The importance of having a feedback form in your e-commerce
website
Internet marketing is a different ball game altogether when
compared to traditional marketing. A brick and mortar store
employs salespersons to guide and advise its customers. No such
equivalent of a salesperson exists for an online store. This
could be one of the reasons why people shy away from online
stores.
Given these circumstances, it is of vital importance that your
web store should be as interactive as possible. An interactive
website makes your visitors feel more comfortable and increases
your chances of making a sale. A well designed website is the
first step to make your visitor comfortable. Enough has already
been said about not choosing flashy colours or having excessive
graphics. I will now elaborate on the importance of having a
feedback form in your website.
Every site will invariably contain a "Contact Us" section.
Information usually present in this section includes the
business name, e-mail address, physical address, telephone
numbers etc. But what is missing in many websites is a feedback
form. Consider a scenario where your visitor has a query and
wishes to contact you. If you don't have a feedback form, your
visitor will most likely choose to e-mail you. There are
numerous intervening steps that your visitor has to perform
before he can e-mail. Such steps like opening his/her e-mail
program, logging in etc. are distractions and your visitor's
attention is easily diminished. Moreover if your potential
client is on a public computer he/she may not have access to
his/her e-mail and it is extremely unlikely that he will
remember and contact you once he/she gets back to his/her
computer.
All this can be avoided by having a simple feedback form in the
"Contact Us" section of your website. Your visitor won't even be
leaving your site when he/she fills up your form. The very
nature of forms makes it easy for you to collect information
from your visitor. For example, if your visitor requires more
information about a particular product that you are selling,
he/she can choose it from a drop-down box listing all your
products and then type his/her query. Consider the alternative:
if you didn't have a feedback form in your website, your visitor
would have to type your product name in the e-mail and then type
the query - more pain to your user.
The very fact that feedback forms have so many advantages may
lead you to believe that they are very hard to implement. You
would be surprised to know that they are one of the simplest
things to have. Forms consist of very simple HTML and there are
numerous tutorials available on the web for creating them. You
also need a program/script to process the form and a simple
query in your favourite search engine would find many such
scripts. A simpler method would be to sign up for a remotely
hosted form processing service so that all your form processing
needs can be outsourced. You will find that the entire process
takes about 10-15 minutes or lesser and you can have a feedback
form up and running!
Now that I have shown you that it is so simple to have a
feedback form and there are numerous advantages associated with
it, there is no reason for you not to have one!