The Elements of Contact Page

It is the most important page for a business web site, this is where the first contact is made with your client. As First Impression can get you to a Good Start will solve half the process, it’s necessary to make a contact page that can do it.

It’s often underrated by the clients and designers about the contact page of a web site. Most websites have contact page which informs nothing rather than a heading CONTACT US. You could be losing a lot of sales with that. It’s certain that a fantastic contact page will get you a deal with new customers, every time (Most of the time).

Adding your contact information, especially your telephone number, provides legitimacy and makes it easy for prospects and customers to reach you. If you make it difficult, they will not call and go somewhere else. Insufficient contact information is one among the few ways of losing visitors.

Must Haves

The main aim of a contact page is to ensure that the customer reaches you and gain trust. So it’s important to provide all the valuable information. The information to be made available depends on the type of business. Like a company that does online services like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) need not provide the physical address to the public as a company that sell a physical product need to.

So it’s totally depended on your business. In here we will provide you with some features.

• Office address.
• Email accounts.
• Telephone numbers.
• Contact Forum.
• Social media information.

Official Address

It depends on the type of business that you are doing as mentioned above, a company that does online services like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) need not provide the physical address to the public (Non-Registered users) as a company that sell a physical product.

Citizen Integrated Media have a small Google Map embedded in the contact page.

You will need to mention the you address along with landmarks and direction from the landmarks like Bus station… even Google map can be embedded in there showing your location.

Email accounts

Make sure you provide the email address to sales , customer service & Support. Again if you don’t have a separate department don’t forget to mention the user about it. Adding email address of various departments allows users to get in touch with the department directly, it can save the time required to transfer the question to departments and get replayed.

ClickSSL provides the email address of different departments along with a contact form, also note the email address, they are images not plain text.

It’s recommended to display email address as an image rather than plain text. Show the email address even if you have a contact form as there circumstances where the user is not able to use it.

Telephone numbers

Image Credit : russell_w_b

Telephone numbers are the most important contact information that users look for. As they can get the information straight away and talk to the same species (Homo sapiens) it’s highly preferred by clients, make sure that you inform a few more information along with Telephone number.

• Complete Number with Country / State Code.
• Time of availability.
• Type of service (Toll Free / Cost per min).
• Languages that you Support. (Make sure you support English.)

kaspersky provides the type of telephone number with country code and the time where support will be available for different regions.

Social media information

Whenever you see social, it will be twitter, facebook, Google plus, dribble ….. that clicks or else you must an alien, if you are welcome to Earth. In the world where social medias is everything it’s necessary that you need social accounts to survive. Make sure you have an active account in any social medium that suits you.

Don’t forget to connect you sites to the social medias.

Guide Visitors

Image credit:National Geographic Россия

Imagine you being invited for a conference may be smashing Conference, give a card with no address but have all their details – mobile, home phone, office, receptionist and social media. Where will you start, you will definitely find the location of conference for sure as its Smashing Conference, it must have taken at least 2-3 phone call or emails for sure.

You did it for a reason, 90% of the users won’t as they have no reason. Help your customers contact you with confidence by providing them guidance. You need to lay out all the reasons why they should contact you.

Stick to the Agreement

There is no “I Agree” option in my contact pages then what is the agreement….? Though you did sign any agreement, everything you said on the contact page is valued more that an Agreement.

Make sure the user gets a reply before you clocks runs out. It must be a real reply not an automated reply. If you provide 24×7 service then the average reply should not exceed 10 – 20 minutes.

Be on time, if you are not able to provide it, you will end up losing every user.

There is no doubt that a person filling out your contact page is probably running out of time. They can possibly contact few other companies too, why would they want to spend the time on your form…..? You can risk losing a customer before you open the door. So make sure you have a decent contact page.

All you want is a user leaving the websites with confidence, anticipating a reply.