Do you sometimes wonder why a website must have a contact us page? Why can’t you just create and publish an email address instead? It sounds like a quite difficult task to make a contact us form. You must be thinking you first need to build a contact form design, and then prepare your contact us text.
But the truth is, you can actually use a ready-made contact us page design if you use a website builder to create your website. These website-building platforms provide you with multiple contact us templates to choose from, which saves a lot of time and effort on your part.
In this post, we will be showing you a few good contact page examples that you can imitate to create yours. But before that, let’s discuss how a sample contact us page and a contact us form works.
How do Contact Us Forms Actually Work?
A contact us form is a short form published on the contact us section or page of a website. It is web-based and can be filled by any site visitor. When someone fills up and submits the form, the site owner receives the message in the form of a notification on the dashboard and an email.
There is a quick process that happens behind the scenes. The contact us form triggers an email to be generated and sent to the site admin’s email inbox. If you have a contact us section with a contact us form on your website, this is how you would receive messages from your site visitors, without having to reveal your email address to spammers.
11 Reasons Why You Need a Contact Us Section on Your Website
Here are 11 ways how a contact us page would benefit you as a website owner.
1. Reduce Spam Emails
You might think that you could replace a contact us form with just an email address, notifying your site visitors to send you an email if they have any inquiries to make. However, this is not really a good idea. Publishing your email address on your website is like inviting all kinds of spam emails into your inbox. Many spammers use spambots to scrape email addresses that are posted on the contact us section of websites. Even if one spambot gets hold of the email address that you provide on your site, your inbox could get full with all kinds of spammy mailing lists. This could lead to serious security risks from phishing emails.
By using a contact us form, you can save yourself from all this trouble. You don’t have to reveal your business email address on the form. Thus your email account cannot be scraped. Of course, you would still face a small risk of getting spammed because the form can’t stop spam. But it would at least be a lot easier to just make certain tweaks to your form to reduce the risks further. One way is to use a CAPTCHA to check if your form entry is made by a human.
2. Get Messages at Your Convenient Time
Most business owners like to publish their business phone number on their website, along with the postal contact information for their office. This is again not a very good idea. What happens if a customer or prospect calls when nobody is available at your end to answer?
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If they call and nobody answers, and they see you do not even have a contact us form, they would probably look for an alternative merchant to buy from what they need. The best to have on your website is a contact us section containing a form and a phone number to prevent this.
3. Track the Inquiries Made by Your Site Visitors
A contact us form helps you keep track of all the inquiries made by your website visitors. As you grow your business, you can expect to get an increasing number of inquiries about your products and services. The best way to receive all of them conveniently in your inbox is through your site’s contact us page and form.
4. Get a Higher Number of Leads
What’s the primary objective of getting your prospects to contact you through your website? Of course, as a business owner, what you are looking for is leads. You want to get as many leads through your site as possible.
Creating a contact us page and a contact us form just makes it very convenient for your site visitors to get in touch with you. It is a way to capture leads.
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You have to rely on the visitor to manually write an email by providing them with just an email link. If used on a public computer, this option might make it difficult for your visitors to manually send emails to you.
5. Build Your Email List
Every inquiry you receive through your contact us section adds to your email list. Building an email list is vital to be able to run email marketing campaigns. You can send newsletters to your subscribers or email list recipients to keep them reminded about your business. When your site visitors contact you first, they are in a way authorizing you to email back to them. This means the chances of your emails ending up in their spam folder become significantly less. That’s why contact us forms are a great way of building a good email list.
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6. Automatically Assign Tasks to Your Team
You can delegate tasks to the appropriate team members using a contact us form. Most of the plugins used for building a contact us form allow you to send email notifications. If you set up the plugin correctly, you can send the proper notifications to the right people.
7. Populate Your Customer Relationship Management System
It could be tricky to manage leads when you have more than one team member. Sometimes even three people working in a team can get confused. It is fine if the confusion doesn’t lead to more than one response going to the same prospect. It doesn’t make a good first impression on a prospect if their message is followed up with two overlapping responses.
To avoid this from happening, some contact form plugins help you send the form inquiries to different CRMs.
8. Automatically Start To-Do Lists
You can even use a contact us template to kick start the checklist for a project. These templates or plugins make sending your contact us section data to a to-do list tool easy. You can actually create a template listing all the steps your staff needs to follow up on a contact form entry.
9. Provide Customer Support
Contact us forms can also be converted into support ticket forms. If running a business, you must provide good customer support to your potential and existing customers. Your website’s contact us section can be used for this purpose as well. With a little customization, most contact us plugins allow you to turn your form into a technical support system.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
10. Gather User Generated Content
Entries on your contact us form provide you with user-generated feedback or content. You can use this content to make guest posts to build your brand awareness. Guest posting is also an excellent way to create backlinks to your website, driving more users to your site and enhancing its search rankings.
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User-generated content and testimonials improve your brand’s social media presence, increase your blog’s publishing frequency, grow your audience, and help you build more professional connections.
11. Accept File Uploads
Did you know that many types of contact us form allow you to accept file uploads? Many contact us page builders let your site visitors attach files to their form submissions. This helps you quickly receive large amounts of information through a short form in your website’s contact us section.
Building a Contact Us Page on a Strikingly Website
Strikingly is a website builder that makes it easy for any layman to create easy-to-navigate and beautifully designed web pages. You can build a contact form on a website that you build on our platform by following these steps.
- From your Strikingly editor, click on ‘Add New Section’.
- Select ‘Contact & Forms’. Then select ‘Contact Form’.
- Set up the form fields from the given options by toggling them on or off.
- Click ‘Add Map’ to add your business location map.
With Strikingly, it is quick and easy to build a contact us section or page and create any kind of web page. Our website templates are responsive and easy to navigate, built to speed up your creating a complete website. Our free plan offers most of the tools required to build a basic website.
If you are looking to start a business and need a website for it, Strikingly is the right choice for you!
