I’m Making My Firm’s Website Contact Form More Prominent. You Should Too.

It’s been a fun stretch at my marketing agency of late. We’re busy, and the new business and new clients coming in are more consistently “the right fit” for our team and our talents. One intake route for that new business has been the contact form on our agency website. When new business inquiries come through this channel, a couple of really good things happen from my perspective as a business owner.

First, although our contact form has only five simple fields (name, email, company name, company website url, message), even that limited data set frequently provides us a pretty good (and very efficient) window on who we are dealing with, the nature of the problem they want to solve, and whether we might be a good fit for them. It enables us to hone in on solid leads more quickly, and to divert inquiries that are a poor match for our talents to better alternatives for them (with less uncompensated time involved on our part figuring that out).

Second, when a website visitor hits “send” on our contact form, it provides quantifiable evidence that the website is doing it’s job – attracting new leads and delivering them to our doorstep. Further, beyond giving us specific data about when/how often those conversions are occurring, we can increasingly also analyze the routes those visitors used to arrive at the specific page where the conversion occurred, and therefore identify which online marketing practices (SEO, Google AdWords, Social Media Channels, Blogs, Client Newsletters, etc.) are performing at high levels and actually working to bring in new leads and which are not.

The act of a website visitor hitting “send” on our contact form is what we call a “conversion point” in website analytics jargon. When a website visitor does exactly what you hoped they would do – submitted a form, registered for an event, or purchased a product online in the case of e-commerce websites – they’ve hit a conversion point. Those familiar with Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Effective People will recall that Habit #2 is “begin with the end in mind”. You can think of a conversion point as “the end we had in mind” for specific pages/sections of your website. By identifying specific business goals, tying them to actionable conversion points and building that into your website analytics, and then tracking backwards to see where “the good leads” came from, a roadmap emerges enabling you to measure your marketing performance more objectively, experiment with different techniques, and then focus on high-performing activities and channels to increase your “conversions”.

The end result is a marketing approach that is more data-driven and involves less guesswork than has historically been the case.

It’s a truism that lawyers like to make decisions based on evidence rather than conjecture. Increasingly, the tools available are allowing us to provide that evidence. Building out your website contact form and tying it into your website analytics as a conversion point is a great place to start.