4 Ways to approach your contact page
Minimalist or maximalist? Form or no form? Here's a few options to weigh up when planning your contact page.
Published on 25 Sept 2023
1. Segment and direct
This is becoming the most popular approach for contact us pages and does a very good job of pointing people in the right direction without much distraction.
Creating more niche avenues for contact and pointing people to the right team, be it sales, marketing, people or support, can reduce frustration for users as they can feel more confident that they are contacting the right team and their message is more likely to be addressed by the right person.
Also, by having designated channels for contact, it can make enquiries more manageable for the company internally and improves outcomes for those getting in touch. For example, having people submit support enquiries through a general contact form when they the support team work mostly on live chat, could mean that their enquiry might get delayed or even lost by coming through the wrong channel.
Forethought Contact Page
2. Minimalist
Fan of keeping things simple? You can also just straight up provide the avenues for people to contact you by and let them take their pick.
This works particularly well for small companies where only a handful of people would be managing these enquiries anyway.
Homerun Contact Page
3. Maximalist
For larger companies, it can make sense to create a more comprehensive contact page which acts as a directory for pretty much all avenues of the business. This can be particularly helpful when working with a very large website.
When you think of the audience that could be visiting a contact page, particularly for a large company, this could be anyone; HR teams seeking references, companies interested in partnering, service providers wanting to tender for a contract, or just people wanting to speak to sales or support. It can be tricky to cater to all these people on one page, which can make the maximalist approach appealing and ensure that everyone is finding the right point of contact, reducing frustration for the user as well as the internal team.
Sage has done a good job of creating a maximalist contact page without making it overwhelming by splitting the page into sections and having a form as a fallback at the bottom.
Sage Contact Page
4. A good ol' form
Forms used to be commonplace for contact pages, but are now often switched out to avoid spam and frustration.
There are pros and cons to presenting the form as the focus point of the contact page. On one hand, it lowers the bar to contact which could increase sales enquiries, but equally can attract spam or enable people to try contact teams like support via the wrong channel.
If you are keen to go with a form, it could be worth looking how you could optimise it. Maybe by prompting the nature of the enquiry with a dropdown and providing the right questions depending on this answer. E.g. if support requires certain account information to address an enquiry, it can be asked here where it would otherwise be missed in a more generic form.
Also, for smaller companies, it can be less of a concern where the volume of enquiries is manageable, but it is also good to future-proof yourself where possible!
Personio Contact Page