Don’t Lose New Business Leads! Regularly Test Your Online Forms or Use an Automated Form Tester

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online formIt happened again recently. Another customer wasn’t receiving email notices of quote request submissions from their web site and they didn’t notice for some time.

They lost business because they didn’t get the quote requests people were submitting. For many web marketers leads they didn’t receive by email are lost forever because they have no backup of them!

Many web marketers rely on email notifications of the form submissions on their website. However, problems with form submissions can occur anytime. Something can break on the website, especially after updates, or your ISP could tighten up the spam filtering causing the submission notices to get filtered.

If you rely on online form submissions for business leads here’s what we suggest –

  • Make a schedule to test your website forms or use an automated forms tester. We recommend testing them at least weekly. Forms should be tested to make sure they working. But, just as important, make sure you are receiving the email notifications of the submissions if that’s what you rely on.
  • Create an inventory of all the important forms on your site (the ones that often include contacts that lead to potential new business like quote requests).

Here’s what we do for the forms on our website –

  • Once a week we have a reminder pop up to test the forms. We have links to each form on our website so we can quickly click to them, fill them out, and make sure the forms are working ok (we use a form filler so all we need to do is click it to fill each form out)
  • Then the reminder pops up again the next day to remind us to check that we actually got the email notice (Very important! things can go wrong with email notices at anytime)

FormTestr: Automated Forms Tester
There is an online form tester available that some of our customers are using to automatically test their forms weekly. You can check it out here formtestr.com

Note. If you use an automated forms tester like FormTestr you still need to make sure you are receiving the email notifications if that is what you rely on.

Send your form submissions to more than one email address (Ideally have the form submissions stored online too)
Have form submissions sent to at least two email addresses, ideally one that is not a domain address (eg [email protected]) in case there is a periodic problem with the server.

Ideally have the form submission data stored on the web server or elsewhere online where you can access it to check that you received notification of all leads.

Your form submission data isn’t being backed up? Very Dangerous! This means you are relying solely on the email notifications and could lose business if the email notifications get filtered. It’s time to think about changing your online form system so that they are stored online so you have a backup of them.