Enquiry forms are an often unloved area of a website. They sit on a contact page, or on the footer of each page, waiting for visitors to fill in their details.
But does anyone actually engage with them? Particularly if there is an email address visible on the site, are users more inclined to use that?
One way to add more value to an enquiry form is to help the user out by automatically including what it is they’re enquiring about. If they’ve seen something on your website they want to ask you about, why not let them directly enquire about that thing in particular, so that when you end up calling them back you have a talking point right off the bat?
Whether you’re a service-based or product-based company, you can incorporate what we like to call an Enquiry Basket onto the site. This works similarly to an ecommerce shopping basket, except instead of adding products to the basket to purchase, visitors are adding content to the basket that they’re interested in and want to talk to you about.
For example, on Vail Williams LLP’s website, customers can search for properties available to invest in. Once they find properties they’re interested in, they can easily add them to an Enquiry Basket. Customers can add many properties to this basket, before clicking ‘Enquire now’ to send an email to the company. All of the properties inside the email get labelled A, B, C, D, etc, so that when the customer gets a call back they can easily talk about Property C or Property D on the phone. This saves time figuring out exactly what the customer is looking for.
We’ve also used enquiry baskets on Multimessage Ltd for enquiring about phone systems for repair.