Email and 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. On this page:

• You can display an email address that people can use to contact you; or
• you can use a Contact Form.

A Contact Form looks professional, and avoids having to publish your email address where spammers can potentially harvest it.

How to display an email address on a web page You can always just type an email address directly into a page: joe@joestoes.com For someone to be able to click an email link and launch a new blank email message you can you use the following MailTo link: <a href=”mailto:joe@joestoes.com”>Email Joe</a> If you do want to include an email address in a website, you can encode it to make it a bit harder for spambots (but only a bit). Use the Email Encoder website to copy the email address in the top field, click Encode, and copy the mess of characters out of the other field. Paste that in to you web page (HTML view) and save. Web browsers will un-encode automatically and display correctly.

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 Gravity Forms. Adding a contact form with Contact Form ][ enabled: open a page for editing, make sure you are using the HTML view, and type in [CONTACT-FORM] To add a pre-configured contact form from Gravity Forms: open a page for editing and click the Gravity Form icon in the tool bar. Choose the form you want to add and insert it. Alternatively use Dashboard, Appearance, Widgets and add a Form widget to your sidebar.

Updating the email address that contacts are sent to

For the Contact Form ][ plugin, update the email address for all contact forms at Dashboard, Settings, Contact Form ][.

For the Gravity Forms plugin, go to Dashboard, Forms, select the form you want to set the contact email address for, then hover over the form name and click the Notifications link.

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 Gravity Forms

Go to Dashboard, Forms, Entries to view your form entries.

Using CformsII

This is a much more complicated plugin to use, and we aren’t using it for new projects. Go to Dashboard, cFormsII, Tracking to view your form entries.

What do you think?

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