Building a better online contact form

For any web-based business, online contact, enquiry, registration and purchasing forms are often the lifeblood of their business, delivering details of potential customers to the sales team. Optimising this form to reduce the number of people who don't end up completing the form is therefore essential to extract the highest value from the website.

The more data you ask for on your form, the less likely people are to fill it in. Equally, there is little point in having someone fill in the form only for you to find that they have entered invalid details, either maliciously or accidentally. If someone enters their contact details incorrectly, you have no way of getting in touch to correct them.

The key therefore is to enhance your forms with a range of data capture and validation tools:

1. Postcode lookup. This is key if you need an address from your customers, e.g. in your shopping cart pages. Allowing people to auto-fill your address fields by entering only their postcode not only requires fewer keystrokes and ensures you get fully valid addresses, but also presents a more professional image of your company.
2. Address lookup without postcode. If someone is ordering goods to be delivered to someone else, e.g. as a present, they may well not know the postcode. That's why our postcode lookup solutions also include a free-text address search option, allowing fully valid address details to be found using building, street and town details instead.
3. Email address validation. Email details are key to any online business, which is why it's so important to get them right. Many forms take the approach of forcing you to enter your details twice, but by using our real-time email address validation you can ensure the address is correct while still only requiring the customer to enter it once.
4. Telephone number validation. If you make your highest value sales after talking to the client on the phone rather than just email, make sure you get the right number! Our telephone validation service ensures that the number is associated with a valid telephone exchange. We can't promise they'll pick up though!
5. Mobile number validation. Taking the telephone validation theme one step further, for mobile numbers we can validate the full number via the mobile networks.
6. Telephone number capture. If someone chooses not to enter their telephone number, what do you do? If you require them to enter a number you could be rejecting an otherwise good lead. Our telephone number lookup service lets you add a telephone number automatically using the data from the phone book, so you never need to go hunting for a number again.