Improving the process
The first thing to look at is the abandonment rate. If it is above 50 percent something is probably wrong with the form. I often see abandonment rates above 90 percent. This is usually because the form is badly designed.
In my experience the most common cause of high abandonment rates is layering multiple purposes into a contact form. The purpose of a contact form is to let potential customers send you contact information. However, people often use contact forms as a means of doing market research, for example asking: "How did you discover our website?" If you do this, understand you are paying for this market research by throwing away potential sales.
It is well known that every additional question placed on a contact form discourages some people from completing the form. You need to be sure the market information you gather this way genuinely translates into improved marketing, which genuinely leads to additional sales, and that those additional sales are worth more than the lost business represented by a higher abandonment rate. If you think you can prove this is the case I'd love to hear from you, because I've never seen it.
Another common cause of high abandonment rates is trying to use the form to pre-qualify leads, for example, asking questions about how much someone wants to spend, or what the person's budget is. Each pre-qualification question loses potential customers who do qualify, but who don't want to tell you this until they trust you more. Personally, I would rather have a sales person waste a few minutes phoning someone who doesn't qualify than lose a sale.
The third common cause of high abandonment rates is required fields, which are questions people have to answer or the form won't be sent. I once had a real estate company that made "How do you rate our site?" a required question. I had to ask if the company was really going to refuse to sell a house to someone just because the person wouldn't reveal what he or she thought of the site. Removing that question from the form doubled online enquiries overnight. This translated into additional sales worth 50 times the total cost of building and running the website.
Stupid or complex questions can also increase abandonment. One recruitment agency I worked with had "please describe your dream job" as a question. That's a tough question to answer if you aren't a good writer. It's also hard to know what is expected as a response -- a few words or a short novel? It's simply easier for someone to go to another site that has an easier form. In addition, the answers the agency did get weren't really used by the placement staff. The staff was more concerned with candidates' qualifications and experience.
The most effective contact forms are the ones that only ask the things you genuinely need to know in order to make contact. In most cases this is nothing more than a name and a phone number or email address.
Once you've gotten the abandonment rate down as far as you can, look at the prospect rate (the percentage of visits during which people look at the contact form). The prospect rate tells you how many people are considering contacting the company. The higher it is, the more successful your site is as a sales tool. The first thing to look at is how easy it is to get to the form. Put links to the contact form in as many places as possible, or (even better), put the contact form in as many pages as possible. After that you can branch out into general assessments of the other sales aspects of the site.
Manage your forms
Finally, and most importantly, contact forms need management. In all the cases I've cited above, management had nothing to do with the contact form process. Forms were created, processes put in place, but no one came back to see what was happening. It was assumed it would all just run smoothly. Someone in a sales management position needs to be counting form submissions and the resultant enquiries. The person needs to know what the abandonment rate is, and whether that is good or bad. If a website is designed to generate enquiries, watching and managing the contact form process is the single most important thing to do on that site. It's what generates the income.
Brandt Dainow is an independent web analytics consultant and the CEO of ThinkMetrics. Read full bio.