Learn More about People Who Contact You (WordPress)

If you run a blog, you may want to hear back from your readers and fans. The most traditional and effective way to let readers get in touch with you is to create a contact form.

The contact form has a few important advantages over simply making your email address public. Two of the most essential of them are:

• That’s a spam-free contact method (if you choose a good plugin for that);
• It gives you some more advanced options to analyze and organize your contacts.

The second advantage is just what I’d like to look further into. There are three WordPress plugins that give some great options for learning more about people who contact you.

1. See the (original) referral of the contact

Enhanced WP-ContactForm includes the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referer. While the plugin doesn’t offer any stats (you can compile the stats yourself by throwing the referrals into an Excel file), this plugin will help you:

• Better understand the person’s intentions (if he, for example, Googled your name to land on your site – this gives you a reason to think that he has heard about you and has been looking specifically for you);
• Better understand the person’s reasons (you can also see which page of your blog might have encouraged the reader to contact you).

Here’s how it looks when you receive an email via the form:

2. Organize Your Contacts Effectively

WordPress-to-Lead plugin is a great way to keep track of your contacts and organize them effectively (I am testing it myself now). It makes it easier to:

• Track all conversations and interactions
• Organize your contacts and tasks in a single spot
• Easily synchronize with Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo!, and more

It does need Salesforce account but if you get plenty of important emails from your blog contact form, you should consider taking this advanced approach for managing them. After all, your contacts are what accounts (or will account) for your success.

Besides, it has a wealth of handy options and settings that allow to configure the look and feel:

What’s more, it has a sidebar widget allowing to add a tiny contact form blog-wide:

3. Track form submissions

Contact form 7 is a very customizable and usable contact form plugin. It has a wide variety of options and is very easy to configure and install.

Besides that, it can be easily connected to your Google Analytics account to track form submissions. Here’s a very detailed tutorial on how to do that.