Hi, I’m Greg Businelle, President of  Businelle.com and also BAPTurnkey, and today I would like to talk with you about the topic of forms:  website forms.  Forms that you have on your website and or links that you have on your  website whose intention is to send you emails from your website. So this would be RFQ forms, contact forms or simple contact email links on your website.

If you look here at businelle.com, you'll see we have a couple of forms on every page - in the upper left hand corner we have  a quote-now form and in the middle here on the right we've a tips and tricks sign up which is the sign-up for this email you're receiving right now.

This can be a real short infomercial, if you will or if you will have someone from your team go to your website right now and test your forms. If you have more than one form, they all need to be tested. I can assure you that when they were created, your forms worked great, they were delivered to the right person in your organization, and they created some business for you. But lots of things happen everyday. For example, your operating system downloads updates, internet explorer, you are probably running 8, nine is coming out and sometimes those updates can make things break.  Sometimes, inexplicably, your form is working today and it isn't working tomorrow.

Beyond that many of our customers are employing spam techniques like physical devices, barracuda boxes, Cloudmark in Outlook, and even virus protection programs like McAfee and Kaspersky are in the spam blocking business.  The goal of those tools is get smarter every day so that they can deliver less and less spam to your inbox. Even the server that your website sits on, which are our servers, have some spam routines running on them. 

All of this “stuff” is in an effort to deliver less spam to your inbox. Here is the problem:  sometimes those things get smarter than you want them to get. So even when someone puts in their email address into a form on your website and then they click quote or submit or whatever, 90% of the time that’s going to work fine.  But then, either your Cloudmark or your McAfee or your Kaspersky or your internet service provider…something blocks it along the way. Really the only way to know that your forms are working on your website is to go to your website or have someone on your team go to your website and test the forms. You don’t need to test them everyday, its not a bad idea to do it weekly and I would say  the very least, you want to test your forms monthly.

Again don’t just test that they work on the website. You need to follow up and make sure that the corresponding email was received by the right person  at your company so that the quote will be followed upon.

So please take this morning…now…and either test yourself or send an email to some one on your team to test your forms.  Try to implement a process that your forms get tested weekly or in the very least monthly.  If there's any kind of problem with your forms, we can help you and certainly track these down and fix them.