It’s a no brainer right?  If you’ve got a small business website then you probably have a contact form on it.  It makes it easy for prospective clients to get in touch and if they’re browsing your site already the chances are they are interested in your services. 

All sounds good so far, qualified leads coming right to an email inbox of your choice from your website contact form.  Great.  That is, of course, as long as you remember to actually check that inbox.  I say this because in the last few weeks I’ve contacted no less than six smallish businesses via their contact form to enquire about services I’m interested in.  I like using web contact forms – they’re quick, easy and I often don’t want to go to the hassle of picking up the phone and calling their offices and getting put through to their sales department, etc.  However, out of those six enquiries I’ve had one response.  That was to say they no longer provide the service they have advertised on their website.  So that was a good waste of their time and mine. 

I was really surprised by the lack of responses, why on earth would a business leave enquiries unanswered?  Especially in these tricky financial times.  Are they not checking their emails?  Do they have the enquiries set up to go to some unmanned email inbox?  Or are they just doing so well they don’t need my business?  Your guess is as good as mine.  I don’t think it’s the last option as in fact two of the companies I was contacting were fairly large estate agent firms – you’d think they’d be desperate for the business at the moment.  It seems not. 

At One Hour PA any enquiries come straight into my inbox, so I don’t have to check anywhere else.  Occasionally one will go astray into junk mail, but by enlarge I’m confident we respond to all the enquiries we get.  (Except of course those ones where people want us to help them transfer millions of US dollars from the account of a high ranking government official in some never heard of country – honestly, are people still falling for this junk?).

So, if you haven’t had an enquiry via your website contact form lately, you might just want to make sure that you know where those enquiries get sent and that someone is actually checking them.