Contact Form vs Email Address – Which Is Better in 2024?

Are you wondering whether to use a contact form or an email address on your Contact Us page? Your decision will have a big effect on whether or not you get the kind of inquiries you want.

It’s rare to see websites that simply publish their email address on their Contact Us page, and there are good reasons why.

In this post, I’ll talk about some important reasons why contact forms are considered better than using your email address for inviting messages from your site visitors.

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Contact Form vs Email Address—Which Is Better?

When trying to decide if you should add a contact form to your site or just publish your email address, there are many factors to consider.

Here are some of the strongest reasons why adding a contact form on your website is preferable to displaying just your email address.

1. Look Professional

When you have a contact form on your website, your website looks more professional.

Creating a contact form that matches your website’s theme shows that you pay attention to detail and have proper systems in place for your visitors to contact you.

In contrast, a publicly visible business email address reveals that you either don’t know how to display a contact form or simply don’t care.

Think of it this way, would you feel more comfortable contacting a website that has a nicely designed contact form or a website that simply displays its email address?

To make sure your contact form looks great on your site, WPForms gives you powerful form styling features to make your forms stand out without any code.

2. Streamlined Communication

When people contact you via email, there’s no way for you to set a structure and ensure every message contains all the information you need to respond properly.

This means you’ll likely be messaging people back to request more information. Not only is that likely to annoy customers, but it’s also unproductive use of your valuable time.

But if you’re using a contact form, you can use dedicated fields for every distinct piece of information that’s important to you. This way, you can precisely capture information like the sender’s phone number, house address, order number, ticket number, and so on.

And if you have WPForms, you can take this up a notch and use conditional logic to only display certain fields based on the respondent’s previous answers to questions in the form.

Simply put, contact forms streamline communication by letting you capture information in a highly structured way so that the messages you get are meaningful to you.

3. Keep Your Team in the Loop

Do you need more than one person to be notified when someone fills out your form?

If you’re just displaying an email address on your website, there’s no way to do this automatically. Instead, you’ll have to forward the email yourself every time to those who need notification.

But with a contact form, you can create multiple notifications and even customize who receives each message based on how the user answers the form.

This way, any time someone fills out a contact form on your site, the right people on your team are notified immediately.

4. Spam Reduction

If you’re publishing an email address on your website, you’re just making it easy for spambots to attack.

Spambots crawl around the internet looking for publicly displayed email addresses to harvest.

Even legitimate visitors can send you all kinds of signature files, email read receipts, or large file attachments that take up valuable space in your inbox.

You’re also vulnerable to receiving malicious attachments that could jeopardize the security of your whole company.

One of the strongest reasons for using a contact form is that you can take extra measures to prevent spam.

If you want to keep your email inbox clean and keep your website secure, using a contact form is a no-brainer.

And it just so happens that WPForms has a wide range of spam filtering solutions including hCaptcha, reCAPTCHA, Turnstile, and Akismet, along with several other layers of protection.

5. User Convenience

There’s no denying that email is one of the most convenient forms of communication we have.

But contact forms are just as easy, if not more. That’s because there’s no separate email client needed for people to submit a form. Instead, they can fill out a form and submit it without ever having to leave the website you’re on.

The important thing is to keep your form short and concise. You can even improve your form conversion rates by using interactive lead forms that display only one question at a time.

On the other hand, if a site invites you to contact them directly via email, you’ll first have to open your email software, copy and paste the email address correctly, and then send your message.

But you can make emailing easier for your visitors by adding a clickable email link to your site. A clickable email address is also called a “mailto link,” and looks something like this:

<a href="mailto:[email protected]?Subject=Hello%20again" target="_top">Send Mail</a>

The problem with a clickable link is that it only works if a person has their email software set up correctly.

So no matter how careful you are, there will always be situations where contacting you via email requires a few more steps than simply filling out a form.

And since user experience is a vital consideration for online businesses, it’s generally preferable to use a contact form where you have more control over designing user experience.

6. Better Record Keeping

If your email inbox is flooded with all sorts of emails, it’s easy to lose track of contact page emails from a mailto link.

By using a contact form, you can decide on the email subject line of your inquiries, helping you to keep your inbox organized.

Besides, WPForms stores all form submissions in your WordPress dashboard. You can view any entry directly from your website at any point in time without worrying about losing any of this info.

Plus, you won’t have to search for a specific form submission among all your other emails.

As a bonus, if you’re running website backups you’ll always be able to retrieve contact form submissions, no matter what happens to your email inbox, which is just another benefit of having a contact form on your website.

7. Tracking Contacts

With a clickable email link on your Contact Us page, you’re not going to have a lot of options for tracking how many clicked it to contact you.

It’s a poor solution because it’s not easy to set up reliable analytics with an email link.

But a contact form usually gives you powerful analytics and tracking options. In WPForms, you can maintain a separate record of submissions by each form you’ve published on your site.

On top of that, you can visualize the form entries you’ve received for a specific date range.

These are powerful capabilities that simply can’t be replicated if people can only contact you via the email address you’ve listed on your contact page.

8. Integrations and Automation

A contact form gives you easy opportunities for creating useful automation between your website and your email marketing software.

For instance, you could integrate your form with an email marketing tool so that people who opt in to receive marketing emails from you are immediately added to your email list.

An easy way to accomplish this is by adding a Checkboxes field to allow people to opt into your newsletter emails.

WPForms includes native integrations with popular email marketing services including ConvertKit, Drip, Mailchimp, AWeber, MailerLite, HubSpot, and more.

And if you’re worried about GDPR compliance, know that WPForms lets you add a GDPR Agreement form field to any form.

Next, Build Your Contact Form With WPForms

And there you have it! You now know that when it comes to using a contact form vs email address on your WordPress website, the best option is to use a contact form.

Create Your WordPress Contact Form Now

Are you now convinced you need a contact form on your website? If so, check out our guide on how to create a simple contact form using WPForms and start making it easier for people to get in touch.

We know that some readers have difficulty with Formidable Forms notfications, so we also put together a guide on how to fix Formidable Forms not sending email.

So, what are you waiting for? Get started with the most powerful WordPress forms plugin today.

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