The website contact form is a fine art which is very difficult to master.
Unfortunately there is no set criteria for a "perfect" contact form as they need to be flexible dependent not only on your business needs but also your prospects' needs.
It's important to strike a balance between what information you want to gain from a contact form and what information your prospect is willing to give.
Below are a few golden rules to consider when creating a contact form but remember the most important thing is think about what everyone ideally wants from the transaction and not just copying a contact form you saw elsewhere.
Keep it simple Consider if you absolutely need everything you are asking for in your contact form? Think about the essentials, for example - how are you going to contact your prospect? If you're never going to send a hard copy mailing to them then there is no point asking for their mailing address.
Consider every step of the process and ask yourself if it's essential.
When building your form think about which fields can be merged, if you don't necessarily need first name and last name to be split into separate fields merge them into one "name" field, also consider doing this for mailing address fields.
Freedom of speech Consider adding a free text field to the end of your contact form for prospects that have out of the ordinary requests or who want to give more details of their enquiry.
While not all prospect will fill this in it is practical to give them the option.
Also, if you find a lot of prospects including the same information in the free text field then you can consider adding this option to the form in another way to help save the prospect time and make the form more appealing to fill in.
Be mindful of mandatory fields Mandatory fields can be a difficult to decide upon, some people are of the opinion that if you are asking for it then it is of course mandatory but this can be a slippery slope as not all fields need be mandatory.
If you are providing an option to be contacted via email or telephone then both fields do not need to be mandatory.
Also giving your prospect the option to fill in a free text field doesn't necessarily mean they have to.
Ditch the Captcha Asking your prospect if they are a human may prevent some spam email coming in but it will also add another barrier to a valuable business enquiry being sent.
Most spam emails are very easy to detect and the time it takes to sort them from a real enquiry is minimal, make it easier for your customer and get rid of the Captcha.
With these simple rules you can easily create a contact form that is quick and easy for your prospects to fill in while still providing you with all the information you need.
Remember to frequently revisit your contact form and put yourself in the shoes of your prospect to ensure it's as good as it can be.