This week has been a bit crazy, the weather is crazy, my mood is insane and the amount of spam I have received via websites I manage has been truly outrageous.
In one night I received triples of 20 different emails from spammers via the “contact us” form from one website and another has a user that’s been spamming on a weekly basis up to 45 posts in under a minute about weddings, this all on a health website.
Come Wednesday morning and what do I find, a pretty little gem of a post, that answers the questions I’ve been having. Is having a contact form really a good practise?
According to the article 5 Items to Delete from your Website by Kipp Bondar over at Hubspot.com contact forms are among the 5 things you should seriously consider getting rid of from your website. This of course in favor of targeted landing pages with effective conversion forms.
To understand this advise I’d like to propose you imagine your contact form is a mailbox, would you rather have it indiscriminately filled, causing clutter and confusion and have absolutely no control or oversight on what comes in OR would you like to make it so that incoming mail is organized according to what the sender is interested in or wants from you at that particular time?
The landing page comes with the possibility to allow people interested in a particular service or product come to you just for that, you receive an email and it’s not an initial greeting that may lead to more interactions where you finally discover what it is they need/want from your company. The contact established through a landing page is many times more straightforward and direct.
So cut the time you spend sifting through spam emails and random contacts that do not want your services and focus on creating real leads, getting the mail you want and hope for and let go of ever receiving any spam, ever!
I’m certainly convinced that I will do this for the websites I currently manage, to free them from unnecessary email bulks, especially because the one doing the sifting is usually me, but most of all because we all want to focus our time effectively, don’t you?