| Confirmation
and Alert Emails
If
you're like me, you've tried to fill out
a contact form on a website, only to wonder
if it actually got through to the company.
One
of the things you can use the PHP programming
programming language for is to send a confirmation
email and alert email from your site. (For
the basics on PHP, please read my earlier
article, What
is PHP and Why Should I Care?)
I
hate when I fill out a form on a site, and
all it says is "Success!"
I
don't have a warm-fuzzy feeling that my
information was sent to the website appropriately.
These
three steps can build confidence and reassure
potential clients:
1.
Make sure that you keep the form fields
to a minimum. Only ask for the "Need
to Know" information vs. the
nice to know. You really only need someone's
name, phone number and email address to
contact them. All else is "Nice to
Know," but can prevent a significant
portion of people from filling out the form.
Don't
think this is true? Test it out on
your site to see. We recently had a client
who added five new form fields to their
contact form, and saw a 95% decline in people
filling out the form.
Here's
our optimized contact me now form:
2.
Make sure that the success page is personalized.
If you have someone's first and last name
from the form, make sure you personalize
the success page with their name. This
creates a psychological impression that
you care about them as a real person.
Here's
a sample success page:
3.
Make sure you send a confirmation email
that is personalized with their information.
Many people will forget your website
address after they fill out the form. Sending
a confirmation email allows them to reconnect
with you easily.
Here's
a sample confirmation email from our site:
4.
Make sure you send an alert email to your
staff, informing them that someone filled
out the form and wants to be contacted.
Instead of waiting for someone
to check the website, send an immediate
email that allows people to be contacted
right away.
In
our alert email, we include details including
the search words they used to find us, as
well as a list of all of the web pages that
they visited prior to filling out the form.
It lets us know what they're interested
in, and what they've been looking at, so
we can better be prepared for a phone conversation.
Here's
a sample of our alert email:
5.
Make sure you save all of the contact information
to an online database, so that you can follow
up with them in the future.
How
does this work from a technical perspective?
PHP
can send an email from a website for someone
in three easy steps:
- Someone
fills out a form.
- The
form submits to a php page, that then
displays a success page to the end user.
- The
php form processing page also sends a
confirmation email and alert email, usually
by connecting to sendmail.
Test
It Out, $first:
To
test out how this works,
visit our website here >>
Why
should I bother using PHP to send emails
from my website?
Sending
an email makes people think (right or wrong)
that you care about them as a person. It
creates trusted interactions that can lead
to long term customers.
|
