Customer ServiceMarketing & CommunicationsNon-Profit
Promote your contact page
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Filed under Customer Service, Marketing & Communications, Non-Profit
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Symptom
How many times do your organization’s email addresses appear on your website? How about phone numbers? Or even the location of your head office? I’d like to suggest that your answer should be “Once: on the Contact page.”
Making it easy for your visitors to contact you by including that call-to-action throughout your site is a great idea; repeating content is not. In the redesign work I’ve done with companies that have large websites, I have frequently encountered the following dilemma…
Scenario
A new program has been created in your organization. Dwight is in charge of it. To help the campaign, this content has been added to your website:
To learn more about this program, email Dwight in Sales at dwight@dundermifflin.com.
Then Dwight leaves the company. Your IT department has since closed that email account, so it no longer works. Suddenly that reference on your website has changed from a profitable call-to-action into a frustrating oubliette.
This becomes a bigger problem when you realize that Dwight had referenced that program in several locations in your site, but no one is sure exactly where. Locating and updating every instance takes time, and no matter who is charged with that task, time is money.
Your company could relocate to a new address requiring an update of your location information. Staff can be moved into new roles and assigned different office phone numbers. The issue can manifest itself in many ways.
Solution
Instead of re-entering contact information on various pages in your site, put it all in one place: your Contact page. Then, rather than including that information on relevant pages, simply link to your contact page:
To learn more about this program, contact us.
This way, if your contact information changes, you only need to update your Contact page.
If you have a well-built site, you could even link to a filtered version of your Contact page, in this case drilling down to Sales staff information specifically, for example.
The last thing you want is to confuse a customer who wants to help you. Spare yourself the embarrassment of receiving angry phone calls from visitors upset that information on your own website led nowhere.
