The ‘Contact Us’ page is an important page on your site and yet it’s often the most neglected.

It’s overlooked by many marketers or treated as an afterthought when it could actually be used as a very effective tool to drive sales and conversions (when set up the right way to facilitate that).

Of course, the contact page won’t make or break your business, but it’s still a very good marketing opportunity that shouldn’t be wasted.

Most people just slap a form or an email address on the page and call it a day, but there are smarter ways of designing your page to make it work for you.

If you want to grow your business and build strong, lasting relationships with your customers, it’s important to make yourself accessible and reply to everyone who gets in touch with you through your contact page.

But you can do more than that, you can actually optimize your contact page for conversions and even sales.

So, let’s take a look at how you can turn the contact page on your own site into a great conversion opportunity.

Be Strategic About What You Put On Your Contact Page

Why? Because we are in the ‘relationships’ business. In a world where B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) are common concepts, maybe it’s time we came up with a new one: H2H (Human-to-Human)

Remember, all the decision makers that you’re ever going to come across are human beings, and they value human to human interactions.

Every aspect of your business is driven by conversations, whether they take place over the phone, through email, via Facebook Messenger or Twitter.

There are many platforms that people can use to communicate, but the bottom line is that it’s the conversations that drive business.

Here are a couple of examples of these conversations:

• One of your readers asking a casual question.

That person may not be ready to buy anything from you yet, but a personal response (as opposed to a pre-formatted one) makes them more likely to buy from you when the time comes.

• One of your prospects asking about your product features. Your sales page can’t answer all the questions that your users could possibly have.

And when they call you with questions about your product, it’s those conversations that close sales.

The point here is that this is a HUMAN business that we’re in, and your business should be as welcoming to all conversations as possible.

Also, your contact page should be treated like any other landing page (optimized for conversions and sales)

How to Craft an Effective Contact Page

1. Make it Personal

Don’t be lazy and just throw an email form on the page, and don’t try to make yourself look bigger or more ‘corporate’ than you are (for instance, don’t use ‘we’ when you know it’s just you…) Neither of those types of pages would be very warm and welcoming to your visitors.

What you want to do instead is to keep it very personal, and talk to your audience like you’re a real person talking to real humans beings.

Welcome them to your ‘Contact Us’ page and make them feel at ease about contacting you.

2. Show Your Face

People need to see who they are talking to if you want them to be comfortable with you, so show them a photo of you.

If you have a team, then you can show some fun, smiling pictures of your team members so that your visitors know who they are about to interact with.

It doesn’t matter if you’re just one blogger or a massive company with multiple departments – you can still make each of those departments more human and more real with the right photos.

3. Include FAQs on Your Contact Page

Depending on the nature of your particular business, Frequently Asked (or Answered) Questions are a great way of reducing the volume of inquiries that you get.

For instance, if you find that you get a lot of emails, all you have to do is to sift through them to find more common queries and then create an FAQ resource to answer all of those questions in advance.

This can be your first layer of support that helps to answer a lot of questions instantly and save people the trouble of having to email you.

Your FAQ section also has another purpose: It can be used as a great marketing opportunity.

Take the recurring questions in your market and then link them to the posts on your blog that offer the best answers to those questions (and if you’re doing your blogging right, each of those posts has a call to action. Right?)

This is a smart way of using your contact page for conversions by routing common questions in your niche to the products or lead magnets that you offer.

4. Provide Various Contact Points

When you make it hard for your customers and prospects to start a conversation with you, you’re only hurting your business.

This is especially true if you’re just starting out and looking to build strong relationships with your customers.

Some marketers treat customers as if they were nuisances to be kept from making direct contact, but the smart ones know the importance of communicating with their audience and even go a step further by giving them more options than just email.

They ensure that their audience have an easy, frictionless experience when contacting them.

People shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get you to answer their questions. That’s a sure-fire way of losing your customers. Instead, your priority should be to allow them to connect with you on whichever platform is the easiest for them.

Some platforms you can use include:

• Email
• Phone (if someone will actually answer it…)
• Twitter
• Facebook Messenger
• Live Chat

Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail:

Email

For this option, you can either display your business email address right there on the page (but that opens you up to robots that collect emails for spam uses) or you could use an email form.

One of the best tools you can use for this is Gravity Forms, but there are other free options that you can use such as the Contact Form 7 plugin.

Gravity Forms lets you set up a question pertaining to the general inquiry, and the message is then routed accordingly.

This is great if you have many different areas in your business (eg, multiple departments, various team members etc.)

Facebook

This is a great way of having people connect with you.

Most people are logged on to Facebook all day long anyway, which makes Facebook Messenger a great (albeit often overlooked) platform for communicating with them.

Facebook understands this and that’s why they set up their Messenger platform to be a central tool for communicating with businesses.

You can connect your contact page to Facebook Messenger by using a hyperlink to your Messenger page.

The short link for Messenger is m.me and if you put your own URL name after that shortlink, you create a shortcut link directly to Messenger, so that people can message you directly.

For instance, if your Facebook URL is:

http://www.facebook.com/yourblogname.com

A link direct to your Messenger would look like this:

http://m.me/yourblogname.com

And it would open up the Messenger web app already preset to message you. You can place the link anywhere on your contact page.

Zotabox

This is a free marketing tool that you can use to boost your subscribers and sales.

Zotabox has a widget for Facebook Live Chat, and although it only works with pages and not profiles, it is actually a very nice widget.

It appears in the corner at the bottom of your page and it’s a great option to use for live chat support (again, only if you’ll actually be there to answer questions).

ManyChat

This is yet another option that will help you connect with your audience in an easy and frictionless way.

This tool is about more than just Facebook buttons. It lets you build your list on Messenger. You can also set up autoresponders and Messenger bots.

In fact, it can do a whole lot more than that, but, for your contact page, you only need their ‘growth tool’ which allows you to place a ‘Send to Messenger’ button on your page.

There’s also a chat option that allows you to embed a widget that floats in the corner to start chats.

When someone clicks it, a Facebook Messenger chat is initiated.

This is a really great tool and it’s real value lies in the fact that when someone contacts you using Messenger, they can be placed on your Messenger list, giving you an opportunity to foster ongoing engagement.

Also, the open rates for Messenger are extremely high and you can also easily invite your audience to connect with you on social media with eye-catching Facebook ‘like’ buttons and Twitter buttons and widgets.

Phone Number

As for this option, only use a phone number if you or someone else will always be there to answer it during the specified hours.

If you’re not going to be able to do so, then don’t list the phone number on your contact page.

Remember, the aim is to make the contact process easy and take away as much of the friction as possible. When customers call you and get your voicemail, that introduces a lot of friction.

Bottom Line?

Think beyond email and make it easy for anyone to have a conversation with you.

5. Set Realistic Expectations

People want instant results these days, but unless you have a whole team of support people ever ready to answer their questions, you can’t really provide instant response.

But since you want to try to make your communication with your readers as frictionless as possible, the best way to do so is by setting some realistic expectations.

Manage your readers expectations:

• If you know that it’s going to take you a day or so to get back to them, then tell them.
• If there is even a chance that you may not see their email (if you get really high volumes of email each day) then make sure they understand that.
• If there are some types of emails that aren’t likely to be answered, make that clear too.

Whatever you have to do, make sure that they know about it in advance.

People are mostly understanding about this kind of stuff, just as long as you’re upfront and let them know exactly what to expect.

6. Make The Page Visible and Easy To Find

Ideally, place the page in the top navigation.

The last thing you want is to have people hunting for ways to contact you, as this can be a very frustrating experience for them. Place your page in an obvious place and make it easy to see.

Strategies For Designing An Awesome Contact Page That Converts

Now that you know the importance of having an optimized contact page, as well as exactly what to put on it, it’s time to address what it should look like.

Most blogs simply put the information onto the standard page from the blog’s theme. This means that the contact page has the same look as the blog, sidebar included.

But since your contact page is one of your core pages on your site, it needs to look a bit more professional than that.

It should look very different from your blog posts.

You can use any (decent) landing page creator to achieve this.

Thrive Architect from the Thrive Membership suite of tools is a particularly good one and it allows you to design your web pages in ANY way that you want without the use of HTML or CSS coding.

But, whichever tool you choose to go with, it should allow you to add all of the elements we discussed above such as the photo, FAQ tab, email form, and other contact options.

In Conclusion

The ‘Contact Us’ page on your site is an important piece of internet real estate that you should optimize for conversions. For a lot of businesses like contractors and agencies, this page is actually the one that gets the most views on their sites.

But, no matter what business you’re in, if you threw your contact page together as a quick afterthought, it’s time to remedy that and turn it into a well-optimized marketing opportunity for your business.

Feel free to post your comment below.  An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published August 30th 2018