Typical contact form solutions work like this: a potential customer visits your website and makes their way to the contact page, they fill out the required contact form fields, and click to submit their information. The form then triggers your web server to take those completed form fields, wrap them up in an email message, and send that message to the email address you’ve specified. It might go to you, the owner of the company, or the person in sales and marketing. Where it goes specifically is inconsequential—the critical part of the process is that the email gets to where you need it to go.
Reasons Why You May Not Receive the Email
If your domain or IP address has been blacklisted, your contact form will work flawlessly on the front end but the email with the form information will never get to you. Your email provider, in an attempt to block SPAM, will not accept email from a server that’s been listed on known industry-standard email blacklists. This could happen whether you are a spammer or not. And you likely never know that you have been backlisted. Customers think their contact form submission went through with no issues so they don’t complain, and on the backend you think your contact form is working fine. The only way most businesses realize there is an issue is when contact form submissions stop coming in. Sometimes contact form submissions are a daily occurrence, and for other companies, they might receive one lead through their website per month, and that lead could be potentially worth thousands and thousands of dollars.
An additional reason contact form submissions may not be received is related to problems with your web host web server configurations or common code libraries like PHP Mail or PHPMailer. Occasionally there are version conflicts and code updates that cause the web server to stop sending mail. Just like the situation with blacklists, the problem is usually a mystery to the business owner. The form works correctly on the front end, but the form submission email is never sent, and there’s no indication of a problem until the business realizes that they have not received any contact form submissions in a while. And by then it’s far too late.
At 43Leads, we implement an industry-leading solution to these problems—database backups. It doesn’t really matter if the form submission email fails and you never get it. Every contact form that we process is instantly backed up in a database and accessible to you at any time. If you’re suspicious that you might not be receiving contact form submissions, simply go to your private database snapshot and view every form submission that’s taken place on your contact page.
Would your business benefit from having a dependable contact form solution for your website? 43Leads was specifically created for small businesses whose contact forms are critical to business growth. Contact us today to learn more about our service and the full complement of features we offer for lead capture on your website.