Tips for creating a successful contact form for your business website

Contact forms are an important part of any business website. While many company’s use their online presence to provide information to the customer, the contact form turns the tables. It allows the customer to talk directly to the business owner.

With a contact form, you can gather customer feedback, valuable leads, and curate contacts for your email marketing efforts (we have a powerful service for that). All of which are geared towards making your business better and generate more sales - do I have your attention?

Fields you should include with your contact form

• Name - Okay this one is probably a bit obvious, but you will want to know who you are speaking with when you receive an inquiry. This field should be a required field to submit.


• Email Address - Having a way to contact a customer is important. If a website visitor contacts you via your contact form, odds are they are comfortable with email communication. Also, nowadays, more people are likely to give you an email address rather than a phone number. You should make this a required field as well and make sure you have validation set up to only accept valid email addresses.


• Message - They are contacting you for a reason right? A simple text box is enough to allow them to add as many or as few details as they want. Luckily you also made the email address required so you will have a way to follow up with them again if you require any further details. It is debatable whether you should make this field required. Ultimately you have already collected their contact information with the above two fields. So you already have the means to contact them if you need them to elaborate.


It’s important to note that form fields could greatly vary based on your business and the information you need to successfully serve your customers. The above may seem like a small number of fields to include in your form, but below we will provide some tips and reasons why this is an important consideration.



More tips for a successful contact form

Less is more
The more form fields you include, the more work you make for a user to get in touch with you. It also creates more opportunities for them to abandon the process and for you to lose out on potential leads.

Keep your form simple so your visitor can fill it out in a minute or two. It is much easier to follow up for more details once you have collected their contact information.

Validate your form fields
Make sure required fields are required, make sure emails validate as actual email addresses, if you have a character limit, make sure your form observes those. Proper validation will help you filter out the junk. Speaking of junk...

Have spam prevention measures
With some forms there are ‘behind the scenes’ measures to prevent spam, others use a reCaptcha service, and some have skill-testing questions that spambots cannot get around. Having a feature like this at the end of your form will help you avoid useless and often inappropriate spam emails.

Have a useful thank you page
Once a user submits a form, make sure you send them to a thank you page or replace the form with a message letting them know you will follow up (if that is expected based on the purpose of the form). Users want to be reassured that their submission made it to you and feel confident that they will get a follow-up. Especially if the nature of the request is urgent.

Test your form
There is nothing worse than having a contact form that doesn’t work, especially if you don’t know it doesn’t work. You don’t want to miss out on valuable leads and customer submissions so make sure you test your form once in a while. Just for that added peace of mind that everything is working.



How to build your contact form

So you know what you need, now how do you do it? Many Web Developers can build a custom form for you, and content management systems often have plugins built in to help with that.

At PSPINC we offer an online form builder tool called InforMakers. You can build a form without knowing how to write a single line of code. It is all done in an easy-to-use visual interface. You can then generate an embed code and paste it directly on your website.

You can purchase an InforMakers subscription online or get it completely free when you host your website with us on Dreamersi!

If you have any questions please contact us at contact@pspinc.com or call us toll-free at 1-800-232-3989



Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.