The Submit button that doubled our reply rate (and the 11 labels we tried before it)

Here's a stupid question that turned out to be less stupid than I thought.

What should the button at the bottom of a contact form actually say?

The obvious answer is "Submit." Or "Send." Or "Send message." These are the defaults because they are the defaults. Nobody who ships a contact form with "Submit" on the button is doing anything wrong. They're also, it turns out, leaving a surprising amount of conversion on the table.

For six weeks, I ran a sequence of A/B tests on our own contact page. One variable: the text on the button. Everything else — the form fields, the headline, the placeholder text, the page layout, the time of day — stayed the same. Traffic came from the same mix of sources. Each variant ran for enough time to reach a sensible sample.

The final winner had a completion rate 2.1× higher than "Submit."

The 11 losers had stories of their own, some of which I didn't expect. Here's the whole diary.

The test setup, briefly

I'm not going to turn this into a methodology paper. The short version:

• Traffic: organic + newsletter + a steady trickle of Google
• Total sessions across all variants: ~38,000
• Metric: form completion rate (visits → submissions, excluding spam)
• Each variant ran for at least 5 days, longer if the confidence interval was wide
• I did not optimize anything else during the test — same form fields, same headline
• I'm reporting rough numbers, not statistical tables, because this is a blog post and you don't want to read a table of p-values

If you want to poke holes in my methodology, you are welcome to. I'd rather share the results than pretend they're academic.

The 12 variants, in the order I ran them

1. "Submit" (baseline)

Completion rate: 100% (by definition — everything else is indexed against this)

The default. Serviceable. The word "Submit" has the emotional temperature of a tax form. I didn't love it but I had to start somewhere.

2. "Send"

Completion rate: 108%

A small win. "Send" is warmer than "Submit" because it implies a real recipient on the other end. The 8% bump was within noise but it replicated across two retests. I trusted it.

3. "Send message"

Completion rate: 112%

Slightly better. Two words instead of one, which conventional wisdom says should hurt a button, but in this case seemed to help. My theory: "message" primes the user to feel like a person is going to read it. "Send" alone is neutral. "Send message" is friendly.

4. "Contact us"

Completion rate: 91%

This surprised me. Making the button say what the page was for (not what the button did) performed worse than baseline. I think it's because "Contact us" feels like a nav link, not a final action. People instinctively looked for something more button-ish.

5. "Send it"

Completion rate: 114%

A tiny improvement over "Send message." Casual, a little bit fun. I liked this one personally but the numbers barely moved compared to #3.

6. "Get in touch"

Completion rate: 96%

Same problem as "Contact us." Too passive. It describes the category, not the action. A button should name what happens when you click it.

7. "Say hi →"

Completion rate: 141%

Big jump. The arrow helps. "Say hi" reframes the interaction from "submitting a form" to "starting a conversation," which lowers the perceived stakes. Users are not asking themselves "am I ready to submit this form?" — they're asking "am I ready to say hi?" The answer is almost always yes.

This was the first variant that made me think I might be onto something real.

8. "Send it →"

Completion rate: 128%

Adding the arrow to "Send it" from variant #5. Nice improvement — arrows consistently helped across every pairing I tested. If you take one thing from this whole post, add an arrow to your button. It's the cheapest UX win on the page.

9. "Message us →"

Completion rate: 134%

Similar territory to "Say hi" but slightly colder. Still beat the original handily.

10. "Reach out →"

Completion rate: 119%

Felt weaker in practice than it looked in the planning doc. "Reach out" is a corporate euphemism. Users don't think of themselves as "reaching out." They think of themselves as asking a question.

11. "Hit send →"

Completion rate: 152%

Unexpectedly strong. "Hit send" is a phrase people use in conversation ("okay I'm going to hit send") and seeing it on the button felt oddly natural. Several people mentioned, unprompted, in the submissions themselves, that the button made them smile. This is not a thing I expected.

12. "Start the conversation →"

Completion rate: 210%

The winner. By a decent margin. 2.1× the baseline "Submit."

This is the button that's on our contact page today. Four words, longer than any button label I would normally recommend, violates the "keep it short" rule of button copy, and it cleaned the floor with every other variant.

Why I think "Start the conversation" won

I spent a week trying to talk myself out of this result. It's longer than the short variants. It's more grandiose than the casual ones. It should not work. And yet.

Here's my best theory. The word "conversation" does a lot of quiet psychological work:

• It implies two-way communication, which is reassuring if you're worried your message will vanish into a black hole.
• It reframes the act of submitting a form as the first step of something, not the end of it. There's narrative momentum in the word.
• It downplays the transactional framing. You're not submitting a lead. You're not requesting a demo. You're starting a conversation. Much lower perceived commitment.
• It pairs well with the tone of the rest of our contact page, which promises real replies from real humans. The button is a consistent continuation of that promise.

The arrow, meanwhile, does its usual job of visually suggesting forward motion and adding a second, non-textual signal that this button leads somewhere.

I don't think "Start the conversation" is universally the best button for every contact form. It fits our tone. If your brand voice is terse and technical, "Send message →" might win. If your brand is playful, "Say hi →" might. The headline is: test your button, don't assume "Submit" is fine, and do not be afraid of longer labels.

The consistent patterns across the 12 variants

A few rules of thumb emerged that I'd apply to any button test in the future.

Arrows consistently help. Every variant that had an arrow outperformed the same variant without one, by 8–15%. The arrow is free. Add the arrow.

Action verbs beat category nouns. "Send it" beats "Contact us." "Message us" beats "Get in touch." Anything that describes what the button does outperformed anything that described what the page is for.

Conversational language wins. The further the button sounded from corporate form-speak, the better it did. "Submit" is the language of the DMV. "Hit send" is the language of your group chat. Your users have more affection for the second one, whether or not they notice it.

Longer is not worse. Four of the top five performers were longer than "Submit." Button length is not a meaningful predictor of completion rate. Button tone is.

Don't overthink whitespace or color. I tested two color variants of my winning button later (the brand color vs. a neutral gray). The color mattered less than any of the label changes. Focus on the words first.

What I'd actually recommend

If you want a button for your contact form that will probably beat "Submit" without running a full test, try one of these three in order:

1. "Send message →" — safest, professional, works for any tone
2. "Say hi →" — best if your brand is warm or early-stage
3. "Start the conversation →" — best if your contact page promises real human replies and you want to follow through on the tone

Pick one. Ship it. Measure your completion rate before and after. Come tell me what happened.

The smaller lesson

I started this test thinking I was going to learn something about buttons. What I actually learned was that a contact form is a piece of emotional infrastructure, and every micro-decision on it — the placeholder text, the button label, the submit confirmation — either reinforces or undermines the promise your marketing is making.

If your marketing says "we reply to every message" and your button says "Submit," there's a small dissonance. If your marketing says "we're friendly and approachable" and your button says "Contact us," there's a small dissonance. The button is not where you want dissonance.

Pick words that sound like the humans who are going to read the submission. The numbers will follow.

---

If you want the rest of the contact-page stack we use — honeypot, Slack webhook, instant notifications, EU hosting — FormTo's free plan gives you all of it in four minutes. Then you can run your own button test against whatever is currently live. I'd love to see what wins for you.

More along these lines: what 10,000 submissions taught us about how people write to businesses and the 500-page Contact Us teardown.