A poorly designed and managed contact form on your site can cost you big. Find out from this web analytics consultant how to maximize its value.
Most sites do not sell merchandise online. For these sites, the most critical business component of the site is the contact form.
Many businesses use a sales model in which the website's role is to get the initial customer contact. Sales staff then follows up and closes the deal. This is a very successful, proven, business model, which is why most organizations do it. Not every company formalizes its sales process in these terms, but if you have a website and don't sell online, that is what you are doing.
In view of this, it constantly surprises me how little attention people pay to their contact forms. Poorly performing forms and poor management of the processes behind these forms are costing many people a great deal of business.
The form process
Before we talk about getting the best out of our contact forms, let's examine the "form process" and establish some terminology. People have to view the form before they can fill it in. Viewing a form is a "page impression." If getting new sales prospects is the reason we have a website, getting people to fill in the form is our goal. Because people have to view a form before they can fill it in, getting people to view our contact form becomes a goal, too.
In order to improve performance we have to first measure it. We therefore need a metric for viewing forms. The percentage of visits in which the contact form is viewed is the "prospect rate." This is a number you'll have to calculate manually. Prospect rate is not a recognized metric; it's one I made up, so you won't find it calculated in any web analytics software. It is calculated by dividing the number of contact form page impressions by the total number of visits (not visitors).
Not everyone who views a contact form fills it in. Here we measure the percentage of people who do not fill the form in. This is the "abandonment rate." This metric comes from IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and is widely recognized, although no formal definitions exist for it. However, some metrics systems will report this number. Abandonment rate is also used for shopping carts, and can be used for any form page, such as online quote systems. The higher the abandonment rate the worse the performance. We want low abandonment rates.
After someone has completed the form, the information contained within is sent to the organization. This is handled by the web server. When the visitor clicks the submit button (or equivalent) the information in the form (not the form itself) is sent by his or her browser to the web server.
In most cases the web server then places that information into an email message and sends the email to someone in the organization. In other cases the information is placed in a CRM or similar sales management system. When the sales management system sits inside the company network (such as ACT) and not on the website, the information is usually sent via email to the company, where it is then imported into the CRM. The most popular tool for doing this with ACT is WebGrabber, which breaks an email into the appropriate fields inside ACT. However, in most cases contact form information ends up as emails inside Outlook.