Contact Form Submitters - Do you think they're spammy or legitimate ways to do business outreach?

Contact Form Submitters - Do you think they're spammy or legitimate ways to do business outreach?

Over the years, it's been getting more and more difficult to pull in leads for my SEO agency.  It could be because I'm getting busier in other parts of my business, or that it's getting far more competitive in this area, or both!

In the past, I've used contact forms submitters to promote anything from affiliate links to some of my actual services, but that was a long time ago, and I was wondering if people are still using these types of software and having success with them.

I wrote this discussion to go over a few of the pros and cons of contact form submitters, and I'd like to hear what you think about them as well.


You can contact 1,000s of websites an hour
One of the best things about a contact form submitter is that you can do loads of B2B outreach with them.  You can contact 100s or 1,000s of websites by firing up your software, entering in your submission information, and let that bad boy run until it's time to turn off your laptop or desktop.

You could also set these on VPS's and let them run forever, but you'll still have to monitor them for success rates and to be sure they're still going, which isn't a huge deal.

You might not get past the captcha
One of the biggest problems with a contact form submitter is that you could get stopped by an automatic gatekeeper that is the captcha.  These aren't anything new, and they were designed to stop bots, like contact form submitters, from filling out the forms and submitting them.  

This isn't a huge problem today since you can link most software to services like DeathByCaptcha or other captcha solving services, but that doesn't guarantee you will get your message through.

Your email/form submission will likely be seen
One of the best things about submitting through a contact form is that someone on the other end will likely see your submission.  I read a study recently that said 90% to 95% of submissions are seen, and that's far greater than the 1% to 15% a cold email campaign tends to get.  

If you think about it, you'd have to send 90 emails to equal one contact form, which is pretty crazy since contact form submitters can run quickly and submit to 1,000's of websites an hour

You might get some angry responses
In the past, I used a few different contact form submitters for my agency and would get an angry response from time to time.  I was a newbie marketer and didn't know to use a dummy domain for sending and redirecting, which is why I got so many angry responses in my inbox, but now I would set something up to protect myself as much as possible.

If you're sending 1,000's of submissions an hour, I can guarantee you won't make everyone happy.  Hell, most of the people who see your submissions will likely be annoyed, which is why you would have to send them to a website that would then redirect them after a form submission or when they click on a banner.

You will boost your brand recognition
Now, this is a double-edged sword, and that's because you can brand yourself better, or you can send people to a dummy site that would then help flow people to your main site.  You could be boosting your main site directly while increasing the risk of someone sending you hate mail, or you could boost the branding of your dummy site, and that's not going to help you much.


Final Thoughts,
If you were to use a contact form submitter, what would you do to get more sign-ups?  Would you send people directly to your site, or would you use a dummy site, with a dummy email, and redirect any interested parties to your main site after they clicked a link or submitted a form?  Again, I've done form submissions in the past, but it was so long ago that I can't remember exactly how effective it was and how many sales it brought in, which is why this discussion was born