Contact Forms
Contact Forms are the best way to allow customers or potential customer to co make contact with you. The format can be tailored to suit your business and allow important and mandatory information to be provided giving you an instant understanding of the request made.
Fields can also be turned into drop down menus to make sure only one of a set of answers is provided. In our example it is the county which prevents work being requested outside of the area normally covered.
Throw in support for secure emails and tick boxes for Terms and Conditions and you can be sure only relevant emails will land in your inbox allowing you to react quickly and provide the kind of service customers expect.
Automated emails can also be set up to provide an instant generic response to all senders as well as the email to you with the customer request.
See the example below for a builder, that requires important and mandatory information as well as a tick box for Terms and Conditions. The reCAPTCHA button will be discussed shortly. To make it more eye-catching the form has been dropped onto an image. (Tip, do not fill in the form and click on Send, the example will not work. If you would like to contact Dynamiser then click here)
Contact Dougie and the Team
Depending on the amount of data you may request from your clients, the form can get very big, especially if the form is used in popups (see Popup Inspiration). The Form can be split into multiple steps to shrink the on-screen impact.
Below is a form, for customers of a garden building company, split into 3 steps. You can go ahead and click on the next and back buttons. Note the steps can be numbered to show progress, but a progress bar can be used if preferred. With this form, we can see also added 3 different ways to ensure the customer provides distinct information.
• Check Box – on page 2, used to select the building type.
• Select Box – on page 2, used to select any services required.
• Radio Box – on page 3, used to select the preferred method of contact.
(again no need to fill in the form and the send will not work)
Let’s see this in action in a pop box. Here a provider of a service is requesting feedback. Click the button below vo view.
We can also add graphics to the selections (Check, Select, Radio) to help customers choose specific items. (note, due to the additional HTML needed to create the graphical elements, it is not – at the time of writing – possible to use within form steps.
Below is an example of a form used by customers to highlight the type, colour and size of the garden building they are interested in.
The reCAPTCHA Verification mechanism can provide protection against spam or abuse caused by Spam robots. With this mechanism, the user is presented with a web page that contains a simple Turing test provided by the Google reCAPTCHA API. These tests can distinguish a human user from a robot.
The tool is free via a Google and after setup, a set of codes are provided that are set on your website at which point the Elementor reCaptcha option can be added to any Contact Form
Alternatively, Dynamiser can add Google’s support for ReCAPTCHA version 3, also known as invisible reCAPTCHA. This version recognises the user by their activity on the website and gives a score. A genuine user gets a good score and so can bypass the “I am not a Robot” confirmation. Suspicious robots are automatically blocked as their activity would generate a low score. If a genuine user somehow gets a bad score then the checkbox is provided for the genuine user to tick and so still be able to use your Contact Form. To give your users confidence, a “Protected by ReCAPTCHA” message can be displayed.
Another special feature of Contact Forms is the setup of automated emails. The first is the email sent to you, the business, which can be formatted to pass you all the relevant details needed from the form. The second type is an acknowledgement email sent back to the customer upon clicking on Send.
Below we can see an example of an email sent to you with a copy of the value of every field filled in on the form. The second is an example of an automatic email sent back to the sender to acknowledge the submission of the form thanking them and advising someone will be in contact shortly.
Note Dougie uses a separate email address (enquiries@dougiesbuilders.co.uk) as a sending address just for the online submissions. This keeps the emails separate from their normal sales email address.
From: enquiries@dougiesbuilders.co.uk
Sent: 05 September 2018 12:01
To: sales@dougiesbuilders.co.uk
Subject: New Online Enquiry – Randell Adams
Name: Randell Adams
Email Address: radams@randelladams.co.uk
Contact Number: 01234 567890
County: Berkshire
Subject: New Hop Shed required
Customer Message:
Hi Dougie, can you pay me a visit ref constructing a new small barn for my hops. It needs to be roughly 25ft x 15ft with Apex roof and large double doors. I will be around on Monday and Wednesday next week.
I look forward to hearing from you
Randell
From: Dougie <enquiries@dougiesbuilders.co.uk>
Date: Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 12:01 PM
Subject: Confirmation from Dougie’s Builders
To: radams@randelladams.co.uk
Dear Randell Adams
Thank you for your online request, one of the team will contact you shortly
Dougies’ Builders
