Contact form: 13 tips to turn this "necessary evil" into a conversion catalyst

In November 1993, David Raggett, researcher at Hewlett-Packard Labs and pioneer of the HTML language, laid the foundations of the digital contact form. Curiously, the forms found on today's web sites are not very different from the original, apart from the smoother shape of the send button and perhaps better field type management.

In this practical guide, Data Enso looks at the advantages and disadvantages of the contact form, and offers 13 tips on how to turn it into a conversion catalyst.

The contact form, a necessary evil...

In web culture, there's a consensus on the contact form: it's a necessary evil for buying a ticket, booking a hotel room, requesting an appointment and so on. Tobias van Shneider, ex-Art Director of Spotify, calls them " relics from the early days of the web ". For Koen de Witt, Managing Director at LeadFabric, " an ideal website is one without a contact form [...], and it's unreasonable to rely on a form with a conversion rate of 1-2% ".

This aversion to contact forms is widely shared by Internet users. In this study, participants were given a choice between two channels for contacting a brand: filling in a contact form, or copying and pasting an e-mail address and then writing and sending an e-mail.

The result: more than two-thirds of participants opted for the "email" option, even though it is more restrictive. If they're being shunned by users and professionals alike, why do forms remain unchallenged on contact and landing pages?

A few advantages of the contact form

The contact form is " the worst system except for all the others ". To put it plainly, this channel has a few significant advantages, first and foremost for the recipient:

• For the company or e-tailer, the contact form allows you not to display your e-mail address, providing a first layer of protection against spamming. 

• The reCAPTCHA has made it possible to protect contact forms from spam robots, with reasonable effectiveness. 

• Contact forms integrate seamlessly with CRMs, eliminating the need for recipients to copy contact data manually.

• The contact form is "qualifying". Unlike direct email, it allows you to define the information expected from the lead, including geographic area, telephone number and email address... a major asset in Lead Gen strategy. For the prospect, the "closed questionnaire" aspect of the contact form avoids subsequent email exchanges.

• Last but not least, completed forms can be automatically forwarded to the appropriate person or department, avoiding nebulous e-mail addresses such as contact@domaine.com or info@domaine.com, which often gather dust.

More broadly, and contrary to what you might think, the contact form (laboriously) fills all the user experience (UX) boxes.

The Nielsen Norman Group conditions a good experience on 5 criteria: ease of learning, ease of memorization (ability to reproduce the action long after it has been performed), efficiency, frequency and severity of errors, and user satisfaction.

In terms of ease of learning and memorization, it's hard to get more intuitive and straightforward than the contact form. As far as the risk of error is concerned, the contact form can be marked out by "typed" fields, checkboxes and drop-down lists. The free-form fields, which play a vital role as they include name, e-mail address and telephone number, can be secured by a real-time validation tool such as EnsoLive, Data Enso's preventive solution.

The only questionable criterion is "user satisfaction". On the whole, it's fair to say that users are only reluctant to fill in a contact form if it's excessively long, with a cryptic CAPTCHA and/or technical problems.

Last but not least, cookies can now be used to smooth the experience, with fields filled in semi-automatically.

Verdict: contact forms are validated by the UX... but they remain a major point of improvement in the purchasing process.