Kia Ora, it is not uncommon these days for pretty much every website to have an online form. Online forms are great way for visitors of your website to get in touch with you easily and conveniently. Other benefits of online forms are:

• You can measure how effective the content of your website is,
  • If people are sending you a form asking you questions about something that isn't already explained on your website you can update the content to cover it
  • If people are making enquiries, you can tell that people are paying attention to your website and you have caught their attention
• You can use the form as a goal to see how people are using your website
  • This is mainly for bookings or product enquiries, but by installing Google Analytics and creating a goal or two, you can easily analyze your visitors and use that data to better steer them in the direction of purchasing or enquiring, which they will do through your online form - then you can track how many people are getting to your goals.
• People who are using computers that don't have an email client (e.g. Outloook) don't get annoyed by clicking on old school "mailto" links which open these programs - they can quickly send an email to you without having to leave your website to login to their email account to send it.

Now everything I have said so far is pretty much common knowledge these days, and most people already have an online form, so here are some tips for people who already have online forms on their website:

1. Don't have email addresses for you or anyone in your company in the content of your website, replace any email addresses with links to your contact form. If you have separate divisions of your company such as sales, general enquiries or locations - set up the links with parameters that can tell the form who/where to send it to, or just have the person who receives the emails forward them to the right person.
2. Put the form in a prominent position on the "Contact Us" page so it is displayed as soon as the visitor gets to the page, try to avoid large amounts of content on these pages as if the visitor has come to the page they are already ready to contact you.
   • If you do have a lot of content on a form page create an anchor link to the form in the top of the content, this way visitors can skip it if they wish. A good example of this is on the Extreme Boats website. Their boat information page also has a quote form at the bottom, there is a link at the top of the content to send them straight there.
3. If you have a lot of staff changes within your company - or if you believe the person who receives the forms will change often set the email address that the form is sent to as an alias - for example enquiries@example.co.nz. This will mean that every time the receiver changes, the form doesn't have to be modified in any way - only the email alias will need to be moved to the new persons email account.
4. Drive visitors to your form(s) - a nice looking "Contact us now" button can be a great way to do this, you can put these on every page or just in key areas, this will prompt people to enquire after reading the information you have given them. Analyzing your traffic with Google analytics is also a good way to measure this and perfect it.

So have a think about your website and how effective your online form is (or how effective one could be) for you. Also let me know your stories if you have any, about how small changes have made a huge difference to the amount of enquiries you receive.