Emails or a Form for bussiness

I am getting a whole lot of pesky free advice emails were people ask me irrelavant questions, with questions not specific enough for me to answer, and most are not serious or sales inqueries.
My inbox bounces at 1,000 emails so it is a real problem to me. Should I use a form instead of a regular email link? Would it turn away sales? or help make sure the questions are asked properly so we can answer them?

What do you have on your site?

 

For my free domain appraisal service on my site i use a form on my site that users just fill in there details so that i just get the specific answers that i need. When the from is submited by the user it gets emailed to my email address and then presto.

My point being is that if you use a form you will get the information you are after therefore that the process will be more faster and efficient for both you and your customer.

 

It was written [somewhere] that forms turn away people!!!

Nothing is more wrong - in fact I would say that it is probably the opposite!

In all the years that we have been on the Internet we have always used forms and where we have placed mailto addresses alongside the forms people have always used the forms in preference.

We put forms on virtually every page that could ask for, expect, a response, so we do make it easy, but what this does also is that it gives us the exact information that we require and we parse these forms directly into our database [filemaker pro acting as an email client] thus reducing our input.

To reduce spam we use &#64 in the email address if needed.

 

I would use both. Unfortunately on the internet you are always going to find people who are time wasters.

 

Because they were horrendous spam magnets, I replaced all the mailto: links all over our site with links to our Contact page. The Contact page has a form, along with phone and mailing address, but no email addresses. We're happy with the change. We discovered that it weeds out the weirdo, jokester, or otherwise unwanted emails we were getting, but the serious inquiries still come in. And every form that gets filled in is an opt-in or opt-out of our mailing list.

We use MasterFeedback by Will Master, and we like it.

 

Thanks! Good info everyone.
Other than the obvious field like name, email address, and fields that are required to answer questions specifically; which other fields should I require? Are phone numbers nescesary? full name? or anything else?

 

Here is one that I am just doing at the moment

http://www.country-colonial.com/enquiries/cc-enquiry.htm

hope it helps

 

you could also create a little flash button that links directly to email. spam bots can't read that.

 

Depending on how your business operates and what you specifically need from a client/user in a form, a salutation, name, email address and phone number are good "required fields" - that way a client/user can give the minimum for you to chase them up if needs be and you can follow up with a phone call to introduce yourself, catch up on the details they've missed and do your customer service bit. It allows the human touch to be involved in an otherwise de-humanised process

That's just from where I've been sitting, others may have different ideas...

 

Those are very good reasons and I'm glad you put in the "required fields" bit which I forgot !

It is essential to require people to fill in what you are asking for - some people [mostly time wasters] will fill in first name and an email address under the guise of "security'. We return the email and ask for the details if that happens [some of our forms don't do required! - an ISP problem].

If they are serious they will give you all reasonable info which enables you to follow up.

Here is a php form generator that does the trick:

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=45605&package_id=122227