Are contact forms "a waste of real estate" on a web page?

Question

Settle a discussion, SX:

I (digital sales optimisation guru) was in a meeting with the boss and he asks, "what can we do to increase sales on our website?"

I say, "having more contact forms will make it easier for customers to contact us".

He replies with this doozy: "contact forms are a waste of real estate" and something about if people want to contact us, they can call.

The website is sales focused and I feel like having a contact form on each product page will increase conversion.

We have one contact form on the entire website and that's below the fold. But we have our phone number in the header of every page.

Now I understand that you can have too many contact forms on a page, that's not what I'm recommending. I don't think one contact form hidden below the fold is good enough.

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What is the correct number of contact forms on a website?

Answer 1

Nothing is a waste if it's in its place. If the goal of your product pages is for the user to contact you then definitely put a contact form. If not, it may take away from whatever other call-to-action (CTA) you may have on your product pages.

If you are concerned about easy access to your contact form you can put a link to your contact form or Contact Us page next to the phone number in your page headers. Unbounce does this on their website.

It is also possible to have more than one contact form per page. Bare Bones Software, an often cited example on this site has a variety of contact forms on their Contact page.