand their own pain points
They don’t feel the need to negotiate down your offered price because they understand that you offer quality work
They don’t constantly change their mind about what it is they want; again, they’re clear of their own needs
Sounds like the perfect customer, right?
They do exist .. of course they do. It's just about using the right words, design and asking the right questions on the contact form on your website.
Think of the contact form as a gateway for the right audience and an exit door for those that aren’t so suited to working with you.
Of course there are other ways to reach out to your ideal people throughout your website (see our FREE workbook which is available to download below. It’s all to do with how to design a minimal and slick website!). Also have a read of our post on How to Create your Own Niche.
Contact Form Best Practices
Asking the Right Questions
Of course you need to ask the basic questions, such as their ‘name’, ‘email’ and ‘phone number’.
However you want to learn more about your prospective client by asking the following questions (we have also explained why this sort of question is necessary):
What is the name of their business? Do they have a website? - For your own research
What are the pain points for their business? - Learn how aware they are of any problems they need to solve?
What are they hoping to achieve after doing business with you? - What are their goals from the project? Learn if they have a clear direction?
Are they working to any deadlines? - Do they need to complete the work within a certain time period? So you can review and organise your own schedule if necessary.
Further to this there are some general questions that you want to include:
Provide your clients with a price range - Offer your absolute ideal minimum and the highest amount which goes outside of your comfort zone.
Ask them where they heard about you or your business - This is for your benefit alone, and will give you a good idea as to where they found you!
How long have they been in the business - This may give you some perspective if this client is a good fit for you.
‘Anything Else?’ box - This is a chance for a prospective client to give any more details they want to let you know of upfront.
Think about any previous clients that you’ve worked with, and go through your old emails. Look at some of the back and forth conversations that you may have had, and ask yourself where you can obtain some of this information upfront for future clients.
In addition, when you ask the right questions, you gain a certain sort of trust with your client, showing that you’re open and transparent with them.
Designing the Custom Contact Form
Squarespace has a built in contact form that you can edit and customise suited to your business needs.
Contact form best practices; Squarespace contact form
You can choose a layout which includes a map, or choose to exclude this if it isn’t applicable to your business.
You’re able to add form fields as you need to, and customise the questions and text.
Adding form fields according to best practices
This built in form enables you to choose from text boxes, checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons and many other form fields! Your customised and pre-defined options can help your prospective client give you the answers you need from them, sort of forcing them to head into the direction you want.
The above screenshots are from Squarespace version 7.0. The built in form is easy to use, and watch out for more content on step by step tutorials showing you how to edit and customise.
Geographical Map
You only want to include a map if this is applicable for your business. We’re not fans of decorative maps, but only when they’re functional and there to provide a purpose.
Squarespace allows you to include a large or small map on your contact form. This is a built in Google Map, which is good because it will mean that most of your clients visiting will be familiar with the Google brand.
This will also give your client a good idea of your time zone and when they should be expecting a response based on their location/time zone.