Will a shorter form attract less serious enquiries?

It attracts more enquiries, some of which are less serious, and the filtering work is better done by the page content than by form friction. An accurate price range and an unsuitability section filter far more effectively than an extra six fields, and they do it before the patient has invested effort.

Should the form ask how they heard about us?

It is tempting and the answers are unreliable, because people misremember. Your analytics and Search Console answer the same question more accurately. If you want the qualitative version, ask at the consultation.

Do I need consent checkboxes?

You have obligations about what you tell people and what you may then do with their details, particularly if you intend to market to them later. The ICO is the right source. The practical rule is that a form which collects an enquiry may be used to answer the enquiry, and using it for marketing is a separate question requiring a separate basis.

What about booking systems that take payment?

They are a different tool with different obligations and they sit further along the path in Module 29. An enquiry form and a booking system serve different steps, and collapsing them into one asks somebody to commit before they have had their questions answered.

Enquiry forms, phone and messaging | Aesthetic Clinic SEO

Every extra field on a form is a reason to abandon it. Every field asking about health is an obligation you may not want.

The ladder of fields

Figure 30.1 Fields to ask at the form and fields to ask at the clinic. Every field below the line reduces completion and buys information you could have asked for later.

Four fields: name, one contact method, treatment of interest, and an open field for anything the patient wants to say. That is a complete enquiry form for an aesthetic clinic and everything beyond it should be justified individually.

Asking for both email and telephone is worth thinking about. Requiring both raises abandonment; requiring one and offering the other as optional gets you the channel the patient prefers, which is also the channel they will answer.

What never goes on a web form

Health information, date of birth, full postal address, and anything about medication. Three reasons, each sufficient on its own.

It is unnecessary. None of it is needed to decide whether to offer a consultation. All of it is collected properly at the clinic, where the patient is identified and the context is clinical.

It reduces completion. A form asking about medical history at enquiry stage reads as intrusive and stops a substantial proportion of people, including many who would have attended.

It creates obligations. Health data is a special category of personal data with heightened requirements. The ICO's guidance for organisations is the reference point, and the simplest way to meet the obligation is not to collect the data through a website at all.

The open field

Label it as a question rather than as a box. "Is there anything you would like us to know before we reply?" produces more useful text than "Message", and it produces text you can learn from.

Read what accumulates in this field once a quarter. It is the same source as the consultation questions in Module 15, Finding the questions patients actually ask and it is already written down, which makes it the cheapest content research available to a clinic.

Telephone and messaging

The telephone number should be visible on every page, as text rather than inside an image, and should be a link that dials on a phone. This sounds too basic to mention and it is missing or broken on a substantial number of clinic sites, usually because the number is part of a header graphic.

State the hours somebody actually answers. A number with no hours attached generates calls at seven in the evening that go unanswered, and an unanswered call is a lost enquiry that leaves no record.

Messaging channels, whether through a social platform or a messaging application, need the same response-time discipline as the form, from Module 29, The consultation booking path. The failure mode is a channel that somebody set up, that appears on the website, and that nobody has checked for a fortnight.

After the submit button

Three things should happen and usually only one does.

A confirmation the patient can see, on a real page rather than a message that flashes and disappears. It should state what happens next and by when.
An acknowledgement by email, containing the same expectation and a telephone number for anything urgent.
A notification that reaches a person, not just an inbox nobody has open. The most common cause of a slow reply is a notification going somewhere nobody looks.

The confirmation page is also the correct place to answer the question the patient is now asking, which is what happens next. A sentence describing the consultation, its length and its cost belongs there.

Testing the form properly

Once a month, submit your own form and time the reply. Do it from a phone, on mobile data, using an address nobody in the clinic recognises. Almost every clinic that does this discovers something: a notification going to a former employee, a broken confirmation page, a spam filter eating enquiries, or a reply time considerably longer than anybody believed.

A form nobody has submitted since it was built is not a form. It is a decoration with a submit button.

Test the keyboard path as well, using the method in Module 24, Accessibility as an obligation and an advantage. Forms are where accessibility failures cost money directly, and the enquiry form is the single most important interactive element on a clinic site.

Disclosure. This module contains no commercial links of any kind. This course is published by Northbank Media, is free to read, and is funded by the workbook pack and by clearly labelled series sponsorship. We do not rank, review or recommend agencies or clinics.

Enquiry forms, phone and messaging

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