Your contact form is one of the easiest ways for customers to reach you
The simplest forms have fields for the person’s name, email address and message. Visitors could be filling out the form for a number of reasons, such as:
- To offer feedback
- To ask you a question
- To solicit their business
- To request a free estimate
- To send you a direct message
Whatever the reason, it’s imperative that you receive these messages. When the visitor clicks Submit, the results should be emailed to an appropriate person at the company, who can reply directly to the email.
What steps are taken to improve form submission deliverability?
There are several steps we take to create and maintain a working online form:
- Build your form with industry-leading form software, such as Gravity Forms, which is backed by a support team of developers.
- Secure your entire website with Cloudflare’s CDN and firewall protection.
- Secure your contact form with Google reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare Turnstile, two of the most popular fraud and abuse protections for online forms (you may recognize them as the “I’m not a robot” checkbox).
- Integrate an email deliverability service, which is specifically designed to get emails from your website to your inbox.
- Keep your website’s software up to date (such as WordPress) as part of our Website Care Service.
Any one of these technologies could experience a temporary glitch and need attention (did anyone say technology is perfect?). That leads to your next question.
Why do some contact form submissions not land in my inbox?
Some legitimate submissions are incorrectly flagged as spam. Check your spam folder and mark these as “not spam” or “not junk” to train your mail client.
Others are correctly flagged as spam, since contact forms are huge targets for mass spamming. Forms hosted by Pioneer Media use industry-leading spam protection, such as Google reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare Turnstile. These techniques cut down on spam, but it’s nearly impossible to eliminate it. Just as spam protection companies mature, so do the developers behind the spam bots!
Occasionally, the email deliverability software incorrectly flags your mailbox as “stale” or “complaint,” meaning it detected enough spam or unopened messages to unsubscribe your inbox completely. This is done with the best intentions, but if your legitimate submissions are affected, we need to manually resubscribe you.
Two best practices to ensure form deliverability
- Check your spam or junk folder every few days for false positives. It takes a few seconds and could save you from missing an important transaction started by your site’s contact form.
- Routinely test your website’s contact form. When your website was built, the form was set up to send submissions to your email address. Maybe the address has changed? Maybe you’d rather submissions go somewhere else now? Maybe the deliverability software unsubscribed your address due to spam? Whatever the reason, test your contact form regularly (at least monthly). As your webmaster, I can’t check this for you because I don’t have access to your inbox.
Follow these best practices so customers and potential clients can easily reach you using whichever communication method they prefer.
About the author
Leighton Smith is Pioneer Media’s website designer, web developer and webmaster, based in East Tennessee. As a solopreneur, he is each client’s one point of contact and has built hundreds of websites since learning to code in 2006.
