The best way to receive messages from your website’s visitors is with a contact form. And whether you coded your whole website yourself or used a platform like WordPress or Wix, you can get a lot more functionality with a contact form builder.
Especially when you consider the costs of coding the form from scratch, the best contact form builder will save you time and money. So if you need specific features, there are alternatives to the most commonly known contact form builders.
Creating contact forms with MightyForms
Launched officially last year, MightyForms is the best contact form builder for 2020. Even as a new release, it stands out because it incorporates functionalities that the bigger builders haven’t started working on yet.
It’s both an application and a WordPress plugin, so you can build and add forms without leaving your WordPress website dashboard. Even if your website isn’t on WordPress, you can embed the form with a simple copy and paste command.
The reason we call it the best contact form builder for 2020 is simply because it makes it easy, quick and intuitive to create a contact form for your website that is optimized for conversions, lead capturing and workflow automation. Let’s start with what makes a good contact form.
Contact Form best practices
The ‘Contact Us’ page of any website is typically one of the most visited, especially for businesses. This is why it’s so important to get it right, to increase conversions and create brand trust.
A good contact page is clear and straight to the point, the user needs to know why someone would contact your business and the kinds of solutions you can bring them.
A contact form is a great way that simplifies the process, but be careful not to overwhelm the visitor by asking them several questions in this first form.
The idea is to first get the bare minimum that you need to understand what they need from you and so you can reach out to them with your reply.
Optimize the contact form conversion
Your first priority when creating a contact form is making sure that it is appealing to your visitor and easy to find.
There are a lot of different design choices and placements you can test to see what brings better conversion rates for your form.
Here are some key elements to look into when designing an optimized contact form:
Form Design
Your form’s design needs to reflect your brand. A lot of times, you’ll come across websites with very creative and beautifully designed webpages, but the contact form looks like the standard template you’d find back in 1993.
Everything is design. Make it into a style that reflects your brand, use the same color palette and make it fit well within your webpage. It’s absolutely imperative that your form is responsive and is easy to read and fill out on any device.
Number of form fields
If someone wants to contact your business, it’s your job to make that as easy as possible. This means that a contact form with an almost endless list of questions that will take them more than 5 minutes to answer, is not advisable.
Remember that a contact form is meant to start a conversation, you find out what they want to tell you and you ask for the minimum amount of information to keep the conversation going.
A contact form is meant to start a conversation. Keep it quick and simple.
Field justification
“Why? Why? Why do you need all of this information? What are you going to use it for?”, is what could potentially go through your visitor’s mind when your form has fields that aren’t relevant.
Especially for this first interaction through a contact form, users aren’t expecting to have to answer a lot of questions.
So if there is some specific information that you need from them that isn’t commonly asked (such as name, email, and message), consider adding a toggle telling them why you need that info.
Or simply eliminate that field from your form, asking for that information later in the sales funnel or in a survey.
User effort level
This has to do with making your form quick to fill out. Online forms don’t have the luxury of having the person’s sole attention as do paper forms. It can be very easy for them to leave your contact page and abandon your form.
A few tips to reduce the users’ effort level, other than reducing the length of the form, is to optimize the type of field you use. Take advantage of dropdown or single-choice fields, that the user can answer your question with a quick click.
Make your contact form quick and easy to fill out.
Call to action
Users need to have a clear objective when they interact with your contact form. They need to know why someone would contact you, is it to make an order, file a complaint, give feedback or just say hello (it could happen)? You can help them make that distinction with a dropdown field with a list of options.
Finally, make that Submit button as clickable as possible. Not only in its color and shape, which, ideally is similar to the design of the other buttons on your website. But also in its message, choose something like ‘Send Message’ or ‘Send me a Quote’ or even ‘Submit Feedback’. Essentially, you want words that are specific to that form’s goal and make them feel that their message will be heard.
Why MightyForms is the best contact form builder
Yes, this may seem like we’re tootin’ our own horn, but hear us out. There are at least five elements that make an online form builder great: user-friendliness, automation options, security, integrations, and pricing. And while being a relatively new player, MightyForms made sure to launch with all these elements at their best.
User-friendliness
Once you’ve set up your account with MightyForms, the builder is incredibly easy to use. It has a clean and intuitive design so you know where to look depending on what you want to do, and a great selection of free contact form templates you can customize.
“Here’s what i loved: Their chat support was fantastic to ask any questions I had, while I was creating my first form […]”
Plus it has Live Chat support and Help Articles if you ever have any questions at all. It’s a little different than other builders since it keeps things simple. So, for instance, you first add the multipurpose ‘Input field’ and then edit it to accept a name, email, phone number, etc.
Form Automation
Even with MightyForms free plan you can redirect the user to another page, add a success pop-up message, or create an automatic email notification to be sent out once the form is submitted. These notifications can be customized with information submitted with the form.
You can also automate PDF filling, by creating a form from a PDF document that fills in the data submitted.
Form data security
Your data and your submissions’ data are safe with MightyForms. With end-to-end SSL data encryption, your information is kept accessible only to the authorized persons. Because it has only launched this year, the steps to offer the GDPR’s Data Processing Addendum (GDR) and HIPAA’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) is still in the works.
Form Integrations
Integrating your form with other productivity tools is an excellent strategy to speed up your work. MightyForms has several native integrations, like Google Drive, Google Sheets, and Dropbox, automatically creating a folder to which it sends your submissions. Plus, you can connect with over 1,500 apps via Zapier.
Pricing
You get a lot for your buck with MightyForms’s pricing plans. The free plan includes unlimited forms, unlimited fields and unlimited submissions, which is a lot more than a lot of the other commercial builders.
If a feature is more complex, it’ll likely be reserved for paying users. Such as with the PDF filling forms and the form abandonment tracker tool, Real-Time Data Capture, both are only available for paid plans.
Are you ready to start? Check out some free form templates you can use for your website and start building.
