Has this happened to you?
Recently, I noticed something.
I was getting a lot of contact form questions that weren't really the kind of messages that made sense.
Sure, everyone gets spam in their contact forms. I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about people writing in my contact form stuff like,
“I WROTE YOU LAST WEEK AND YOU STILL HAVEN'T ANSWERED ME”
I know it can be frustrating to send me a note and not get something back. I get that. But at the same time, I get a decent number of messages a day. So it can take me a couple weeks to get back to folks.
But when I looked at the former email from the yelling “fan”, I read a very different request (no caps).
“I took on a job where I needed to integrate WP Courseware with WooCommerce. You have several articles about each. But you haven't explained how to connect them. Can you quickly reply and tell me how? I've already started the job and now I need the information.”
Something about that felt very wrong.
Why take on a job that you don't know how to do, only to send me a note asking me to show you how?
So I've changed my contact form
Instead of just having a standard form to contact me, I've now started by asking your intent. This allows me to then dynamically present the follow up question (using Gravity Forms), and then route it to me.
It also let's me tell you that “I may not reply to this contact request.”
Because while I want to reply to everything, some things aren't worth replying to. Like the notes above.