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If you run a blog for your business, then chances are you’re doing it to attract more leads and sales.

While most bloggers spend hours updating their blog with the hopes of engaging their audience and getting more organic traffic, very few spend time optimizing the parts of their blog that can grow their business…

… Most importantly their contact form.

Recently we did a study involving 1,886 websites that thrive within the design, development, advertising, and coaching industries and were shocked that only 8.7 percent had any pre-qualification questions on their contact forms.

To make matters worse, up to 40 percent of the websites were found guilty of using generic statements such as “Please contact us!” and/or “We would love to hear from you!”

These should be considered client repellent. Don’t use them, especially if you’re trying to position yourself as a premium provider.

In this article, I want to show you how you can overhaul your contact form to help bring your business more leads and sales.

Your Contact Form Should Do Three Things

 Before we get started here are the three things that the “perfect contact form” should absolutely accomplish:

1. It should be able to filter out problem clients.
2. It should help potential clients figure out exactly what it is they really need.
3. It should allow you to collect key information to guide you when dealing with the client.

To make things easier for you to understand, I have included an infographic which breaks down all of the aspects of a contact page that can prove to be vital to the success of your website and its ability to build an audience for your growing business.

Feel free to save a copy of the PDF file for future reference.

Step 1) Ensure You Have a Reliable Host

Talking about optimization, one factor instantly comes to mind and that is speed. Not only is lack of speed one of the biggest ‘turn-offs’ for a visitor, but it damages brand reputation and general reliability.

Ways to get around this is to go with a reputable name who offers set uptime guarantee and response times, along with transparency around their services. For the sake of recommending a brand we’ve worked with, HostGator springs to mind. These guys have been around for some time with thousands of happy customers.

Check out the review here, if you are feeling the need for a reliability switch.

Step 2) Filter Out Problem Clients

The first big goal of our contact form is to filter out problem clients.

To do this, we want to do two things:

1. Set expectations of what it’s like to work with us.
2. And understand their goals and what motivates them.

While only 8.7 percent of the websites that we looked at in our study used pre-qualification questions on their contact forms, this is one of your best tools to filter out problem clients.

In fact, I think they are so important because they frame the client conversation and give you a glimpse into what is motivating their decisions.

 You can learn more about can find out more about motivation filters and other pre-qualification questions that you can incorporate into your contact form by going over the outline in the infographic above.

Step 3) Help Get the Clients Thinking

The perfect contact form should be able to help potential clients and you come to a clear understanding of what it is that they need.

Sample questions that will encourage your visitors to think about what they want include:

• What is the mission of the project?
• How does the project fit in with your overall objectives?
• In what ways will the success of the project be measured?

Of course, there are many other questions that you can use to encourage potential clients to really think about what their expectations are and how they intend to go about achieving their goals. It’s up to you to decide which ones are appropriate for your specific audience.

Step 4) Collect Key Information

Once you’ve set expectations and have a clear understanding of what is motivating the client, don’t forget to include the common (and not so common) fields, such as:

• Name
• Phone
• Email
• Company
• How’d you hear about us?
• Anything else?

Problem Awareness: The Secret to Closing More Clients

Once you’ve collected all of this information it’s what you do next with it that matters.

Your goal as you analyze the information is to better understand how aware the potential client is of their own problem.

I call this problem awareness and while I’ve written a thorough guide on it, what you need to know is different people are at different levels of awareness when it comes to understanding their problem.

Some people know what their problem is. Other people may even know exactly how to solve their own problem, but what you to do it.

It’s your job to understand where they are in that process.

 What Will Your Contact Form Do For You?

Now that you’ve been able to go over the three things that your contact form should be able to do, it’s time for you to think about one simple question:

“What will your contact form do for you?”

Will you be optimizing your contact form to make sure that it helps you build an audience and enable you to rake in more of the right clients for your business?

I hope so.