Your website's contact forms aren't reaching you.
Or a hundred a day arrive and not one is a customer. Both can be fixed, and you can measure whether the fix works.
The short answer
It's almost always one of three things. The email goes out from the website's server without your domain's authorisation, so it ends up in spam or gets rejected. The form fails and nobody finds out. Or everything arrives, but mixed in with bot submissions. A new template fixes none of them. What fixes them is looking at how the email goes out, what happens when it fails and what gets filtered before sending.
Why they don't arrive
- The email isn't authorised. The server sends "on behalf of" your domain without your domain saying so (SPF, DKIM and DMARC records). Gmail and Outlook treat it as spoofing: spam or outright rejection. It's the most common cause and the hardest to spot. If the emails you write yourself are going to spam too, see why your emails are going to spam.
- It fails silently. The plugin, the hosting or the email service's key stops working and the form keeps saying "message sent". The customer thinks you're going to reply. You think nobody is getting in touch.
- It gets lost along the way. An overly strict spam filter, a full inbox, a notification email pointing to an account nobody checks any more.
Why you get spam
Bots fill in any form they find, in seconds and with any text. The usual reaction is to add a captcha, which stops bots but also older people and anyone in a hurry on their phone. There's a better way: a honeypot field that people can't see but bots fill in, a minimum time between opening the page and submitting, and a log of everything discarded, to check that no genuine message is lost.
How Vaseia fixes it
- The email goes out through a sending service with your domain verified (SPF, DKIM and DMARC). It lands in the inbox, not in spam.
- Every submission is saved before the email is sent. If the email fails, nothing is lost: it's retried and an alert goes off.
- An instant Telegram alert, with what they wrote and which device they used.
- A bot filter with no captcha. It's the same one used on this website's form and on the website of a training academy in Madrid, where it has caught dozens of bot submissions without losing a single genuine one.
- A copy in a spreadsheet when you need to work with them, such as enrolments.
- In the monthly dashboard you see genuine and discarded forms separately.
Check it in five minutes
Submit a form from your phone with made-up details you'll recognise. Check your inbox and your spam folder. If it's in neither, the form is failing and has been for who knows how long. If it's in spam, the email is going out without authorisation. And if it's in your inbox, count how many of the last twenty came from a real person.
What next
Audit your website on the home page: several of the eighteen checks affect this. Or, if you prefer, write to me through the form. That one does arrive. I work remotely, in English, with businesses outside Spain. I don't compete on price. I compete on quality and speed.
Questions
Why does the form say "sent" when nothing arrives?
Because the form only confirms that the browser sent the data, not that the email went out or arrived. If sending the email fails behind the scenes, the visitor still sees "sent". The fix is to save every submission before sending the email and to raise an alert when the email fails.
Wouldn't a captcha fix it?
It stops bots, and some people too. An invisible honeypot field and a minimum time before submitting keep bots out without the visitor doing anything. A captcha is kept in reserve for when that isn't enough, which is rare.
What are SPF, DKIM and DMARC?
Three records in your domain's DNS that say who can send email on your behalf and what to do with email that fails the check. Without them, Gmail and Outlook treat the form's email as possible spoofing. Setting them up properly doesn't take much, and it can be checked.
How much does it cost to fix?
If your website is covered by Vaseia's monthly fee, it's included. If not, it's a small job, with a fixed price in writing once I've seen how it's set up. The first step is the five-minute check above.
Where are the submissions stored?
In the website's own system, not in a third-party marketing tool, and with the consent checkbox GDPR requires. In the dashboard you see the genuine ones and the discarded ones.