Contact Form Enquiries

Most websites have a Contact Us page (mysite.com/contact/ or mysite.com/contact-us/) that allows a visitor to send an email message to the site owner. The form looks professional, and avoids having to publish your email address for spammers to harvest.

How to add a Contact Form

With Wordpress there are a number of plugins that support contact forms. We support Chip Cuccio’s Contact Form ][ as well as as Oliver Seidel's CformsII.

The easiest way to add a contact form is to make sure the Contact Form ][ plugin is activated (which it is for all OM4 sites), and then:

• using the Visual Editor, click on the Contact Form button
• using the HTML view, type [CONTACT-FORM] 

How to Monitor Contacts and Conversions

If you are running an OM4 site and have the OM4 Contact Form Enquiries plugin activated, messages entered by visitors are recorded so you can track them through to conversion.

To monitor your contacts, make sure the Contact Form Enquiries plugin is active, then go to Dashboard, Contacts to see:

• the date, time, name and text of the message sent
• the Contact Page, which is the page on your website the contact was initiated from
• the Original Referrer of the contact - that is, the website they visitor was on before coming to your website. This might be Google (if they searched Google to find you), or another website.
• the Keywords used to find you, if the contact originated from a Search engine

When the contact is followed up and it leads to a Conversion (your definition here, but perhaps it could be a Booking or a Sale), you can mark the original contact as converted. You can report on contacts over a period of time, and analyse your conversion rate (number of conversions divided by total contacts).

If someone does get past the spam traps and still posts a junk message, you can mark it as Spam to stop it affecting your conversion rate.

Using CformsII

This is a much more complicated plugin to use, so we don’t activate it by default. You need to work with it a bit to get it going (or read the instructions even) - the reward for doing this is you get to create multiple contact forms for your site, with custom fields (such as text fields, check boxes and radio buttons). And tracking as well.

What do you think?

If you like contact forms, please tell us using the contact form below.