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E-Marketing Performance Blog

How Many Contact Options Should Your Website Provide?

website contact information
Q: How many ways should visitors be able to contact you?

A: All of them

Yeah, that’s a bit simplistic, but it’s true. Every visitor has a preference as to how they want to contact companies they are considering doing business with. And that preference might be different depending on the need they have at the time.

The problem is, many websites offer only one way to be contacted: web form.

I get it, your time is valuable and you don’t want to be fielding senseless phone calls or emails with questions that are just as easily answered on the website. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

On the flip side, many potential customers are thinking the same thing. They need some information that may or may not be available on the website, but who has time to search for it? Especially if those searches turn up to be fruitless.

While you may have perfectly valid reasons for wanting visitors to use your preferred contact method, keep in mind they only need to contact you because the information they need is not easily found (at least for them) on the website.

The solution for this is 1) fix your site so visitors can more easily find the information they need. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about solution 2) allow your visitors to contact you via their preference, not yours.

Think about it. The need to contact you generally stems from a baseline frustration of not having the information the visitor wants. But when they go to contact you, they are forced into yet another frustration: limited contact options.

For many visitors, that’s one frustration too many. That visitor will not be your customer, period.

As the business owner / web marketer / site developer, it’s your job to reduce visitor frustrations. One simple way to do that is by letting visitors contact you any one of a variety of ways.  [Tweet This]

For many potential customers, having multiple options isn’t about the need to contact you a certain way, it’s about the security that they can. That itself can be enough to make the visitor secure enough to decide to business with you, whether they contact you or not.

But by taking away their contact options, you’re more likely taking away the option of them doing business with you at all.

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