Seems like a silly question, right? You put your contact info on the contact page. No brainer. Actually, though… (get ready for nerdy diatribe, here it comes, wait for it…)
You’ve probably heard a lot of conflicting advice on what methods you should suggest when people want to contact you via your website.
The simple answer to this question is that you should put the exact way that you prefer to be contacted.
No matter how many people tell you you’re going to lose leads if you refuse to put a phone number on your website and talk to the customer, or if you put an email address on there your worse off than including a form, the decision for how you prefer that people reach out to you by your website is entirely up to you.
Let’s think about this. People keep on telling you that you’re going to lose leads if you don’t take phone calls.
But if you work in a job like design or copywriting where you’re busy at the computer all day and a phone call breaks your concentration and eats up your time, then putting a phone number on your website is not the right thing for you to do.
Another important fact about this is the type of customer you’re trying to attract in the first place. If you know that people who talk a lot are not your ideal writing or design client, cause lots of delays and headaches with your projects, then the answer to your problem is simple.
Just don’t put your phone number on your website. Really, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
Okay, next question.
What happens if you choose to advertise one way for people to contact you, but that way isn’t working?
Will you sit there and lament that you just can’t seem to extract the right details from your clients that would lead to a sale? Is it hard to connect with customers based on your chosen form of communication for the initial discovery consult?
It’s easy enough to fix this problem by updating the contact page of your website and changing your instructions for people to follow.
Maybe you want people to email you, but then they can’t seem to type full sentences. Well if you look at this one way, you get to weed out people who would really make things difficult if you worked with them.
If you look at it another way, putting a form on your website with a series of questions might help pull out the information you need to decide if it’s time to go forward initiating a relationship with a new client.
Just remember that every single aspect of your website content can be controlled by you.
You can also change it anytime you want. That puts even more control in your hands. If the words you’re using are not getting the results you want, just change the words.
You don’t have to start from scratch and create a whole new website. All you have to do is take a critical eye to what’s there and decide you’re going to modify it either a little or a lot.
Once you change your website, it will take a while before the new changes are updated on search engines. But it will happen. You won’t have to actually do anything. So be sure to engage with your website content, pay attention to how it’s working for you, and make regular updates for the best performance possible.
- If you want people to call you, put a phone number at the top.
- If you want people to email you, share your email address.
- If you aren’t sure how you want to be contacted, use your contact page as a landing page. More on that, below.
In a case where you only want people to be routed to one contact page where you can easily update the words there to tell them how to contact you, then every time you give the call to action on any page or post of your website or in the sidebar, just include the link to the contact page. It will become a heck of an easier time should you decide to completely change the method of contact.