A contact form is a no brainer to have on your website, but are you not getting as many inquiries through it as you would like? You have a clear call to action on your website, information is easy to find, but is it your contact form that’s holding you back?
How many questions do you have on your contact form right now? 6? 8? If you ask for too much information up front, you can drive potential customers away. HubSpot recently did a research on 40,000 of their customers forms and found that the conversion rate improved by almost half when the number of form fields was reduced from four to three. Half! If you have a client that’s contacting a few photographers, you might be decreasing your chances of someone following through because they don’t want to take the time to fill out a lengthy form.
We try to rationalize our long contact forms by saying that we’re screening our clients ahead of time. But if this hindering clients from even reaching out to you, you might not have any inquiries at all. You want to make it easy for them to make initial contact. By keeping your form short, you’re making that first hurdle low so that they will follow through with the call to action on your website. Keep it simple: Name, email, and a message box. More often than not, they’re going to include what they’re interested in within that message box anyway. And if you use the Iris Lead contact form on your website, they can easily select the icon of what type of session they’re interested in.
In reality, your website should be doing a lot of your client screening for you. If you have a strong brand and you are targeting your ideal client from the start, those are going to be the people that are wanting to contact you for a session anyway.
After they’ve sent you the initial contact, quickly send out a standard “Thank you for contacting us!” email. That is the biggest way to connect with and impress your client is by having a fast follow up. You can even include a basic questionnaire to gather more information from them. By doing it this way, you’ve shown them that you’re professional and organized right from the start.
As a side note – if you’ve noticed a big dip in inquiries, make sure you’re checking your contact form regularly so that you know incoming messages are getting to your inbox. Set a reminder on your calendar once a month! Too many times, I’ve had photographer friends not realize that client inquiries weren’t getting through and they had missed out on new clients. And always have your email address listed on your website in case someone needs to contact you directly!
How long is your contact form? Are there any questions that you can eliminate to make it shorter?
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