Have you been getting a lot of traffic to your website? If so, this is great news. Now, here’s the next question:
Are these visits equaling conversions?
If not, you may need to look at your “Contact Us” page.
Without a doubt, turning heads and attracting clicks from the SERPs is crucial. It‘s why we have SEO and UX. Be that as it may, we all know that getting people to your site is only half the battle. The other half consists of making things easier for your customers to get in touch with you. Nowhere else can you and your customers touch base than on the Contact Us page.
The Contact Us page is equally as important as your site’s landing page. Like your landing page, the Contact Us page is an area of conversion, turning a casual site visit into an opportunity to gain a customer or following.
In addition to its lead generation potential, the Contact Us page tells your site visitor that you value his or her experience and concerns. Hence, it is a page worth your time tweaking and optimizing.
What exactly is the Contact Us page for and how can you make yours better? Read on!
What Is a Contact Us Page?
A site’s Contact Us page is a web page that is usually a click away from the homepage. This is a page that contains the contact details and physical address of the site’s owner, usually the business to which it caters.
On the Contact Us page are also online forms that site visitors can complete. These forms can serve you in many ways, including:
- Giving an email address through which you can send any correspondence to a customer
- Allowing you to receive your customer’s complaints
- Opening channels of communication for any other transaction your e-commerce plugins cannot handle
Ideally, your Contact Us page needs to be:
- Easy to locate
- Easy to use
- Contains all your contact details, a form, and your physical address
Because of the purposes your Contact Us page serves, we deemed it worthy of a place in our “How To Series.” But, how important is your Contact Us page other than being a convenient data point for online directories?
Read the next section to learn more!
The Importance of Your Contact Us Page
There are roughly two billion websites in existence, according to Hosting Tribunal. Nearly all of these websites are sites for businesses.
Businesses cater to customers. These customers can be individual customers or other businesses (think B2B companies). Either way, businesses through their sites make their money by delivering quality products with customer service.
Customer service is the crux of sales and engagement. When Khoros compiled customer service statistics, it discovered time and time again that customer service can mean the difference between sales and going bust.
Customer service has several components. One of the most important parts of it is communication with customers.
Good communication with a business is often a plus for many customers. In fact, a timely response and a feeling of being genuinely heard are enough to entice at least 70% of consumers.
If your website has messenger plugins or extensions, more power to you. But, nothing screams commitment to hearing customers better than a well-designed Contact Us page.
Now that we’ve talked about why a Contact Us page is important, let’s go into how you can optimize yours!
The Basics
Ask any dev or web designer for a how-to series about Contact Us page design, and you’ll bump into different answers. This shouldn’t shock you.
Like designing a landing page or hero page, there’s no science behind creating the perfect Contact Us page. It comes right down to creativity and having an idea of what your customers are all about.
That said, many devs and web designers will swear by the basics. Here they are:
Simplicity
A Contact Us page is a part of your website customers need to be able to navigate with ease. Customers are there for one reason, and one reason only — to contact you.
Hence, you’ll have to ensure that forms are easy to fill out and your contact details are open to view. Your contact details should stand out like the quality of service you intend to provide.
Show Off Your Brand’s Character
Picture this:
You’ve got a site that has black, blue, and red making up its basic color palate. Your other web pages including your blog section come in the same three colors.
All of a sudden, your Contact Us page greets users in its all-yellow-and-purple glory!
How do you think this would sit with your user? While it may not necessarily be a deal-breaker, it can turn some people off.
Being inconsistent with your fonts and colors can create a fragmented image of your brand. You want your customers to see more than a contact page. You want them to see and remember your Contact Us page!
Dot the I’s and Cross the T’s
This might seem a little nit-picky. However, it’s still a good practice to ensure that grammar and spelling are in check.
In addition, be mindful of punctuation, syntax, and the proper use of words depending on your brand and target audience. In short, remember all that good stuff you learned in your high school English class!
Making Your Contact Us Page Stand Out
It takes more than contact details and online forms on a web page to create an awesome Contact Us page.
This part of your website needs to do more than give your customers a way to contact you. It should also contribute to a positive customer experience. There are many ways to do this. Here are some to get you started, along with some examples:
Keep Site Navigation to a Minimum
Some will say that your Contact Us page is a landing page. Others will classify it as a different kind of page. Whichever camp you agree with, the tip will remain the same — minimize any chances of your site’s visitor or customer leaving the page.
You can achieve this effect by reducing site navigation opportunities. By site navigation opportunities, we mean any clickable element that will take them to another part of your site beyond the Contact Us page.
Sure, you shouldn’t remove in-site navigation from the Contact Us page completely. But, you don’t want to sprinkle buttons to your blog section or home page either.
Some examples of pages that have minimum navigation on the Contact Us page are:
Appear to “Read Minds”
Very likely, your customer will get in touch with you because of a question or problem. If you’ve been in business long enough, you’ll notice a pattern. More specifically, you’ll have an idea of common pain points and areas of concern.
This is where your research into common pain points will come into play. From your findings, you’ll be able to categorize problems into different areas. Doing this not only makes life easier for you and your site visitor but positions you as a business that knows what people want.
Very few sites have Contact Us pages that nail this down perfectly. One of them is Dropbox.
Dropbox’s Help Center has contact details as well as common areas of concern categorized on the page. This allows users to select areas of concern, creating a cohesive user experience.
Try a Virtual Chatbot
The problem with online forms is that they can strike people as useless at times. Occasionally, you’ll have one user just switch to a different service. This is because he or she assumes that the response on an online form won’t be timely.
But, what if you can change that? These days, chatbots are all the rage. These automated wonders give site visitors the timely responses they crave, albeit automated and pre-generated.
Chatbots are an innovation you need to exploit to please a growing millennial audience.
Of course, it helps to already have a clue about pain points. This ties into what we talked about in tip #2. Need an example of contact pages with chatbots? Here you go:
Set Expectations With Response Time
Without a chatbot, it can take some time before your customer receives a response. And, many of your customers already understand this. They just need to know how long they need to wait.
A helpful piece of information to include on your Contact Us page is the average time it takes for you to get back to your customer.
Shopee is a Singapore-based eCommerce site that aces expectation setting. The Contact Us page of the site informs users of when they can expect a response.
By letting your customers know how long they have to wait for your response, you give the impression of not ignoring their messages. Of course, do respond!
Wrapping Up
Your Contact Us page is what connects you to your customers. Hence, you must optimize this part of your website to give your customers a user experience they’ll fondly remember.
As passionate web developers and designers, we at PERC can create web pages that tell your story. Reach out to us now for a website that stands out, delivers, and speaks to your desired audience!
Sources:
https://www.impactplus.com/blog/best-contact-us-page-examples
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/03/11/contact-us-page
https://www.helpscout.com/75-customer-service-facts-quotes-statistics/
