Taking enquiries without drowning in spam

There is a version of this problem almost every small business has met. You put your email address on your website, because that is the obvious thing to do, and within a few months the genuine enquiries are outnumbered by offers to redesign the very website they are writing from.

The address is the leak. Published in the text of a page, it gets collected automatically, and once it is on a list it stays there.

A form is a different shape of thing

Your site comes with the form it needs, and the reason to use it is not politeness. It is that a form does not hand out anything a machine can add to a list. Someone has to arrive at your page and fill it in, which is a small amount of friction for a real customer and an enormous amount for a bulk sender.

It also collects things somewhere useful. Everything sent through the form is collected the moment it is sent and lands in your dashboard. Spanli emails you when messages arrive, marks the unread ones so you can see at a glance what you have not dealt with, and lets you download the lot as a spreadsheet when you want it somewhere else.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Enquiries scattered through an email account are enquiries you lose. Enquiries in one list, with the unread ones visible, are a thing you can work through.

Ask for less than you think

The most reliable way to get better enquiries is to ask for fewer things.

Every field you add costs you real people. Name, message and one way to reply is usually the whole form. Phone number, if you genuinely call people back. Company name is almost always vanity, and dropdowns listing your services are usually there to save you a question you could have asked in the reply.

The exception is a single qualifying question, which is the one field that pays for itself. "Roughly when do you need this?" or "Which service is this about?" or "Where are you based?" filters out the enquiries you were going to decline anyway, and it does it before you have spent twenty minutes on them.

Say the awkward things on the page

Half of the enquiries you do not want are not spam. They are people who had no way of knowing you were not for them.

If you have a minimum order, say so. If you only cover certain areas, list them. If your prices start somewhere, put the number on the page. Every one of those facts, on the site, removes a category of message you would otherwise have to reply to politely.

This is the least technical anti spam measure there is and easily the most effective one.

Keep your address off the page

If you want a mailbox people can write to directly, use one you can abandon. Keep the address you actually run the business from out of your website's text, and let the form be the front door.

The same goes for your phone number, with a caveat. A number in the text of a page will get automated calls. For a lot of trades that is a price worth paying, because a customer who wants to phone you and cannot will simply call somebody else. Judge that one on your trade rather than on principle.

Turn the notifications down, not off

Getting an email for every submission is right when you are getting two a week and wrong when you are getting thirty a day. You can turn the emails off per form and work from the dashboard list instead, which is usually the better arrangement once the volume is real, because a notification you have learned to ignore is worse than no notification.

Where this stops

Worth being straight about the edges. Spanli builds sites that inform, persuade and collect enquiries. You can show a catalogue and take orders through a form, but there is no checkout and no logins for your visitors, so if you need to take payment on the page this is not the tool for that part.

For everything short of that, the pattern is the same and it is boring on purpose: one form, few fields, one qualifying question, the awkward facts stated plainly on the page, and every message landing in one list where you can see what you have not answered.

Your site comes with the form already on it, and building and previewing are free. Build free.