Why You Should Have a Sign Up Form on Every Page of Your Website
Your website is a direct marketing tool. It is not as much a branding and awareness medium like many people treat it. You know how you get direct mail asking you to buy stuff or sign up for magazine subscriptions? That’s an example of direct marketing. Direct marketing is when you market directly to the consumer and request a direct response back.
The big difference between direct mail and your website is that you send out direct mail. People come to your website. They come because they want to learn more about your business, products, services, and company. Don’t squander this golden opportunity by weakly engaging your visitor and skipping your opportunity to ask them to take a next step!
This same philosophy applies to non-profit organizations and personal websites. People have come to your website to learn more about you. You have to seize this moment to ask for a donation, volunteer work, or to contact you.
Common sense says that you would never want to ignore your website visitors. In fact, you’re probably very thankful that each and every one of them took a moment out of their day to view your website. The fact that they came to visit you says a lot. They want to know more about you – or perhaps your views and opinions on something. So give them what they want! We’re not talking about high-pressure sales techniques, but we are saying you should have a strategy to bring them one-step further into your sales cycle.
Reasons to Provide a Direct Response Path
The trick is knowing what each visitors special circumstances are. Like most companies, you probably offer more than one service, product, or reason to visit your website. Then each potential customer probably has their own unique problem that they hope you can solve. This leads you to generalize your websites message to a certain extent. You can’t get too far into the details with someone until you know what they want. Your chances of making a sale are far greater once you understand the detailed needs of your prospective client.
A sign-up/contact form on your website gives your prospectives an opportunity to tell you about their needs. To request further information. And to engage you directly in a conversation.
A sign-up form or contact form is what devEdge Internet Marketing calls a “Direct Response Path.” It’s just a fancy term that means you are giving someone a clear chance at responding to your message. Your direct response path should start on ANY page on your website. This means that you should be placing a form on all your web pages.
Things that Keep People From Using Your Contact Form
There’s actually a lot of reasons people don’t like to use your contact form. If you’re like me, you get anxious about filling out a web form. You never really know what that company will do with your personal information once they have it. In fact, there is a huge amount of research put into exploring the things that stop people from filling out website contact forms.
We could go into details. Unfortunately, that would require an entire blog dedicated to that research (and those blogs do exist). What we can say with absolute confidence is that the reasons always relate to fear and anxiety. We’ve all learned very early that you need to be careful with your personal information online.
So put yourself in your prospectives shoes. What would scare you from filling out your web form? Now how do you reduce those fears? Some common things to explore:
- reduce the number of fields on your form (and the amount of personal information required)
- assure the viewer that their privacy is protected and you won’t be spamming them
- provide them with something free to increase the value of completing your form
You’ll see that even on this page there is a contact form. Our entire website, this blog, and everything online… Revolves around people filling in that form. It’s not because devEdge Internet Marketing wants to collect a ton of personal information. It’s not so we can abuse that personal information. It’s because our business thrives off of people like you contacting us. It’s about people telling us about their Internet marketing problems to see if we have a solution. We’d love it if you took a moment to fill out our form.
Your business is probably not that different. You need customers and clients too!!! So, in this case, get on the bandwagon and make sure you’ve got working contact forms on your website.
Learning More from Each Other
What fears and anxieties do you have about filling out website forms? What are some of the things you’ve done to encourage people to contact you via your forms? Do you have any thoughts or comments on this article?
Please take a moment to join with others, like yourself, and leave a response below.
