I have a phone number on my business website. I also have a physical address on the website. So shouldn't I have the email address on the website as well?
It's a fair question.
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This post was first published on Leadfuse.com.au, an old website of mine and some of the logos are still in the graphics or videos. Despite this - the content is still relevant
And mostly it comes from the heart. Isn't it easier for someone to email me? That's sort of basic thinking of this thing.
But there's three reasons why you shouldn't.
Spammers
The first of those is you'll get a lot more spam email because people, spammers, mostly, just scrape the web page and they're looking for email addresses because they're in the same format they areeasy to find.
They get those and then they start to spamming you stuff and it'll drive you mad.
Waste Your Ad Spend
The second important business reason is that you'll lose your performance data. What I mean performance data is if you're advertising on AdWords or Facebook advertising or any other direct advertising, then certain information comes across to the website with the link from the visitor. That information is lost as soon as someone goes out of the website and onto an email client and starts typing in the email.
So what that means, in a sense, is that your marketing will be less efficient because you don't know where your leads came from. You don't know what particular keyword, for instance, or what campaign or what physical set of ads created that visitor to the website, the contact and ultimately the sale.
So your marketing budget gets wasted in the long run.
Bad User Experience
And the third reason is that it's actually a bad user experience. So if you think about it, they've got to copy the email address.
They've got to open an email client like Outlook or Gmail or Macmail or whatever.
They've got to fill in all of the stuff, the subject and type in the email, and it takes the user off the site as well. So they've moved away from your website.
More often than not, you'll get an email which is vague and you'll have to reply back to them and ask for more information. If they're forced to use a contact form, you can ask for their name and their phone number.
If you don't ask for that via email, then you might not get it. And then you have to reply back to them and say, hey, what's your name? What's your phone number? What is it I can do for you?
Because they don't write all that out. So there's a cycle there. You lose leads, you lose contacts, and it's just harder and worse user experience for everybody. So my recommendation is to use a contact form instead.
You can embed a contact form on the landing page for advertising so people can fill that out. It's much easier for the user to use. You get the information you need, you don't get the scraping and much less spam.
And you have a much more trackable experience for your performance marketing.
Conclusion
So is an email address on a website a good idea? No, it's not. Use a contact form instead. It's a much better process for everybody.