Are your website email forms…performing?

Are your website forms functioning properly?

When a contact form is created on a website, a recipient is set (such as the owner or marketing manager). But there are a variety of ways form delivery can fail:

• E-mail recipient address change due to staff turnover
• An email server is changed that has different SPAM filtering expectations
• A company domain name change (oldCompany.com vs NewCompany.com) potentialy rendering the current email form recipients obsolete
• A website form can be "correct" in terms of settings and recipients, yet delivery can still fail.

Steps to test your forms

A few simple ways to test your forms:

• Visit any form on your site: the Contact page, member registration, subscription or Call to Action form. Send a test message from a non company-branded address
• Does the form allow the message to submit?
• Is there a clear Thank You message or landing page to indicate success?
• Does notifcation of the form submission arrive in the appropriate inboxes?

Steps to keep your forms healthy

• Use a transactional email delivery service, improving the delivery of your website emails. Creative Arc can assist with this
• Set a monthly calendar reminder to test a form and verify email notification
• Use an automated tool to submit test form submissions on a regular schedule. Creative Arc can assist with this
• Include a "safety" recipient, perhaps at a personal gmail address, to avoid delivery issues unique to your domain name
• Learn the basics of the email form engine used on your site so you can verify settings as needed

Website contact forms benefit from periodic reviews

Email is one of the most important functions of your website for your visitors and customers. With the increase in marketing email volume over the last decade, mail services like Gmail, Yahoo, or perhaps your corporate email service have tightened their email delivery regulations. Routine email messages such as receipts, forgotten passwords, or order tracking updates might get flagged as SPAM if your website domain is not properly configured as a reputable email sender. See our blog about Transactional e-mail for more info: https://creativearc.com/blog/what-is-a-transactional-email