Inquiry widget

Connect your website to your OctopusPro account and capture more leads by embedding an inquiry widget directly onto your website.

If there should be one element that you absolutely need to include on your website, it would be a contact form. Your website visitors are already interested in your services since they are on your website, so using a contact form or an inquiry form is a great way to capture their information, allowing you to contact them later in order to sell them your products and services.

An inquiry widget is essentially a form through which your customers can easily send their inquiries. Once sent, these inquiries display directly in the inquiries section in your OctopusPro account from where you can manage initial customer contacts and convert inquiries to estimates and bookings.

You can simply embed the inquiry widget on any page or any website you want, making it as easy as possible for your customers to reach you regarding your services and products offered. You can place the widget on your website, blog, or any website that you can edit so you can start capturing more leads.

Table of contents

• The benefit of having an Inquiry form on your site
• Customizing the look and feel of your Inquiry form
• Showing custom fields when a service is selected
• Showing service categories
• Allowing customers to submit inquiries without selecting a service 
• Asking customers to upload photos after submitting an inquiry
• Redirecting your customers to your Customer Portal after submitting an inquiry
• Custom fields
• Period Required
• Testing your inquiry form
• Embedding your inquiry widget on your website
• Banned IPs
• Receive bookings through your website

Make your business reachable

Your business can’t be available by phone 24×7, so it’s essential to give your visitors a way to contact you, even when you aren’t available. 

Inquiry or contact forms let you do just that. An inquiry form gives your visitors an easy way to send you a message right from your website. Plus, inquiry forms give your users the impression that you are available. Having a business phone number on your website is also important, but it’s no substitute for a contact form. 

Inquiry forms can simply be used for any type of request that you want to capture through your website and funnel into your sales workflow funnel, like general “Service request”, “Contact us”, or other nonproducts/date-specific requests. You can fully customize all the wording used in the process so that your customers know that they are just making an inquiry or a quote request.

An inquiry form can be used for just about anything you can think of, but here are a few examples of reasons to use a contact form:

• Service/ Information Request: Your customers can use this to enquire regarding more information about services or products sold by your business.
• Questions: An inquiry form allows visitors to contact you with various questions they may have related to your business
• Feedback: This is a contact form that is used for general comments from your visitors regarding your website and business

Some of the major benefits of embedding the contact form on your website:

• Reduce Spam: Typically, the alternative to having a contact form is to have an email address published on your contact page. This can be bad practice for a number of reasons, but most of all is spam. There are bots that troll the internet harvesting email addresses from any website they can find. Your email then gets blasted with all sorts of irritating spam. No one likes to get spammed. It’s a time-waster, which is just bad for business.
• Information control: Since you specify the information you’d like from the customer you can capture the exact information you want from them
• Sales funnel management: Since all the information is provided to you the same way, all inquiries from your contact form will show in your inquiries tab in your OctopusPro account, allowing you to easily manage them through your sales funnel and convert them to quotes and bookings.

Automatic email confirmation

When a user contacts you through your website, it’s important to let them know that you have received their message. OctopusPro handles this for you with an autoresponder that is customizable from your settings.

You can find the email template named Confirmation email for websites under Settings > Communications > Templates and Canned Responses. It’s also an added way to get your business name and branding in front of a potential or existing customer. It’s almost like a takeaway, brochure, or business card. It’s something they’re able to see later to remind them of the interaction. Having an automated email response at the top of a user’s inbox is also a great reminder that they contacted you.

If you would like the client to receive an automated response, don’t forget to configure the “Confirmation email for websites” template in email templates.

If you don’t want to send an automatic confirmation email to your customers after they submit an inquiry, then you must disable the “Send confirmation email to customer after the inquiry is submitted” flag.

Now that you know the importance of an inquiry form on a website, what are you waiting for? Get started and embed your inquiry form on your website today.

Customizing the look and feel of your form

You can make basic changes to the style of your inquiry form from your settings. You can customize your form title, button text, button color and button text color, form text color, and title color.

You can make further customizations to the look and feel of your inquiry form using CSS after embedding it on your website.

For setting up your Inquiry form style in OctopusPro, follow the instructions bellow

• Firstly, you need to go to Settings > Communications > Inquiry Form

• Scroll down to a Box that says widget styling.

• Form styling details are explained as:

1. Widget title: Your Inquiry form Title can be adjusted from the first box, (for example QUICK INQUIRY)
2. Button text: Here you can change the text in the button which the customer has to click on to submit his inquiry on your website, (for example, GET QUOTE).
3. Button color: Change your button color to whatever color you find suitable for your website theme, (red for example).
4. Button text color: Change your button text color to whatever color you find suitable for your website theme, (green for example).
5. Text color: You can choose whatever color for the custom field text, (yellow for example).
6. Title color: Choose the color of your inquiry title from here, (purple for example ).

• If you choose the same colors and the texts in the examples mentioned before your inquiry should look like this:

• Note: You can change the previously mentioned colors in two ways, either you enter the color code or choose the color by clicking on the square color icon on the right side of the field where you want to change the color.

• You can also customize the labels of your form fields, like email, mobile, phone, state/region, town/city, address, postal / zip code, comment, property type, the period required, and other fields by scrolling down to Form fields.

• If your business requires multiple addresses for your bookings, like pickup and delivery address, or multiple delivery addresses, you can show up to three address fields, which will feed directly into the multiple address fields in your inquiry in your OctopusPro account.

Note: you can copy these fields’ values to your quote or booking address fields when converting the inquiry to a quote or to a booking.

• You can also choose the fields you want to be shown in the inquiry form by choosing activating the “visible” flag for fields you want to appear or “hidden” for fields you don’t want to appear. 

• To change the name of your form fields, you can enter the new name in the input field that appears next to the default field label.

• For example, you can change the label of your Name field to First Name by entering the First Name in the input field next to Name. 

• As a result of the last step, the place holder text (it is a text that disappears when the customer starts to type in the field) will show in inquiry form as follows:

• Additionally, you can decide whether these fields should be optional or mandatory for your customers to complete, the fields are optional by default, by clicking on the last button on the left of the field that you want to change, it will set the field to mandatory.

• Remember to press Save before being able to test your changes.

Showing custom fields when a service is selected

When your customers are filling out the form, they will have to select at least one of your services which you decide to make visible in your form.

• If you want custom fields of your services to be displayed when selecting the service, you can choose either “visible” or “hidden” for the Show Custom Fields flag.

• As a result of the previous step, your customer will fill or choose the custom field depending on your setup.

If you don’t want all custom fields of a specific service to be shown, you can customize that in your custom fields settings by activating the Hidden from inquiry widget flag which appears when creating or editing custom fields.

For more information about showing the custom fields when the service is selected go to Settings>>Services Settings>>Custom Fields, or click here and you will be redirected.

Showing service categories

• If your business offers a wide range of services, you can group them under categories to make finding services easier. The categories that will display here are the categories you have set for your services in your services settings.

• Activating the Show category will appear in the inquiry form as:

Allowing customers to submit inquiries without selecting a service 

If you want to allow your customers to submit an inquiry through the inquiry form without selecting a service, you can disable the flag for it.

To do that, go to Settings > Services Settings > Services 

On the service view page, click on the service you want to disable the flag for and click edit from the actions button.

First, you have to disable the flag for “Allow scheduling bookings through the customer portal” to display the inquiry form on your customer portal service view page, and allow your customers to submit inquiries. 

Then, to allow your customers to submit an inquiry without selecting the service, disable the flag “Display in inquiry widget” 

This service will not be mandatory to select when your customers are submitting an inquiry. 

Follow the same steps for other services, to hide them from the inquiry widget so customers can easily submit an inquiry without having to select a service for it.

After disabling all the flags, the services will be hidden from the inquiry widget whether it is embedded on your own website or visible on your customer portal.

Your customers can now submit inquiries without selecting a service. 

• If your business doesn’t offer a lot of services and is not grouped by categories, then you should disable this flag.

Asking customers to upload photos after submitting an inquiry

• If you would like your customers to upload photos together with their inquiry, you can do that by activating the related flag in your inquiry widget settings.

• The upload photo form popup will display to the customer right after they post their inquiry, and you can customize the message that appears to the customer in that popup when asking for photos to be uploaded with the inquiry.

Redirecting your customers to your Customer Portal after submitting an inquiry

When an inquiry is submitted successfully through your inquiry form, you can either keep your customer on the same page they enquired from, or you can redirect them to your Customer Portal after submitting an inquiry.

• If you prefer to redirect your customers to your customer portal upon submitting their inquiry, you can activate the Redirect the customer to Customer Portal after submitting the inquiry flag.

Custom fields

Depending on your business requirements, you might need to collect some extra information from your customers to best help them regarding their inquiries.

You can add additional custom fields to your inquiry form by creating them in your service settings, then adding them to your inquiry form from under the custom fields tab in your inquiry form settings, which was explained previously. 

You can add as many custom fields as you want, and you can customize each one by selecting from various different field types, allowing you to create any types of fields you need, so you can be creative with your inquiry form design and add any fields you wish.

If you want to add new fields to the inquiry widget, you can add them as custom fields. You can link custom fields that already exist or you can create new ones and then link them to the inquiry widget to be shown as another field in the inquiry widget.

• If the custom field already exists and you only want to link it to your inquiry form, you simply need to go to the Custom Fields tab from your Enquiry Form settings.
• Press the Assign Custom Field button, then select your custom field from the list of available custom fields in order to link it to your form.

• After that a pup up will appear, click on the field which says select what suits you.

• Don’t forget to click on the save button.

• Your new custom field will be added on your inquiry form.

• If you want to change the order your custom fields display in your form, you can rearrange them by dragging and dropping the added fields into an order that makes sense to you. To do this, hold down the left mouse button and drag your custom field to where you want to place it.

• After that go to widget tab located at the top left of the page.

• Scroll down to the end of the form fields box and hit the save button.

• You will see the newly ordered custom fields in your inquiry form as:

If the custom field you wish to add doesn’t already exist, you will need to create it first by going to settings > services settings > custom fields > create a custom field. Click here and you will be redirected to create a custom field in services settings.

Period Required

Manage inquiries more efficiently knowing the timeframe when a customer would like to receive a service by adding the ‘Service Required’ field to your inquiry form, e.g. ‘ASAP’, ‘Next 2-5 Days’, ‘Next Week’ etc. If you don’t want the period required dropdown field to appear in your form, you can disable it from your inquiry widget settings form.

For more information about the period required visit the following link.

–https://help.octopuspro.com/add-period-required-field

Testing your inquiry form

As you make changes to your inquiry widget settings, you can see them actualize in the ‘Preview’ section below after saving your changes.

Embedding your inquiry widget on your website

Once you’ve set up the contact form, the widget can be installed on your business website so leads coming in will magically auto-populate in your account. Pretty awesome.

To set up and customize your inquiry widget, go to the inquiry widget section under Settings > Communications  > Enquiry Form

After customizing your inquiry form, you will need to copy the generated code snippet into the section on your website where you want the widget to appear.

Scroll down to the embedding the form section and follow the instructions.

Banned IPs

You might receive unwanted spam inquiries, which can crowd your inquiries list and waste your time having to delete them. This can also cause your email address to be blacklisted, as when people receive your auto-responders they might flag them as spam, which can reduce the deliverability of your real emails to customers.

With OctopusPro, you are able to block these IP addresses to stop receiving spam inquiries from the same IP addresses, saving you time and allowing you to focus on real inquiries from real customers.

All the IP addresses you have banned will be listed in the Banned IP section. To ban IP addresses, find and click on the inquiry whose sender you want to ban in the All inquiries section from the menu. Scroll down to the sender details, and click on ‘Ban IP Address’.

OctopusPro inquiry form does not require a CAPTCHA to prevent spam as it doesn’t display at all to web crawlers and spiders.

More information can be found by visiting the following link.

– https://help.octopuspro.com/view-banned-ip-addresses

Receive bookings through your website

If you are looking to allow your customers to place bookings on your website with specific service, pricing, and date-specific requests you may want to consider using the OctopusPro Customer Portal to receive bookings online. For more information please visit. https://help.octopuspro.com/customer-portal-set-up