For Six Years I Talked Seattle Owners Out of Contact Forms

For about six years I talked Seattle clients out of contact forms, and I did it with a completely straight face.

I had reasons. Forms collect nothing but junk. Forms make a small outfit feel like a call center. A phone number is warmer, and small business is a phone business, and anyone serious about hiring you will pick the phone up and call.

Four of those were opinions and I still half hold them. The last one was a claim about how strangers behave when they want something, and I never once checked it against anything.

The client who ignored me

A woman I’d built for put a form on her site anyway, about a year after we finished, using a plugin I hadn’t installed and wouldn’t have recommended if she’d asked.

She mentioned it on a call about something else entirely. Most of the work she took on that spring had arrived through it, and she could name the exact evening the best job came in, because the notification woke her up.

Every one of those people had her phone number sitting on the same screen. Not one of them used it.

Why would they, when the thing in front of them worked and cost them nothing?

They weren’t shy about her, either. They were on a job, or at a desk with people listening, or lying in bed at eleven at night with a decision half made and no intention of speaking to a stranger about it before morning.

Where this city sits

24.3% of the homepages I opened here have a contact form on them. Only Corpus Christi came out lower when I lined up the twenty four cities, and New Orleans is the one sitting immediately above.

Across everything I audit the figure runs at 28%, which is nobody’s idea of a demanding standard, and this city sits underneath it.

So Seattle isn’t a place where owners tried the thing and found it useless. Almost nobody tried.

A client of mine here ran a perfectly respectable site for two years and got nothing back from it, and the four changes that finally moved it were all about this size.

The slot in the door

A contact form is a slot cut into your front door.

Someone walks up at eleven at night, pushes something through, and it’s lying on the mat when you open up in the morning. Take the slot away and the only way in is knocking while you happen to be standing there awake.

Your phone number is you standing there awake. It works beautifully for the hours you’re actually standing there, and it does nothing whatsoever for the rest of the week.

So which of the five do you say to me when I bring it up? They’re below, worst first, with what I think of each.

1) It’s already on my contact page

Doesn’t hold.

I check the homepage deliberately, because the homepage is where she lands and it’s where she leaves from.

She got there from a search result, or a review, or a text message from her sister, and she has about as much patience for hunting through your menu as you have for an automated phone system at half past four.

When did you last go digging through a stranger’s navigation on a phone to find a way of contacting them?

78.4% of the sites I tested here work properly on a phone, so the page in her hand is behaving itself. It simply has nothing on it that she can do.

A link marked Contact is a sign pointing at a door. A form is the door.

2) Everybody who wants me phones me

True about everyone you hear from, and completely silent about everyone you don’t.

A man on a site with a compressor running can’t make that call, and he isn’t going to remember to try again at six when he’s driving home with the radio on.

A woman sitting in an open office is not going to say the words about her divorce, her debts or her rash out loud with three colleagues within earshot.

You never meet either of them, which is exactly what makes this excuse so comfortable to keep. Nothing ever turns up to contradict it.

So what was last month’s silence actually made of, in your business, in people?

And 56.7% of the sites here are counting their visitors at all, so most owners around here couldn’t tell you what last month’s silence was made of even if they wanted to.

3) My email address is right there in the footer

Half holds.

Your address asks her to leave your website, open a mail app, type your address in by hand without fumbling a letter of it, then invent a subject line and a polite opening sentence, all before she has any real idea whether you’re even the right company for the job.

A form asks for her name, a way to reach her back, and one line about what she needs. She’s finished before she’s had time to talk herself out of it.

How many strangers do you honestly think finish the first version of that on a phone, in a car park, in the rain?

Your address does one thing better, mind you, and it’s worth keeping for that alone. She can forward it to her husband.

That forward is worth thinking about on its own, because it is the one moment two people look at your website together.

4) Forms fill up with junk

True when I started out. Solved since.

Every form tool I install now has the junk filtering built in and switched on by default, and turning it on where it isn’t takes about two minutes.

Most of what still gets through is a robot offering to redesign your website, which I find funnier than you’re going to.

You’ll delete four of those a week. Weigh that against the woman lying in bed at eleven at night with her mind half made up, and tell me which way that trade goes for you.

5) I can’t keep up with what I already get

Holds. The only one on this list that does.

If last week’s voicemails are still sitting there unplayed, adding a form makes you slower rather than richer, because a message answered on Thursday about a Monday job reads as a no.

The fix for that isn’t a form and it never was. It’s deciding who answers, by when, and what happens on the days that person is up a ladder with a phone in the van.

Be honest with yourself about which one you’re dealing with, though. Is that your situation, or is it the sentence you reach for whenever the subject comes up?

Being found was never the problem here

88.2% of the businesses I audited in this city hold at least one Google review, so strangers are finding these companies and reading about them perfectly well.

They find you, they read your stars, they decide you’ll probably do, and then your screen offers them a phone call or nothing at all.

How much did you spend getting her that far? And what did you leave her to do with it?

Backing out of a page is the easiest thing on the internet, and I once sat down and listed every reason I could think of that a stranger leaves. Having nothing to do when she arrives is on it.

That’s an enormous amount of work to get a stranger that far and then leave the last step of it to whether she’s the kind of person who rings people.

When I build a website around here, the form sits on the first screen and I fill it in from my own phone before I hand the site over to anyone.

And if yours has been there for years without anybody checking whether it still reaches a living person, send me your address and I’ll test it and tell you what turned up.

Do this tonight

Open your homepage on your phone and look at the first screen, before any scrolling happens.

If there’s nothing on it a stranger could type into, install one form and give it three fields: her name, a way to reach her back, and one line about the job.

Toronto puts a form on more homepages than any city I check, and it still took me years to work out that a form nobody tests is a form that quietly stopped delivering.

Then send yourself a message through it and sit there until it arrives.