A contact form on your site is a great way to encourage customers or potential customers to take a desired action. Whether you’d like them to sign up for an e-book or schedule a consultation, contact forms can help make it happen. However, the way you set up your contact form on your site has a significant impact on whether people actually bother to hit “submit.” Here’s what you need to know:

If you ask for too much information, you can drive people away

Some businesses use their site’s contact form as a way to do market research about their clients. They ask the basics (name, phone number, e-mail address, etc.) but then throw in additional questions that aren’t totally essential to complete the transaction. While these questions may be beneficial to your marketing team, they can become aggravating to the person on the other end of the screen who’s just trying to submit the form and move on. Be selective about the fields that you make necessary on your contact form. Gather the pertinent information and make the other fields optional, otherwise customers will give up.

People are still wary about giving up too much personal information

While it’s become normal to do business online, some people are still hesitant about giving up too much personal information to a random contact form on a website. They may be fine giving you their name and e-mail address, but if you start asking for their home address, place of employment, or other more private details, they get uncomfortable and hit “x.” It’s important to know your consumers’ limits, and to stay within these limits.

Think about the information you really will use

Some business owners believe that if they gather plenty of information from users who submit a contact form, they’ll then be able to process these details and draw highly informative conclusions about their target customer. However it’s important to be realistic about this. Does your marketing team really have time to sift through and analyze 300 contact forms, each with three pages of information about that particular customer? Probably not. Therefore you’re aggravating both the client and your staff. Instead, trim the form down to its most necessary information and leave out the rest.

Conclusion

Keeping contact forms short and easy to fill out helps to encourage potential clients to actually complete the form, thus generating more leads for you. If you’re unsure if your contact form is pesky to a potential customer, think about how you would feel if you saw a similar form on a website you were visiting. Would you roll your eyes at all of the blanks or find that it’s pretty easy to complete? From there, make any necessary adjustments to create a pleasant consumer experience.