Tuesday, 13 March - 18:49 Category: e-marketing

Here's Where You Can Stick Your Phone Number!

SYNOPSIS: Where should your telephone number go? Answer... everywhere. Here's why...

It astounds me how many times when I visit websites I have to actively search for their contact details. In some instances I have gone to a contact us page only to find nothing more than a form I'm supposed to fill in. Presumably, the fact that I may actually want to speak to a human being didn’™t enter the Web developers’™ minds. God forbid I should waste my time with that most cumbersome of communications -- speaking -- when I could spend the next 20 minutes crafting a lengthy e-mail asking questions to imaginary answers I may or may not get. Ludicrous. And don't start me on those who only supply e-mail addresses.

Here we have companies who have invested in websites, traffic building exercises, crafted copy to get me to a point where I want to talk to them and at the last moment they drop the batten and hide their contact details.

Now let's keep this simple. You want people to make contact with you in any way so of course, you will have contact forms, e-mail addresses, fax numbers, postal addresses, etc but the most direct form of contact is a telephone call. It is also far more succinctly displayed on the page than a contact form. Here's where you should place your telephone number:

  1. It must be above the fold (i.e. above the point where people would have to scroll to see it).
  2. It must be prominent on the homepage.
  3. It must be on every single page.

Why every page? Because you can never anticipate when somebody is going to decide to make contact with you. Therefore, by putting your contact number on every page you make it easy for them to get in touch. (Why make somebody search for your contact page when you know that a proportion of them will give up trying and go somewhere else. And just in case you're wondering, yes, people really this fickle -- the web statistics bear it out.)

By the way, just a minor point, if your telephone number absolutely has to be a graphic make sure you apply an Alt-Tag which contains the telephone number. You'd be surprised how many times contact numbers are searched for.

Next time you're doing a spot of browsing I challenge you to count the number of times you fail to see the above in action. For something so simple it seems frequently forgotten. (I wonder if this is because the ’˜web team' so wound up in the complexities of what they're doing they fail to appreciate the obvious?)

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Posted By:Jed Wylie on Tue, Mar 13th 2007, 18:49