Turn mailto links into clean contact forms
squaresend.com
squaresend.com
Furthermore, it allows a customer to add the recipient email address to their address book if the need for further communication arises.
On the receiving end, SPAM filtering for email has gotten so good that having a public email address posted somewhere is a non-issue, whereas having to deal with bots submitting contact form is still an issue in need to be solved on a per-site basis, so just having an email link will solve the spam issue for the recipient of the form.
So - why would you still use a contact form? I mean - if it's for a plain contact form - the moment you want to ask for structured data or file attachments, it might start to make sense, but even then - who doesn't hate these forms where you have to click a radio button for selecting the purpose of a message when just typing a subject would do too - especially when the purpose you want isn't listed.
Personally, I always prefer a plain email link over a contact form - both as a sender and as a recipient.
Some quick A/B testing and surveying indicate that "People have email clients configured and they know how to use them" is very wrong :) With an actual contact form we had a massive spike in pre-sales requests, with a direct spike in new business.
This is especially prevalent for business users, who will often make a sales contact. Anyone with a B2B site that only has a mailto: link is losing out!
As to the rest (rich text, etc.) I agree. We built our contact form to push the (plain text) request into a mailbox & send a pleasant information email to the customers address, which accounts for a lot of the points you raise.
Because:
* Some folk don't have email addresses and still want to contact you (it does happen)
* Some folk are using this away from their primary machine and don't have email configured
* The form's are large in-your-face pieces UI and are much more "obvious" than an email address. In multiple usability / split tests I've seen feedback forms get more responses than email addresses. People often completely miss the fact that their is an email address. They're looking for a form.
* A large chunk of people just seem to prefer them - again I've seen this in multiple usability tests.
Personally, I always prefer a plain email link over a contact form - both as a sender and as a recipient.
Me to. But I'm generally not building web sites for me ;-)
(This will happen until everyone clicks Yes to registerProtocolHandler requests.)
And I'm a fucking programmer.
You can hope that people will include all the relevant details in an e-mail, but I'll bet you most don't.
Whoever likes using their email client can click the link. Whoever wants to use the form can do that.
1) Not as many people as you think have configured email clients 2) Filling out a form does not break flow with looking at the site 3) Response rates are higher for these forms than an email address (based on my own experience) 4) a form allows you to collect more structured information from responders
I'd much, much, much prefer a form over a mailto: link, which 90% of the time loads completely the wrong thing.
A contact form is superior to publicly displaying an email address because 1) if you think about it as a conversion funnel, that's one less step for the person to reach out to you, and 2) a contact form makes it really clear that you're open to being contacted; some people are hesitant to email you out of the blue.
http://www.immersionmedia.com/blog/customizing-and-styling-g...
Sounds like a description of a weekend hack project on Github, but apparently it's a service. Damn.
It's actually a very good idea, but a service would have been much better suited to a few years ago when pages were more static and adding a contact form to a page was reasonably hard work for a designer with no programming experience. Nowadays you pretty much get one built in to Wordpress/any CMS/template/whatever.
1) A WordPress plugin. I know it is just a script include but this makes it much easier to integrate and gives you visibility on the WordPress plugin list. You can also add an admin menu item to load your admin ui in a iframe inside the WordPress admin.
2) An affiliate program. I can see a lot of designers recommending this to clients and if you can give the designers a cut of ongoing monthly revenue you will greatly increase your reach and will give you a market focus.
3) I'd remove the free monthly plan and just say "Free for your first 100 contact replies". This lets people try it out without having to think about how many valid contacts they get a month and filters out paying for spam messages. It also changes your conversion point from a monthly trigger to a single one so you can do lifecycle emails as they start getting close to their limit.
1. Pick a form from 3000+ form templates
2. Enter email address to receive responses
3. Copy the code provided to your site
For us, one use-case for contact forms is to request a webinar at a specific date. I'm guessing here, but I think more people will request a webinar if they can simply select a date and send it off vs. if they have to write a free-form email requesting a date.
Any plans on adding a date-picker (instead / in addition to the main message)? I was going to implement that myself at the end of this week/next week...
It seems like there's two possibilities with any likelihood, either it gives the user an error or it starts behaving like a regular mailto: link until the limit rolls over - but it'd be nice if the site said which.
* Test integrations with various CRM type systems. Hubspot, Salesforce, Mailchimp all have huge ecosystems that you can leverage!
* Offer per page configuration (on/off)
* Expose CSS for easy skinning. This could be a text box on your portal.
* Offer configurable fields to be collected
* Implement a "send to your webmaster" button.
* Expose that you are a whitelisted sender (if you are)
Good luck!
Baidu doesn't seem to understand that an href to a mailto: is in an email not html namespace!
Then build some administrative area to view these messages that get sent through your 5-extra-lines-contact-form.
Or build some simple(or not, depends on your needs) backend logic to mail the content of the form to your inbox in that case you might want to
- integrate with some SMTP-relay/Mail-server-api like Mailgun, Postmark, Mandrill or any other to insure delivery and what not.
- Or you could host your own mail server.
- Or authenticate with an account @gmail or any other and mail it through their SMTP server.
But really though, I am pretty sure it's geared more towards those with less technical experience than you and I or those with little time on hand to do anything more decent than putting a mailto link.