Clean Up Your Contact Us Page! - What to Include
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This may sound a little outdated, but you should always include a physical address or at least a postal mail address. Even if all of your business is conducted online, a postal address gives you a greater air of legitimacy in the eyes of many visitors. Besides, it won't just be customers that need a physical address; you probably have contractors, suppliers, vendors, service providers, and others who need to know where your business is located.
Along with your physical address, you should list a phone number. In fact, you should list more than one. The bare minimum is a business phone number and a fax number. List the hours during which those numbers are answered, and stick to them! You might also want to include phone numbers for reaching particular departments (such as customer service or editorial). If you're comfortable with including a cell phone number, do so. You might even want to look into getting a separate cell phone that you use exclusively for your business, whose fees might be tax deductible, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
Not everyone will be in a position to call you during your normal business hours. That's simply a fact of life if you're doing business globally – which you are, technically, if you're doing business on the Internet. So along with all of those phone numbers, you should include instructions for leaving voicemail. If you can, note how quickly voicemail messages will be answered.
Some of you will dislike this, but you should also include an email address that is checked regularly. Yes, you may get spam. So what? Most people use email these days, if they surf the Internet at all. They expect businesses to do the same. It's the norm in communication between businesses, and it gives your customers an easy way to contact you after hours. Using email means everyone gets a solid record of the communication, too, providing an extra layer of protection in case things go awry.
If you really want to make things easy for your customers, you can set up your email address so that it is a “hot link,” meaning that they can click on it and see their own email program opened instantly, ready for them to start typing a message. Setting this up is just like setting up a hyperlink on your web site, only instead of typing “http://www.yoursite.com/” you're putting in “mailto:relevantparty@yoursite.com,” or whatever email address you've chosen to use. Just make sure you DO check this address regularly! Check the spam filters too; speaking from experience, you'd be surprised at what can get lost in them.
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