June 29, 2012

How to Add a Contact Form to Your Website with ContactMe



ContactMe has been shut down.


If you have a blog or website, you know that the interaction between you and your visitors can bring new opportunities. In general, people love to know who's behind the blog or website, and likes to inquire or provide feedback. If your blog or website is representing a business, brand or organization, providing a way to contact is essential. Do you have a contact page implemented for your readers or customers to contact you?


Do You Need a Contact Page?


It depends. I mean, the way you define the purpose of a contact page. Your blog or website is not just a page on web space. It represents you or your business. You may have comment forms, a way to review products or services, or support page implemented to increase interaction with users and to get feedback. Oh, you may have given enough opportunity to contact you via social networks too. Yeah, they help you to get feedback from people. But do you think it's enough? It may be enough for you now. Let's say you are managing a business blog or website. You may offer products, services and information on your site. Just ask yourself,

● What if an user wants to know more information about your product or service?

● What if someone fail to find information on your blog or website, they are seeking for?

● What if users need to convey their ideas related to your products or services?

● What if someone has problem viewing your site and need to report the problem?

● What if your customer experiencing a problem with your product or service and wanna discuss it privately?

● What if someone needs to join hands with your business?

Do you think your social profiles and other feedback gaining methodologies can relate to all of them? Or do you feel like you're missing opportunity? It doesn't matter, your blog or website is in personal or business category. As long as you interact with people online, contact page could help you build relationships, find new opportunities, increase sales, increase user satisfaction and brings you more advantages towards you or your business. Still thinking of implementing a contact page on your blog or website?


Contact Information vs Privacy


So you need to have a contact page on your blog or website. You can simply create a new page on your site and list all available contact information such as phone numbers, email addresses for your visitors. That makes sense? For businesses, it could be alright to show their contact information publicly. What if you're a personal blogger? Would you like to give away your personal email address? To trusted contacts, YEAH! Still it's alright and else how do they contact you?

But do you know there are spammers and email marketing junkies always looking out for personal email addresses to send their promotions and newsletters or to spam with your email? Some of them will sell your email addresses to companies. Afterwards you will start to see new promotions, advertisements, newsletters in your inbox but you don't remember signing up for such services. Sounds familiar?


Use a Contact Form


A contact form is really helpful if you are much aware of your privacy. I mean, if you don't wanna expose your email to public. It helps to get information from people and you can get valid information without letting it to be a bulky message. But if you are not familiar with PHP or such server side programming languages, building contact form from scratch is impossible. It doesn't mean you have to give up on it. If you can't build, outsource or buy it.

Anyway now there are plugins and contact management tools available where you can easily create your own contact form to embed on our blog or website and even free. ContactMe is such a useful service where you can easily build and customize a contact form of your choice. Customization is vital 'cause the formation of contact form may different from site to site.

If you are using ContactMe to create contact form and to manage contacts, you can have following features along with the service.

● Live preview of your form while building it.

● Customize contact form anytime and one time implementation. (You don't need to add contact form code each time you update your form)

● Display confirmation message after the user submission.

● Integrated form validation techniques to prevent users from entering false information.

● Enhanced Captcha spam protection to prevent further spam activities.

● Reports to view user engagement of your contact form.

● View all contact submissions in one place including the location of the contacted person.

● View all contacts of people who have contacted via your contact form.

● Respond to submissions directly from your email, by replying to contact notification email.


Ready to Contact?


So what do you think? If you use general contact form, you have to manage it all individually at your inbox and have to build separate list to manage your new contacts. Absolutely, you can't expect reports for engagement from general contact form. Further you have to be careful of form validation techniques and spam activities of users. So here you will get it all without additional charge or effort. All you need to do is build as your choice and add to our site. However with ContactMe free plan, you can create only one contact form. If you need to create more forms and wanna experience additional features, check out paid plans.

Now it's time for you. Ready to welcome new opportunities and improve user satisfaction of your blog or website? Let's implement a contact form on your site easily with ContactMe and start to manage your contacts. Oops... I almost forgot to provide you a really useful resource. I have found very interesting post which helps you to know what matters in building a better contact form for your website. I'd like to invite you to read Build A Better Website: 8 Tips For A Contact Page That Converts written by +Carol Lynn Rivera, before step into contact form implementation. Her tips would help you to build your contact form more effectively for your blog or website. Afterwards, step into steps below.


Before You Go:

You need to sign up for a new account at ContactMe website before you proceed.


Steps:

1. Log in to your ContactMe account.

2. Navigate to Account Settings page and fill out appropriate information.

3. Now click on Settings drop down menu on top right corner and click Forms.


4. Now click on Add New Form button.


5. You will navigate to Contact Form Customization page. Customize your contact form using available options. You can,

● Show your business name and logo.

● Specify your email address, where you need to receive contact form submissions.

● Hide your email address from contact form.

● Display your contact information (You can show them on a map) and social profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype).

● Add Captcha Spam Protection.

● Change form default language.

● Add, edit and arrange fields of your contact form.

● View live preview of your contact form.

6. Once you done with your contact form, click Save Form button.

7. Now you will direct back to Forms page and there you will able to see your contact form listed. Check out Actions field corresponding to your created contact form and click Get Code link.


8. On next page, you will be able to see embed code snippet for your contact form under Embed The Form heading. Copy your contact form code and add copied Contact Form Code to the contact page on your blog or website.

Note: If you are a Blogger user, you can embed your code easily on your blog. Read How to Embed External Content on Your Blogger Posts or Pages.


More Information:

* You can manage your contact form at Forms page and changes will reflect on your form automatically. No need to place contact form code again.

* You can view all contact submissions on Submissions page arranged by date.

* You can view your contacts of the people who have contacted via contact form at Contacts page.

* You can view contact form engagement of users via Reports page.


Enjoy :-)




Awesome! Thanks for coming by and taking your time to read this post :) I hope you have learnt something today. Now you can share it with your friends and I'd love to hear from you too.






Related Posts and Categories


Category, , , , ,





Comments

* Make sure your comment is genuine and comply with our commenting guidelines.

* Review your email and reply notification settings to receive replies via email.


Lisa Buben said...

I like the look of this one, I have used others for other sites but not on my blogger, it's on my to do list today, thanks Mayura!

Mayura De Silva said...

Hi Lisa,

That's great :) Glad you did it on yours and contact page is a vital to grab more opportunities and to improve user experience dear. Customize your contact page to match with your blog and ask for relevant details on it. People will happily contact you and sometimes you will be surprised with good offers it takes.

Cheers...

Adrienne said...

That was a good explanation Mayura, great job.

I use a plug-in and have been pretty happy with it overall.  I don't get a lot of spam on my blog email but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

I enjoyed Carol's post too, she really shared with us the value of building those relationships with your list.  Great addition to this post.

Thanks for this great explanation, very helpful indeed.

Enjoy your weekend now.

~Adrienne

P.S.  Thanks for featuring my video as the video of the weekend.  It's greatly appreciated.

Mayura De Silva said...

Hi Adrienne,

Yeah, I've had some auto generated spam messages via contact form earlier. But not after using Captcha protection on ContactMe. When I finish writing, I recalled a post I've seen somewhere about creating effective contact page dear. I've found it Carol's blog and I really thought it would help and match with this topic. So I've added it here :) It's really an informative and explanatory post.

Ohw... I've selected your video on last weekend and you know I've got good responses for it too.

Thanks for stopping by and for adding your compliments dear :)

You have a great weekend too :)

Cheers...

Brenda said...

This is AWESOME Mayura! I just added to my blogger blog! Very easy to do! Thank you for both writes up! You rock! :)

Mayura De Silva said...

Hi Brenda,

Awesome Brenda ;) Now I see it on your blog. It's really easy and appealing too. isn't it? ;) So your visitors can easily contact you and no need to expose your email address too. And you will find it really easy to check out all your submissions too.

Thanks for stopping by and always appreciate your compliments dear :)

Cheers...

Harleena Singh said...

Love the way you explain things so well Mayura!

If I hadn't got my contact form in shape, I would have gone in for all that you mentioned here. :)

Just like Adrienne, I also use a plugin for my contact form, which so far is working pretty well. It's called the jetpack plugin, which is a free contact form. Earlier I was using a different one but that ate up lot of space resources. And yes, I went ahead with this one because adding a contact form is very easy with this plugin. I haven't tried what you mentioned, though when I am stuck with mine, would head over to yours.

Thanks for sahring and letting us know about ContactMe. :)

Mayura De Silva said...

Hi Harleena,

Well, so you have a contact form on your blog and that's great dear. I think you know what would you miss if you haven't had a contact form on yours :)

As Adrienne said she hasn't had any issue of spamming with contact form and I hope neither you. Spam protection wouldn't be essential but here you can specify and validate form fields as you need, just other than text fields to write a message. So you can ask for right amount of information using option buttons, drop down buttons etc. Also if you need to keep track of all your incoming submissions, it's really great.

Thanks for commenting and for adding your experience on contact forms dear :)

Cheers...

Sylviane Nuccio said...

Hi Mayura,

Contact me is what I actually use on all my blogs. They do have a free and paid version and the free one works fine with me so far.

This is great what you've done giving us step by step to set it all up. Thanks for your excellent tips, Mayura :)

Mayura De Silva said...

Hi Sylviane,

Wow... So you're already on it :) Great choice, isn't it dear? Paid version has more unique features too. However I think free version is much more enough for personal use anyway. So you confirm it too ;)

I've seen some blogs without contact forms and I myself find new opportunities with the contact form on my blog dear. So I thought it would be really helpful in sharing it with my readers.

Thanks for your comment and yeah, for encouraging compliments dear :)

Cheers...

JB said...

Great post again. Good work Mayura. The majority of my promotion goes through Google+ and Twitter, but FaceBook isn't really my favorite place for that (yet). I will certainly look into that though, because it's kinda stupid to let a (in potential) 800 Million people market just pass by.

DjDipo said...

I think better use your google plus profile to reach your reader as now blogger get more integrated with google.

Mayura De Silva said...

Hi Mate,

Well, social profiles are vital to connect and interact. And still contact form if the formal contact methodology especially when users wanna share their private information. So if any blog or website wanna have a contact form implemented, they can make use of this tutorial :)

Cheers...

DjDipo said...

I think you have a point, for matters of privacy is preferably through a service like this and you have a tutorial that is easy to follow.

Mayura De Silva said...

Yeah mate :) Anyway it's your choice to select which matters most. Though contact form seems unnecessary, it can bring you more opportunities. Trust me on that.

Thanks for your comment and compliments :)

Cheers...