How To Beat the Contact Page Hurdle
Getting customers successfully through your website can sometimes feel like navigating a series of hurdles. It starts with getting them through the home page (or wherever they enter your site) and ends with getting them successfully through your contact page. Unfortunately this final hurdle can be the most dangerous part of the race!
Your contact page is the place where your visitors get the chance to interact with you and leave some personal info - maybe to request availability on a vacation rental home, sign up for a newsletter, or ask you a question.
Your contact form is a key part of your website since it allows you to meet your visitors. For many websites it’s the most important page since it aligns with your business or website goal. It’s the reason why your website is up there.
So here are some questions:
- How complex is your contact page?
- Is it easy to see what’s it’s there for (i.e. to get people to contact you), or
- Is it stuffed full of interesting, but irrelevant content?
Contact forms often get filled up with content. The reasons are simple. It’s partly because designers want to help their visitors: why not add some more information that they can read while they are on the page? It’s also because your contact page often ends up with a higher PageRank than other pages, so savvy SEO experts try to take advantage of this by filling up the page with some more target keywords.
My advice: don’t do it. Your contact form is there for one purpose: to get your visitors to contact you. Any distractions on the page can lead them off into all sorts of dangerous extra browsing. You need to catch their attention and get their details while they are on the page.
So, take a good look at your contact page. Is it 100% obvious what it’s there for? Are you sure there aren’t any other distractions? Check your site stats - do you get a high percentage of exits? You might be missing something.
This is a great example of ‘keep it simple’.
Once you’ve got their details, by all means offer them some more information. After all, you’ve got them over the final hurdle now!!
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