Along with the About Us page, your Contact Us page is one of the most important and crucial pages on your site to get right. In fact, the Contact Us page could be considered the absolutely most important page. Even if the rest of your site succeeds in the goals, if visitors fail to find the information they need to contact you then you will bring their shopping experience to a screeching halt.
Shoppers are often hampered if they don't feel they can get a hold of a real person or are limited in their contact options. With all other areas of the site working, a bad contact us page may cause someone to think twice about purchasing with you altogether.
Accessibility
Visitors must be able to find a link to your Contact Us page easily and obviously from all pages of your site. They should not have to hunt to find your contact information.
Contact options
Provide multiple options for contacting you including phone, fax, email and web form. Live support can also be valuable. While you may want to direct the options toward what is most convenient for you, not providing a contact option most convenient for your visitors can be a mistake.
Contact points
Larger sites should provide contact information for all major departments such as customer service, tech support, inquiries, general info, memberships, job apps, billing, etc. You might even want to include contact options for specific individuals such as CEO, SFO, etc.
Map and hours
If you deal more with local business rather than national, your hours of operation should be included along with a map pinpointing your location. This certainly won't hurt national businesses either.
No advertisements
Your contact page should be free of ads, both for your own as well as other products/services. This page should maintain as limited focus as possible.
Web form
Your web contact form should require as little information as is necessary. Don’t use this as a survey. Just the bare necessities should be requested.
Your Contact Us page should not be complicated. In fact, simple is better. Provide the information that your visitors need and provide as many contact options as you can to cover your bases. This will ensure an effective contact us page that provides assurances to your visitors as they move through the conversion process.
Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.
Thanks for the heads up.
I tend to agree with all those points but the one that strikes the hardest is - "simple is better"
The simpler something is, the more likely someone is to use it.
Putting a name on the contact page, especially for small businesses, helps immensely with credibility, such as: Bill Smith will get back with you.
Thank you; now I have more ammo to show to clients!
Leaving no room for doubt or time spent in searching, contact information on each page seems like the best option to me.
Thanks for the summary.
Great post. I too believe that every page of your site must have your email address and/or contact information.
At the point in any page of your site a person must be able to get hold of you, otherwise you will lose customers!
All the best,
Mark
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