Your website’s contact form is one of the easiest and most effective ways for potential customers to reach you. The simplest forms have fields for the person’s name, email address and message.
They could be filling out the form for a number of reasons, such as:
- To hire you
- To give feedback
- To ask a question
- To solicit their business
- To request a free estimate
- To send you a personal message
Whatever the reason, it is imperative you receive these messages. When the visitor clicks the Submit button, the results should be emailed to the business owner or manager. When the recipient goes to reply to the email, the sender’s email address is already filled out. Some contact form submission emails will incorrectly be flagged as SPAM. Some will correctly be flagged as SPAM, since contact forms are huge targets for mass spamming. There are ways to cut down on form submission spam, but it’s nearly impossible to remove it entirely (after all, who likes inputting obscure characters that you, a human, can barely read?).
We highly recommend these 2 best practices:
- Check your SPAM/JUNK folder every few days for false-positives. This just takes a few seconds and could save you from missing out on a lucrative business opportunity initiated by your site’s contact form.
- Routinely test your website’s contact form. When your website was built, the form was setup to send submissions to your email address. Maybe the address has changed? Maybe you’d rather the submissions go somewhere else? Maybe the form just doesn’t work anymore? Whatever the reason, you should test your contact form to make sure you are receiving the submissions without a glitch.
Follow these best practices to ensure customers and potential clients can easily reach you using whichever medium they prefer.