There’s a lot of reasons contact forms don’t send email, but the answer is usually that you haven’t authenticated your email. In order to get emails to send, make sure to authenticate SMTP to your website. If you’re on WordPress, here’s a free resource that can help you do that: WordPress: https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/use-smtp/
Video Transcript:
So one thing that I see all the time is that many lead forms, contact forms, general forms on websites, are a complete black hole. They literally go nowhere. I get calls and emails all the time from website owners who are saying, my prospect, my lead, my customer filled out the form and I never got anything. I go test the forms and they don’t send at all. Literally, the notification does not go to the website owner. So, just tons of business is lost. Millions and millions of forms online are nothing but a black hole. That is actually because of email deliverability.
As spam has increased, the rules of what is allowed to send and what never delivers at all have been changing. So what’s really interesting is you can very easily send mail from any web server. I can very easily change the headers of the email and I can send you an email from your own email address. I can also on the same principle call you from your own phone number. Will that email actually go through? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the settings of the server, and it depends on the settings of the receiving inbox.
So, a lot of inboxes and mail servers are starting to reject all unauthenticated mail. If it’s not authenticated as a real email address, that mail isn’t going to go through at all. So, that’s what is happening. Web developers in many different places around the world are just using these general mail-sending practices through websites without ever authenticating them as a real message and just trusting that to go through. It’s not good enough, and it’s not going to go through.
What we have been doing is SMTP authentication. We actually have your website connect to your email and then send the email message. So essentially, let’s say you’re using G Suite. We’ll hook your website up to the G Suite API. It will literally log into your mail server and fire that off. In some situations, if you change the password on your mailbox, it actually will cause an error again.
My best recommendation is to always test your contact forms regularly to make sure you’re getting leads, you’re getting questions. You really want to be on top of that. If you haven’t gotten a message in a couple of days, it’s really a good idea to have a testing protocol for that. At any rate, the most important thing that you can do is actually authenticate through SMTP. Reach out to us if you need help doing that, otherwise I’ve provided a few resources.