Without doubt, Contact Forms are expected to appear on any website
The reason is that putting an email address directly onto any web page will undoubtedly ensure it's scraped by automated "bots" and added to multiple spam mailing lists. Whilst a contact form allows customers to contact you via email without exposing yours or their email address
You'll want to keep your main contact form relatively clean and simple, there's a direct correlation between the number of form fields you have in a form to the number of people willing to fill it out. Whilst a complex form asking lots of questions helps you know more about who's getting in touch, people won't bother to fill the form in if it becomes an arduous task.
A clean contact form will ask for:
Name, Email Address and Message.
Possibly also phone number and subject/enquiry type
But anything more than that is likely to discourage people from getting in touch.
The technique of improving website features and content - such as contact forms - in order to help get more of what your business wants out of them is called Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
There's a whole science on improving website CRO, but the most simple rules to follow are to keep things as simple, clean and obvious as possible.
Whilst contact forms need to be as clean and simple as possible - other forms may need to collect much more detail in order to be useful.
Make sure when you're collecting personal details (eg name or email) with forms that you make sure your organisation remains compliant with data protection regulations. It's not unusual to include a mandatory checkbox at the end of a form that asks people to agree to let you process their personal details, usually linking to a Privacy page for more information
Not many people know that contact form messages delivered from websites have a tendency to end up in junk mail folders. This is due to the technical nature of the website server having to pretend to be a human sending an email normally. Any business that needs to ensure contact form messages are delivered quickly, safely and securely should be considering delivery services such as Postmark.
