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Build an Intuitive Website with “Contact Us” Best Practices

The Contact Us page is the most important page on your website—it is, after all, how your visitors reach out to you and potentially become customers, clients, or partners. Yet it is also by far one of the most neglected pages, despite how incredibly crucial it is to your business’s online presence. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the Contact Us best practices that will drive users to your business.

How to Build a Contact Us Page

The Contact Us page is often overlooked or poorly developed, frustrating users and making it more difficult for people to reach out to you and enter your buyer’s funnel. Because the Contact Us page seems so simple on its face, it actually ends up being harder to get right—because if it’s so simple, then it should be easy to do and not require much attention, right? Wrong.

Building intuitive websites means getting the Contact Us page right. A Contact Us page needs to meet your user’s expectations, give them the information they need, and make them trust you as someone they can reach out to.

Let’s look at how to build a Contact Us page for your site following best practices, starting with what your users want.

What do users expect from a Contact Us page?

First and foremost, what users expect from a Contact Us page is the ability to contact you! It sounds basic, but there are a lot of little mistakes websites can make that frustrate users and make it harder for them to use your Contact Us page as intended.

Little things, like:

  • Leaving the Contact Us page off of the main navigation menu or the site footer
  • Not having a prominent link to the Contact Us page on the homepage
  • Not providing information such as business hours or setting expectations

At the end of the day, what do users expect from an optimized contact page?

  • Users expect to find your Contact Us page through menu options like “Contact” (obviously), “Support,” and “Help,” or CTAs like “Contact Us,” “Speak to an Expert,” “Schedule a Consultation,” and so on.
  • Users expect your Contact Us page to be easy to find and click to, no matter where they are on your site. That means having it on the top navigation bar and the footer of every page of your site.
  • Users expect to see all of the options they have for contacting you, online and offline (office locations and hours, email, phone, fax, active social media profiles) collected in one convenient place.
  • Users expect to have an idea of who they’ll be talking to when they reach out to you.
  • Users expect to know how long it will take for you to reach back out to them.

What should be included in Contact Us?

Based on what your users are expecting, there are a few must-haves for your Contact Us page. Here’s what to put on a contact page:

  • Your business phone number
  • Your fax number (if you have one)
  • Your designated general contact email (contact, sales, customer service, etc.)
  • The address(es) of your office(s), maps, and basic driving directions
  • Office hours
  • A Contact Us form

Having photos of your primary contacts on your page can help personalize your company, assuring your visitors that their message is going to a person who cares and not just falling into your CRM to be dealt with by whoever. Including things like testimonials, reviews, or links to case studies can also help build social proof and encourage conversions—just remember not to overstuff your contact page.

Last but not least, your Contact Us page should make it clear to users that:

  1. You want to hear from them
  2. They will receive a quick, timely response from you

These might seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised to see how many Contact Us pages neglect to set up a user’s expectation that they will receive a response in a sensible time frame!

Your users should feel confident that they will receive a reply while their need for your services or products is still relevant—leave them in the dark, and they might just take their business to a competitor. For example, just mentioning that a user can expect a reply within one business day could suffice.

This might sound like a lot when you list it out, but it shouldn’t take up much space. Remember, the Contact Us page shouldn’t be full of content – it’s not a long form pillar page – and should be full of clear and easy avenues for visitors to reach out to you.

How long should a Contact Us form be?

Having a form for the visitor to fill out on your page is an important part of Contact Us best practices. In theory, the Contact Us form is more immediately accessible to your visitors than email or phone. The benefit you receive, in turn, is that you can collect information from your visitors that can help you better identify qualified leads and separate the wheat from the chaff.

In practice, if you want your Contact Us page to accomplish these goals and bring qualified leads into your sales funnel, you have to strike a delicate balance.

At a bare minimum, all your Contact Us form needs to do is collect a name and contact information, such as an email address and/or phone, along with the ability to include a brief message describing the user’s reason for reaching out. This is usually all you need.

Short contact forms encourage higher rates of use with a trade-off. You will lack qualifying information for these leads that could help you determine how potentially valuable they are to your company.

A more extensive form collects more information, such as the visitor’s company, industry, or location. By collecting this sort of information, you collect more qualifying information for your leads so you know when a really important lead comes through your funnel and can prioritize it accordingly.

However, it comes at a cost. Even if you make further qualifying fields optional, the sight of a long form can subconsciously discourage visitors.

There are pros and cons to both sides. Striking the balance between volume and quality is up to you.

Just remember—at the end of the day, a Contact Us page shouldn’t have more than it needs to have!

How to Optimize a Contact Page for Conversions

To optimize your contact page for conversions, you must focus on making your page as user-friendly, persuasive, and intuitive to use as possible.

Here are just a few best practices for a Contact Us page that encourages lead conversion:

  • Have a clear, visible, and compelling CTA (Call-To-Action)
  • Use a simple, concise, streamlined contact form
  • Provide multiple contact methods to engage users on their preferred medium
  • Utilize a mobile-friendly design, since many of your visitors (maybe even the vast majority) will experience your website on a smartphone or tablet
  • Provide clear messaging and social proof that communicates the benefits of reaching out

Last, but certainly not least, one of the most important Contact Page optimization best practices is analytics. Optimization is not a one-and-done thing, but an ongoing process. Using analytics tools, you can regularly monitor your Contact Us page’s performance, see what works and what doesn’t, and make adjustments as needed to continually improve its effectiveness.

Ultimately, the last thing your website should do is frustrate your visitors, and that’s especially true for the Contact Us page. If contacting you feels like a hassle—then your visitors won’t!

At Intuitive Websites, we’re all about building—you guessed it—intuitive websites. Our job is to help you build websites for your business or organization that your users feel comfortable using, drive business, and provide room for growth. Making the best Contact Us page you can is essential to good website design.

If you’re in the market for a better, more intuitive website with an optimized contact page experience and want to see a great illustration of Contact Us best practices, you can start by reaching out to us today to schedule an intro call:

Willow Ascenzo

Contributing author: Willow Ascenzo, one of IW’s content specialists based in southern Wisconsin. Prior to joining IW, Willow had over six years of experience crafting long-form website content for various tech startups in the Madison area.