Eoghan McCabe has covered some good conversion tips in his blog post – User Interface Simplicity Gone Wrong.
He has explained how website conversion rate can shoot up if the contact forms are simple and to-the-point. Everyone is in a hurry and people hate filling in long forms. Web site visitors are impatient and one should not expect them to fill in long forms. They get frustrated very easily and messages like “Zip code has been left blank. Kindly provide the same and re-submit the form” can simply put them off! They are doing a favor to you by getting in touch with you and not the other way round. I have been a strong advocate of a simple form, so that the initial contact can be made without much effort in few seconds.
I have been using the simple contact form for few years now and I have experienced the jump in conversion since then 🙂
However, I would additionally suggest that –
1. Include couple of contact fields as well like Name, Email, Project Details (Phone number is optional as many people may not like to disclose their phone number to an unknown person)
2. Include a link to the privacy policy or at least make the visitor feel safe enough that his information will not be sold out!
3. Put this contact form in every page of the website
4. When a contact form has been filled and submitted, a feedback must be generated in form of a “Thank you message”. This make the user confident that his action has yielded a positive result.
5. DO NOT put a “Reset” button below the form. I have seen countless websites where they have a stupid “Reset” button which gets pressed by a person-in-a-hurry and results in wiping out the entire effort of filling up the form.
6. Set a “tab” preference in the correct order, so that when a user presses “tab” after filling in one field, he is taken to the next field. the sequence must be correct and end with the “Submit” button.
It do a lot of good to your website and conversion!
Abhishek