Contact Info + Address And Map

These contact pages usually contain your picture, a link to social profiles, street address and a map. It’s a good way to build a contact us page if you are willing to share your location. It shows you are a real person or company, and builds trust.

Here is this example with only the person’s picture missing.

Impressive Design

Design might not be the first you think about when building your contact form. Too bad! It’s one of the most important pages on your site. A “contact us” page that looks amazing does few amazing things:

• Keeps the visitor on the page. So they hopefully will really fill that great looking form rather than closing it!
• Builds trust (again). If your contact form looks great perhaps you are offering great services or products too
• Goes viral. There’s no need to give you  links to posts that link to amazing contact forms. In fact, this is a such post too. Here is one amazing contact form. And below is another:

Headset Hottie

There is no joke. A “headset hottie” can draw some attention and give the feeling there will be someone to answer. People know they are fake but they still like them. There is even a whole site dedicated to headset hotties.

It’s better however if you put your own picture or a picture of your real staff (if you have any).

More Than One Contact Method

Please don’t leave us hanging on a contact form or email only. You must have at least one social network profile where I can reach you. Twitter, Skype, and/or phone number are also highly positive. The more options you give to connect, the more likely your visitors are to do it.

Call To Action

The reason you build a contact page is that you want people to contact you. You know how bigger are your chances to make business with someone who already contacted you than with a stranger.

So, make it clear where the contact form is (you do have a contact form, right?) and make that button big and appealing. Make people crave to click it so badly that they won’t get bored by the rest of the fields they have to fill.

Contact Form Autoresponder

I’m not talking about the “thanks for contacting us” auto-reply. Sometimes it’s useful to confirm that the message has been delivered and to keep your address in the prospect’s mailbox. Don’t rely too much on this however as people barely check their read mail again. It’s a lot more important to reply to their inquiry.

But why not go further than this? You could also subscribe everyone who contacts you to a mailing list or autoresponder. Of course you’d better let them know in advance and request email confirmation before doing this. This can be implemented with the PRO version of BroadFast Autoresponder for example.

Because these people already made the effort to contact you they are likely to be interested in what you offer. So your autoresponder may work well on them. Just don’t look at hard selling – better include them in informative newsletters or autoresponders and build trust over time.

List Your Other Websites

If you have more than one site (and they are related to each other), your “contact us” page is a great place to share them. Here is why:

• Lets people check what else you do. Again this builds trust.
• Helps you get some traffic on the other sites. And maybe a customer too?
• If they didn’t find exactly what they were searching for maybe they’d find it on the other sites?

List the other sites gently under the main contact info and make sure they open in new tab.

Give Your Other Channels

Having Flickr account, Youtube or Vmeo channel, shared Delicious list, or Behance profile? Your contact page is a good place to share them too.

Keep The Contact Form Easy And Simple

Don’t forget that people have to actually fill that form to get in touch with you. Although some will use the other contact options most will fill the form. So make it easy and simple:

• Keep fields to the minimum. Name, Email, Message and (maybe) subject/reason. (Don’t call it “department” please, I don’t give a dime about how you structure your company internally)
• Make gentle validation. Something like jQuery validator will do the work. Or see a bunch of other validation plugins.
• Avoid captchas if possible and use other ways to stop spam.
• Make tab order work correctly. Don’t make us click every field with the mouse.

Follow these practices and let me know the outcome. If we can help you with autoresponder software or designing your contact page, contact me via my contact page. I know it badly needs rework! (Goes in my to-do list)

• Get people subscribe to your list. They are too tired of receiving crap.
• Get people open your mails. Even  if they don’t unsubscribe, they’ll often just delete the mail.
• Keep people on the list. After working hard to attract a subscriber you don’t want to lose them because you wrote something wrong.
• Get people click on links and buy what you offer.

People who tell you building a mailing list and using it as a source of customers is easy, are simply lying (and trying to get you subscribe to their list), or just have no idea what they are talking about.

Still, the mailing list is one of the most sustainable, most responsible, and least expensive ways to build traffic and have your offers seen and heard.

Here’s a list of good resources that will help you get the most of your list – from building it, to sustaining it and getting results from it.

While the resources in each category are not exactly ordered, I’ve tried to put the best ones first so in case you get tired by one topic, you’ll have learned the most important about it. Some of the advice may overlap or even contradict. Marketing is not exact science, you know.

All links open in new window.

List Building, Conversion/Opt-in

Building your list – that’s where you want to start. And if you are working hard or paying for visitors on your squeeze page, you want to make sure the conversion rate of opt-ins is good.

- 20 Giveaways For List Building – This Is Email Marketing On Autopilot – a great list of ideas. Just don’t forget that all these things require time and/or money to create.
- Why List Building WORKS & how I wasted 2 Years – includes a video
- 12 Lead Capture Squeeze Pages Elements of Success – basic but important tips
- Are Pop-Up Opt-In Forms Still Effective? Part 1 and Part 2. I’d be very careful with those as they can increase your site bounce rate. They are very irritating for me.
- How To Build Your Email List Without A Big Website (Video) – includes a video from Jim Cockrum
- List Building 101: Why And How To Build Your List
- How to Build an Email List – 7 “Cs” to Supercharge Your List Building
- 5 Steps You Can Start Implementing Right Now To Explode Your Subscribers Base
- Increase Your Subscriber Opt-In Rate With These Useful Tips
- How To Build Your Email List Fast
- How I Gained 200 Blog Subscribers Fast!
- Build a Email List? – Why & How
- How to Get More Feed Subscribers: 10 Tips
- 12 Ways to Build Your E-mail List
- How to build your email mailing list

Unlimited Mailing List
and Autoresponder Software

Newsletter Content

If you bombard your list with offers, most will unsubscribe, others will delete and some may even report you for spam. Make sure your newsletter content is useful and interesting or your offers are really amazing.

- How to Write Effective Email Newsletters
- To Write A Top-Quality Newsletter, Study Michael Campbell – a bit old but still valid
- A Way to Repurpose Content and Grow Your Email Marketing List – repurposing content is always a good idea.
- Electronic Newsletter (Ezine) Resources. Usually I don’t recommend using such kind of basic content for your newsletters. In some niches it may work however.
- How To Write An Email Newsletter

Improve readability and open rates

While good content is required, you need to make users open your mails first. Subjects and your reputation will play the big role here.

- How to Write The Best Email Subject Lines. This one is good. Subjects matter the most so I would pay the most attention to it.
- Email Marketing Design – Helpful Tips To Improve Your Email Open Rates
- Write the Perfect Email Subject Line – and again on subjects
- Increase Email Click Through: Avoid Distractions
- 10 Email Newsletter Design Tips
- 6 Rules to Improve Email Deliverability
- Improve your email open rates
- How to Improve Your Email Newsletter Open Rates

Unlimited Mailing List
and Autoresponder Software

Testing (A/B Testing)

I’ve been stupid not to test for years. In 2010 I started A/B testing and discovered how many of my assumptions were so wrong.
- A Beginner’s Guide To A/B Testing: An Introduction. A must read article by Kissmetrics. Don’t miss it.
- Optimize Your Email Marketing Newsletter through A/B Split Testing
- How to Measure the Effectiveness of E-mail Newsletter Ads
- A/B split testing

Monetization of your newsletter

If you are running a content site maybe you don’t have a product or service to offer. Then read these articles:

- Monetize Your Blog’s Subscriber List
- 4 Ways Video Makes Email Marketing More Profitable
- How to Run a NON-Scummy, Profitable Email Marketing Campaign
- Five Strategies to Monetize a Mailing List

Unlimited Mailing List
and Autoresponder Software

Miscellaneous and General

These posts don’t fit to specific category or cover more categories at once. They are also good:

- Email marketing: A Beginner’s Guide (PDF inside)
- Email Marketing Census 2011 (PDF inside)
- Internet Marketers’ Dictionary – a good list of words and language you may want to use too.
- What the Gmail Priority Inbox Means for Marketers. With the increasing number of Gmail users you definitely need to read this.
- The Problem With Autoresponders (Video)
- 5 Uncommon Ways to Use Auto-Responders to Grow Your Business
- Email Marketing – Is it Still Effective?. The short answer is yes. For the long answer read the article.
- How to Handle User Unsubscribe to Your Advantage?
- Affiliate Emails: How To Prevent Spam Complaints – very important. You really don’t want to be labeled as spammer.
- Is Your Email List Really Small? Read This Now.
- 6 Goals You Should Have For Your Email Marketing Campaign
- Why Successful Affiliate Marketers Use an Autoresponder
- eMail Marketing Tips – Valuable eMail Marketing Information
- 22 Rapid Tips On Email Marketing For Bloggers
- That’s not SPAM, That’s My Newsletter!

That sums it up for now, but I may add resources over time. If you think there’s anything missing, feel free to comment.

If you want to create such exams on your website, engage visitors and attract links, check out our quiz and exam software. This quiz has been created with it and all calculations are done through it. The software allows also collecting taker’s contact data, creating unlimited exams, splitting users in groups and more.

I have not chosen to require email for this quiz, so if you want, please share your results in the comments!

Photo by drinksmachine

However there are many genuine customers who may also end up asking for refund because they are unsatisfied with your product or support. In this post I’ll tell you what I do to keep the percentage of such requests very low.

Delivery Quickly

The more your client has to wait, the bigger is the risk she will be unsatisfied and ask for refund. Sometimes the client will not do it immediately but will get dissatisfied when other small problems add up (some minor glitch in the software, hard to understand manual etc). Most people expect instant delivery on digital items and you should aim for that. If for some reason you can’t delivery instantly, it is a good idea to explain how long will it take to ship during the order process and/or in the thankyou email you send after the purchase.

Make Clear and Detailed Descriptions of Your Products

You don’t want people who don’t understand your product to buy it. Don’t think that you’ll make more sales by using superlatives and hiding the disadvantages of your product. The customers who don’t like it will ask for refund and will lose your time complaining that it is not what they expected.

At Calendarscrtips I place online demos of all the products I sell. This is the only way to be sure that customers can see exactly what they are buying. (Well some will not bother to look at the demo but buy and then scream it’s not what they expected. You can send such people to hell).

Offer Good Support

This is a common sense but it’s underestimated by many sellers. Many online products and especially software need to have technical support for bugs, problems or just to help people who can’t manage with the installation and usage.
Instead of trying to test in every possible platform and hope you’ve covered them all, just offer good responsive support to these who have troubles. 99% of them will be happy after you help them and will not even think about refund.

Manuals For Free

If you are selling software, it’s a good idea to offer the installation and usage manual for free download even to non-customers. Many people will check it prior to purchasing to ensure they can manage. Don’t worry about those who will not buy because the manual looked scary to them. You don’t want them as customers. They will waste your time and at the end can still request a refund.

Have a Forum

If you have a forum where customers can talk to each other, discuss the software and the technical aspects of it, this will make them and the visitors a lot more confident that there is someone to help them.

I still don’t have a forum on CalendarScripts but I have a neat comment system for every product which seems to do the job of a forum at this time.

Don’t Overprice and Don’t Go Too Cheap

People are a lot more inclined to complain and ask for refund when they think your product is overpriced. On the other hand, too cheap products attract freetards who expect that you will be their tech support for free.

Try to price your products fairly – accordingly to the effort put in them and to the price of similar products in the market. This will reduce the refund requests.

Be Reachable

If you offer something more than just a contact form people will feel they are dealing with real person and will be more confident they can reach you when they have inquiries. The best thing is to give a toll free phone, although I don’t do it as I am not a big company and do my support myself (I don’t want to be called in the night). However I have published my Facebook visit card and Twitter account and that seems to work great.

These are the most important strategies I can think of at this moment. If you have other ideas, please share!