Monday morning, nine o’clock. You open your email and find three requests from the form on your website. The first says “Hello, how much does it cost to paint my house?” and nothing else. The second says “I’d like a quote for painting”. The third has only a name and an email address.
How much does it cost to paint a house? It depends. On the square metres, on whether the house is empty or furnished, on whether the ceilings are included, on where it is. None of the three requests tells you.
So you reply to all three with questions. The first answers on Thursday. The second never answers. The third phones you on Wednesday to tell you, politely, that they have found someone else.
The customer does not know what you need
It is not their fault. They know what they want done, not what changes the price. You know that, from years of work. To you it is obvious that an eighty square metre flat full of furniture is a different job from an empty eighty square metre flat. To the customer it is “my house”.
So they write whatever comes to mind. And if the form gives them a large empty box labelled “Message”, they will write one sentence and press send.
The form is where you can tell the customer what you need, before they even write to you. If the form does not do it, you will do it afterwards, by email, by phone, by a second and a third email.
What “tell me a bit more” costs you
Every question you send back is one more round. And every round costs you in three places that we rarely count.
In time. The request came in on Monday, the price goes out on Friday. Not because you were slow, but because you were waiting for answers.
In requests that disappear. Some people never answer your question. They found the answer elsewhere, or they simply forgot. You do not see these as lost jobs, because they never became a quote.
In work that goes to someone else. When a customer asks three businesses for a quote, the winner is often whoever replies first with something specific. Not always the cheapest, and not always the best. It is the one who first gave them an idea of what they would pay and when.
The form that asks the right things
Let’s stay with the painting. A typical contact form looks something like this:
Before: First name, Last name, Email, Phone, Address, City, Postcode, VAT number, How did you hear about us, Message.
Ten fields. And not one of them asks what you need in order to give a price.
After:
- Your name
- What would you like done? (interior, exterior, or both)
- Roughly how many square metres? (with an “I don’t know” option)
- Is the space empty or furnished?
- Which area?
- When would you like it done?
- A photo of the space (optional)
- How should we reply? (phone or email, whichever you prefer)
Eight questions instead of ten. The difference, though, is not the number: now every question helps you answer, and Monday’s request arrives with what you need. You can reply the same morning with a first estimate, or with a concrete proposal: “To give you a final price, I can come and see it on Wednesday at ten. Does that suit you?”
The questions change from one kind of work to another. An electrician asks different things, an accountancy firm different things again, a kitchen maker different things again. The rule stays the same: ask whatever changes the price or the next step, and nothing else.
Every field has a cost
Every field you add is a small decision for the visitor. And every decision is a chance to think “I’ll send it later”. In practice, that “later” rarely comes.
We will not give you a percentage for how many requests are lost with each field. Whatever figures circulate were not measured in your market or on your form, so they say little about your case. Our experience is consistent, though: when a form asks for things the visitor does not understand the reason for, some people stop.
Three things do the most damage, because they appear almost everywhere and are rarely needed at first contact.
The VAT number and the full address. You need them for the invoice, once the customer says yes. Before the price, they feel like an interrogation. There is something else too: the General Data Protection Regulation (Article 5(1)(c)) asks that the data you collect be limited to what is necessary for the purpose. If the purpose is a quote, the VAT number is usually not necessary.
“How did you hear about us”. You want to know, and rightly so. But it does not help you answer, and for the visitor it is one more box. If you want to know, ask on the phone. You will get a better answer, too.
Fields that are required for no reason. A required phone number drives away anyone who would rather you wrote to them. A required square metres field drives away anyone who does not know. Offer “I don’t know” and let them carry on. A request with rough figures is worth far more than a request that was never sent.
And on your side
The right form brings you the request ready to work with. But “do you have what you need to answer?” has a second half, and no form solves it.
If every request makes you start the calculation from scratch, you will be slow even when you have all the details. What helps is simple, and you already carry it in your head: a list of the jobs you do most often and a price range for each, written down somewhere so that anyone else who replies on your behalf can find it.
And the reply does not have to be the final quote. It has to be specific. “For eighty square metres, furnished, allow roughly this much. To give you a final price, I’ll come and see it” is an answer. “We’ll get back to you” is not.
Two more things are worth checking once. Whether messages from the form actually reach you, and not just whether the form says they were sent: we explain this in “Analytics says «conversion». But did a customer arrive?”. And whether your quotes reach the customer or end up in their spam folder: that is in “Why your emails land in the spam folder”.
The request that arrives ready
Back to Monday at nine. This time the request says: interior, about eighty square metres, furnished, Chalandri in Athens, some time in November, and a photo of the living room. Under “How should we reply?” they chose the phone.
At a quarter past nine you call. By twenty past nine you have an appointment for Wednesday. The customer never got round to asking for a second quote.
The difference was not your price or your work. It was that the form asked what you would have asked.
If your website’s form brings in requests that need two or three emails before they become a quote, send us through the form your website address and the three questions you most often have to ask your customers. We will look at the form the way a visitor sees it, suggest what it should ask and what it should leave out, and check that the requests actually reach you. This work is part of website development and improvement.
