Looking to get the opinion of your audience? Want to build a human connection with your customer?
As a responsible website owner, you would always want to maximize your communication and interaction with the audience. It follows then, naturally, that you would create specific communication channels for them to use and reach you. “How exactly do I achieve this?”, is the question that must be on your mind right now. Don’t worry, we have got you covered.
There are plenty of ways for a website owner to maintain good communication with your audience. The first channel that most websites use is email. They use email hosting or an email server that can both send and receive emails. With a good email hosting plan, you can have unlimited addresses for your email from your domain. For example, if your domain name is mysite.com, you can have multiple addresses such as [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and many more. This allows you to divide email addresses into departments or teams as required by their function. This streamlines the usage of emails to communicate with your audience. You can also have multiple users operating the same email addresses with limited and non-limited access. However, this channel of communication is much suited to commercial and corporate enterprises and does not bring a lot of usefulness for personal website owners.
Moving on, another communication channel that is widely in use is social media. Websites are often used to drive organic traffic to social media profiles by personal and commercial websites alike. The vice versa is also a highly effective marketing strategy that is very popular and for good reason. Several billion people in the world use social media and there are very few other things that can even make claims of having such a large user base. Consequently, people from among your audience will likely feel more comfortable and at ease reaching out to you on social media compared to email. This is because an email is an electronic form of a letter and therefore it carries all the formalities and complexities of a letter. Your audience will likely not want to communicate using email unless it is something they strongly wish to convey. Social media can therefore serve as a better indicator of their connection to your website.
One of the most important communication channels is the voice and using a helpline, cell phone number or outsourced call center is one of the most effective ways to utilize the voice communication channel. Speaking is still a more natural and interactive way to communicate than writing or chatting with bots on the internet. As a result, users prefer to interact with voice communication channels as they can be more direct and natural in their speech while also taking up less time to convey a lot more information. Unfortunately, this channel of communication requires human input and labor and cannot be completely automated. This results in very high costs and can also require the procurement of employees or outsourced services. Not to mention, the retention of information is not very high.
So we have discussed several methods but none of them is highly effective for all case scenarios. What then should be the course of action for you as a website owner? Well, the answer is quite simple. Contact Forms! Contact Forms have been around for quite a while now and they are a very effective channel of communication between you and your audience. That “Reach Us”, “Leave Us a Message”, and “Let Us Know” dialog box that you usually see on the bottom of a website’s page is known as the contact form. Although it has an intricate working structure, a contact form achieves a very simple task. It allows the website viewer to fill in a couple of dialog boxes with correct information, it then verifies that information using a few checks and sends the entire form as an email to the designated address. It combines the convenience and ease of use of social media with the context and information of an email. Best of all, you have complete control and storage over the information you collect.
Today, we will be showing you the 5 best WordPress plugins for you to integrate Contact Forms on your WordPress page:
WPForms
WPForms has over 5 million active users and it makes sense why. It has been around for a really long time and in that time it has managed to establish itself as a robust, reliable, and easy-to-use way to integrate contact forms. It offers more than 300 templates varying from surveys, contact forms, payment forms, newsletter forms, and more. It even features the 10 Most Popular WordPress Plugins of All Time. Moreover, they offer solid integration with email marketing to double the effectiveness of your forms and they are extremely easy to embed on any page. Pricing starts at $40 a year.
W8 Contact Form
W8 Contact Form is another great contact form plugin for WordPress that serves many users every day and has been around for almost a decade. With built-in captcha, custom form settings, multiple recipients and automated responses there is nothing you would need that W8 Forms cannot provide. It is also part of the brilliant CodeCanyon family of plugins offered by the Envato Marketplace (read more here about how to use the Envato Elements plugin). The regular license for W8 Forms is $20.
Jotform’s WordPress Forms
This plug-in provides everything you need to streamline your tasks and enhance the way you manage your business. It offers several advanced features such as conditional logic, 30+ payment gateways, and strong data management tools to let you create your ideal form without any coding involved. It even features countless advanced form fields, widgets, and integrations that you can use and combine with your existing workflow. You can get started on creating your document by choosing one of their ready-made templates and customizing them further using their powerful drag-and-drop builder. When your document is complete, you can easily embed it onto your website or just share it with a link. The free plan includes all the features and the Bronze Plan starts at $34/month billed annually.
Formidable Forms
Formidable Forms is among the giants in the WordPress Contact Form category and it is easy to see why. Testified by businesses like Apple, Wells Fargo, WB and more, they are easily the largest corporate supplier of this feature. They integrate a simple drag-and-drop builder model with 1-click installation but also HTML customization for those that need it. They also offer cutting-edge features like dynamic fields and integrated views that you won’t find anywhere else. The Basic plan starts at $40 per year.
Forminator
For the budget-minded out there, do not fret. We have your back. Forminator is easily the best free solution to integrating contact forms on your WordPress website. It offers a basic, visual, drag-and-drop building utility to minimize the effort you require. There are also many unique form templates like quizzes, feedback widgets, polls and a lot more! Although it is free to use, Forminator offers some features you might want with a premium membership.
Did we miss your favorite plugin? Head on to the comments now to let us know!
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