Your site’s contact form is usually one of the most overlooked things on your website, but I want to show you some little tips and tricks on things that you can enhance your just simple contact form in order to have it do things like route things to the right people, maybe react differently depending on what people type, and maybe even keep some of the spammers from being able to raid your inbox. So let’s talk about that. Okay, so we’re on my own website at blogmarketingacademy. Com, and you’re on my contact page. Typically, this is one of the most boring pages of a site, and you It’s usually just a form. Frankly, a lot of people end up having their form just barraged with spammers and stuff like that. There are things you could do about that. For example, you could set up reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare Turnstile on there, and it puts a challenge on the I like to use a plugin called WP Armor, which will put a honeypot on the form, and it’s actually more effective than the honeypots that are usually built into form plugins. So there’s things that you could do to try to keep bots from submitting it.

But there’s also things that you could do on the form the way it’s designed, and you can make it so that it’ll almost help with sales in a way, because based on things that people say or things that you ask people to enter on that contact form, you can route them to different places. And a lot of this is going to be done using conditional fields. And so what I’m going to show you here, this form is real simple. Actually, there’s other things that I could do with it. You could see that next to the form, I have some friendly stuff here. If I say they’re interested in a project or concierge services, I route them over to book a call with me, which a lot of times is a way better way of contacting than just this because It’s a lot more personable. I say if they’re already a client, it’d be better to go post over there in base camp because it actually is better than just trying to come through the general public contact form. So these are things that you could do on your contact page to route people. But here’s the thing.

Regardless of what you tell people, it doesn’t mean they’re going to do it. And so there’s things that you could do on the form itself. So over here on the other side of my screen, you’re going to see Fluent Forms. This is the plugin that I use for all of my It forms. And one of the things that you could do is ask a drop-down that basically asks people, What do they want? What is this concerning? Now, the reason you can ask this is because depending on how you phrase this, you can actually put in conditional fields. I’ll show you that one in a second. But do they have a general question? Do they have a question about their account? They have a project they want some help with, concierge service? I am just basically asking that so that when it comes in to me, I know what they were in for. However, there’s other things that you can do. So for example, if they said concierge service, I could ask them other questions about concierge. I could also have a conditional thing that comes up right below that that says, Hey, have you checked out this page where it actually talks about concierge?

Or I could send them to an FAQ about concierge. And basically, the way that that would work is using conditional fields right in there where where you can basically drop in some HTML or something like that right here. And you could type anything that you want in there. And then you just activate this conditional logic and say, What is this concerning? Is equal to concierge. Then basically, if they select Concierge, in fact, I’ll just save this for a second. All right, let’s refresh my page. Now, if I choose Concierge, see, that shows up. Now, obviously, this is not very useful, but you could put anything you want in here. You could put things like link off to an FAQ or maybe have some very common questions show up right there. Then if those questions or those FAQs do not answer their question, well, they can submit the contact form. So these are little things that you can do here. Let me go ahead and take that off since we don’t want to keep that there. This is a live form. Now, another thing that I recently adapted was Because things like… So if you have a contact form, at least in my business, but I imagine a lot of them are the same, you get people who are pitching services to you.

They’re pitching SEO services. They want to collab on things. They want to pitch a guest post and see if they can have a mutually beneficial relationship. All these little buzz phrases that people put in. Well, why couldn’t you have a conditional feel that if they type one of those buzz phrases into the message, you can pop up a little thing. In fact, you could even keep them from submitting the form altogether. It really depends on how aggressive you want to do. So here’s what I’ve done. You see this little box here. It says, I promise I’m not here to pitch you or to buy something. I’m not interested in a guest post. I probably should get even more descriptive in order to warn them off. Now, I’ve got this field as a checkbox. I basically use the terms and conditions things. It’s just a simple checkbox. I made it a required field. Now, the thing is, it’s only going to be if they trigger the field. You can see that if we go under advanced options, I’ve enabled conditional logic, and I’ve got a bunch of things. If your message includes the phrase guest post, it’s going to pop this thing up, or collab, it’s going to pop this thing up.

Do they want to hop on a call, pop this thing up? You get the idea. Pick your brain, all these little buzz phrases. What you could do is just start typing away like this and say hop on it. You got to filter it on a call and see how this now shows up over here, and they’re going to be required. Watch this. If I try to submit it, that’s required. Of course, the subject line, but it also says, To spare us both the time, please confirm the intention of this message. And that right there is controlled right here under the customer error message. And they have to check this box in order for the form to submit if they use one of my buzz phrases. So that’s a little tip that I just implemented not too long ago that will warn off some of the stuff. Now, obviously, if your email address is out there in the Ether, and they just email you directly, there’s not much your form is going to do about that. But this can keep the form itself from being abused too much. And then obviously, in terms of the bot stuff, you can expand this list of filters out, but it comes down to how far you want to take it.

At a certain point, the bots just need to be blocked in the first place using honeypots and turnstile if necessary and things like that. Another thing I wanted to quickly show you that you can do is that, let’s go over here. Under settings and integrations, you got a couple of things that you can do, all very conditional. So under conditional confirmations, you can make it so that they are rounded to a different page or it displays different messages to them when they submit the form based on certain criteria. For example, on this simple form that we’ve created, let’s say that they were interested in concierge service, and that’s what they indicated, I could have a custom confirmation message in here that would then point them to some page. I could even take them to a special offer about concierge. It could be something that’s suitable to the context that they filled out this form based only on if they choose that one. If they have another one, you got other options, right? And so that could be really handy as well. Now, the way it works is that if you don’t have a conditional confirmation that fits the criteria, then your main confirmation is going to take effect.

And mine’s really generic. It just says, Thank you for your message. We’ll get in touch with you shortly. I probably should do something a little bit more graceful than that. But that’s the way that works. Another thing that you can do is if you go to your Configure Integrations, you’ve got your integrations, for example, putting them into Fluent CRM. If you have WP Fusion, you can do and work with any CRMs you want. This will work with any CRMs that Fluent Forms will work with. But you can do multiple integrations and you can make them conditional. For example, let’s say we had a condition We match up their email address field, first name, blah, blah, blah. Let’s say we wanted to tag them, I’m just going to make one up as this one here. But we only wanted that to happen if they said they were interested in concierge. That we would do is we enable conditional logic and do the same exact thing, if equals concierge. It needs to be exactly what we have over there. Concierge, service. We could be any of these logics, etc. Basically, this integration will only fire if they choose that they’re interested in concierge service.

What could I do? I could put a tag on there that flags them as a lead for concierge service. I could send them then a custom message. I could offer them a discount if I feel like it, although I don’t discount concierge services. You get the idea. So this can be used as a sales vehicle, even though it’s just a general contact form. What most people do on their contact form is just ask for name, email, and what do you want to say, and that’s it, and it just goes to your inbox, and it’s super generic, and it doesn’t really accomplish all that much. But if you think through the logic of your contact form, and you ask the right questions, and you do some additional logic on the back end to that form, you can actually have it guide people to the right places, answer questions faster than if you were to email them back, and also help along with your sales by flagging them as a lead in your CRM and doing various things. They don’t have to say, Hey, I want to buy this thing. They could just be a casual interest, and you could still tag them as a potential lead for whatever product or service you have, and use your CRM to send them an automated follow-up.

You have a lot of options there, all based on that contact form. Now, obviously, the tool that I’m using for this is Fluent Form. It’s definitely the one that I prefer. It works great with the other Fluent products, but it’s a great just standalone Fluent Forms or Forms plugin. But I wanted to just say that because even though I recommend Fluent Forms to you, if you’re using another one like WP Forms, WS Forms, Gravity Forms, they’ll all do the same stuff. It’s just the interface interface is going to look different. So the overriding point here is think through something as simple as a contact form, and maybe just don’t waste the opportunity. If people are going to bother to fill that thing out, why not make it as helpful as possible, not only to them, but also to you with the follow-up capabilities that you have. These forms plug-ins can do a whole lot of things beyond just simplistic contact forms. With conditional follow-ups, conditional email notifications, integration in with the CRM so that you can tag them as a lead and run entire marketing automations. There are so many things that you could do with these forms.

You just have to take the time to think it through. At the end of the day, our websites are basically attention funnels. People come there to learn something, and then if you’re in business, which most of my clients are, they’re there also to fulfill their need with a solution that they will buy. You can use pretty much every form on your entire website to further those things along, not only by flagging as leads and email notifications and that stuff, but even just intelligence gathering. If you do a survey form, and based It’s the things that people will tell you. You can put certain information to the CRM and target things later. There’s so many things that you can do. You just have to think it through a little bit. So with all that being said, if you would like my help making your forms, especially your contact form in this case, just do a little bit more for you, get in touch with me at blogmarketingacademy. Com. You could book a quick roadmap call with me. We could talk it out. You could also use my contact form and get in touch. And then we can see what we can do for you.

But really, what I’d like to do here is make a site that actually helps do conversions and helps fulfill business goals. It’s not just simple contact form. I just feel like most people are wasting the opportunity of their contact form. You got to think of it almost like a sale. And the conversion is to fill out the contact form. And then what do you do with that? If you look at it that way, it starts to get the gears flowing on what the opportunities are. With that, I’ll see you on the next video.