If they can't contact you, they won't pay you.

If you are not a legitimate company, don’t value your credibility and reputation, please stop listening and go back to your tutorials on shady telemarketing techniques.

If you are in the other camp and deeply care about reputation, customer service, being of value, building revenue for the long game, this is for you.

Have you been to your company’s contact page lately?

What did you learn? As a new visitor, potential customer, investor, what did you learn?

More and more companies seem to be opting for the basic:

Address

Contact form approach.

There is nowhere on their site of who runs the company, who the PEOPLE are behind the company, how to reach them, ways to contact them. WHY would you do that? What are you hiding?

Are you embarrassed by your team? Then get a new team.

Are you afraid others will steal your team? Then you suck as an employer. Be better.

I understand if you have a PRODUCT site. You want to keep people focused on buying or signing up for trials, etc. but SOMEWHERE in the footer there needs to be a link to the corporate site with the contact information.

Consider a page for investors, support team, sales team, who covers which region?

A map of how to get there if you want us to visit, phone, email AND contact form.

Why would you limit how people reach you?

I had a client once say she didn’t want her email or phone on her site because she was getting 4 emails a day that weren’t client related. She blamed that and the junk calls on the site. Her site that she treats like a static brochure and never posts anything sharable. I wish that’s all the junk I got each day!

I have clients in the past actually say they didn’t want anything other than an email and voicemail listed because they had so many complaint calls. Sigh. I decided that I couldn’t work with that particular client any more due to a misguided focus in their level of customer service.

With rare exceptions, all of our businesses and products are OPTIONAL! Rarely are we the only, necessary solution, so stop acting like it. Have some respect for the time people take clicking to get to your site and then to your contact page. Oh, and name it something simple like CONTACT or CONTACT US. This indexes very well in Google, as opposed to the clever titles such as “REACH OUT”, “TALK AT US” - stop it. Just make it simple and complete. Quit hiding your staff. At least have your leadership listed on the site with photos and way to reach them and connect on LinkedIn, Twitter, direct line, or contact form that goes directly to that person.

Here’s your check list for a thorough contact page:

• Full company name that checks are made out to.
• Mailing address
• Main phone
• Main fax if you use one.
• Main email
• PHYSICAL address if people visit for ANY reason and map to make it easy.
• Directions from major freeways, and public transportation mention if that’s a thing for your visitors, vendors, volunteers, clients.
• HOURS you will answer phones, help lines, be in the office.
• Great place for support chat link, or you can go to a support page, if you need one.
• Then, a new section for LEADERSHIP - you can link to a leadership page, or list it here with HEADSHOTS, Name, title, LinkedIn link, direct line/extension

Calling it LEADERSHIP allows you to show only key people who are your spokespeople. Some companies put their full cast in there. At least have key leadership. If your leadership is impressive, don’t send them to LinkedIn so fast. Have a bio page for them and THEN link to their linkedIn page. Ask them to link to a company overview/call to action page in their LinkedIn and other bios/profiles. Just linking to a home page doesn’t ask for further contact. ASK for their name, email and phone. Why not? They clicked. Create a landing page specifically for this purpose - linking from social profile. They can be prompted to do this so you can follow up. If you are tracking your pages, you’ll see how they are finding this special call to action page. You can update it regularly, perhaps with tips, get an ebook, etc. Just get their info!

Another handy item on a contact page is a department table:

Department | Extension | Email | if there is a different address | if hours are different than main hours.

You can choose to hide, be cryptic or “cool” but it doesn’t get you speaking to people, seeing what they’re interested in or converting them faster. Challenge yourself to convert someone trying to sell to you. I dare you! Post links to your contact pages in the comments if you want feedback or to show off.

Get more free tips on susanfinch.com/rootedtips, sign up to receive marketing tips and to be notified of new episodes. You can also contact me on my site so we can talk about your best online face of your company!