Thank you Pages are the secret treasures for any businesses when rightly optimized these pages have excellent scope to enhance the sales of the business to many folds.
Thank you pages are invisible selling tools to the business for any brand and hold a number of opportunities to enhance encouragement, improve sales and generate more revenue.
What is a Thank you page?
Thank you pages are a page of a website, where the visitors are redirected to when they make use of the services of the website. The Thank you page is also referred to as the confirmation page because the page confirms an action taken by the website user.
The Thank you page then follows up any desired action on the website like,
- Filling a survey
- Subscribing for an email newsletter
- Filling out a contact form
- Making a purchase on the website.
Why Thank you page is important?
Thank you page optimizes any action the brand’s website wants its visitors to take. It not only serves to confirm the previous successfully completed action but aims to engage the visitors continuously when they are still psychologically intact to engage with the business further.
Marketers consider visitors who have just completed action on the website as more valuable than new visitors, as they have just proved that they are interested in offers of the brand.
An effective thank you page ensures that the relationship is cordial and has the capacity to grow further. Also, thanking the audience for visiting the site is also a polite gesture to build the credibility of the brand in the minds of the audience.
Best Practices to Follow for Your Thank You Page:
With little efforts, brands could convert their Thank You page into an automated feedback and research tool. It is the perfect domain to help the audience gain deeper insight into the business and serves as a perfect marketing tool. But to optimize this Thank you page as a marketing tool, some practices from the side of the brands is desired and these practices are discussed here,
Giving Confirmation:
The ideal anatomy of a Thank You page is that it should confirm the visitor on the action they have taken as successfully completed.
For example, if they have subscribed for the newsletter of the brand, the thank you page should have the note thanking them for their subscription. The page should also confirm all the relevant information that relates to the action such as how frequently they will receive the newsletter, when would they receive their first newsletter, how they could opt out of the subscription etc.
This is a good practice and a gesture to thank someone for showing their interest in the business. This would also make them feed valued immediately and believe in the action they have taken to be correct.
Navigation across the website:
Keeping the audience stranded in the Thank You page is one of the worst practices from the business perspective. The website has to allow for further navigation and take them around the different pages of the website so as to fuel their interests to explore better. Having them hanging around the website helps in promoting different products and services of the brand as well.
Lead visitors to take a Survey:
Surveys are the easiest and inexpensive way to gain feedback for a business. Surveys are simple to supply and with just a few questions posted on the Thank You page, visitors would be encouraged to participate and share their feedback. Survey questions are to be kept very short to the maximum of 5-8 questions so that visitors gain an impression of their time being valued.
It is also a good practice to inform them in advance how much time the survey would take to get completed so that they would be happy to take it up. To frame the survey questions, Google forms could be used as it is a free tool and also lets the marketer view the responses in a spreadsheet.
Collect information about the customer:
The Thank You page can be optimized to help gain useful information about customers. This can be done by asking the customers to leave their comments before they leave, the information thus gained would be far better than any analytics tool. The lead gained from these comments could be used to create blog content and new products and services.
Asking the customer for Feedback:
Asking the customer for feedback offers a complete picture of how the consumers interact with the business. Feedback helps in getting the answers directly from the customers and is the best weapon to explore new opportunities in the business.
The comments form in the Thank You page would allow the visitor to share their feedback. Some question leads to submit feedback could be asking the customers on,
- How they like the products and services,
- In what way they could change their services
- What made them to visit the website etc.
Using Thank You page to gain referrals:
The main challenge for online stores is creating new business and customers. Referrals seem to be a consistent and predictable source of revenue for online stores. Word of mouth marketing seems to be a key influencer in determining the purchase decision of prospects.
The Thank You page can be used by businesses to ask their prospects to recommend their business for their close acquaintances. A pre-written referral mail could also be included so as to save the time of the customers.
Asking for shares in Social Media:
Thank You pages can be used to ask for likes and shares in the social media so as to enhance brand awareness and improve social media engagement. But such social media share request should depend on audience demographics.
Young visitors would be more interested to share the business on social media rather than to send emails. Knowing how active the visitor is on social media could help in asking them for quick likes and tweets.
Including Media Mentions:
Thank you pages not only demonstrate consistency and commitment but also hold the scope to demonstrate authority over website visitors. The page creates a tendency among subscribers to be consistent with the actions they have taken. It also positions the business in the place of a leader paving way for the prospects to follow them.
Having a small feature in the section where the business is been featured in media mentions, testimonials, and reviews create an impression of being a market leader. This leader impression attracts customers towards the business.
In short, gaining authority through what other authorities have to say about the business. This practice helps to build trust and gradually attracts more buyers.
Offering Discount vouchers:
This is a popular tactic for almost all existing e-commerce businesses. Most of them include promo codes and discount vouchers on their Thank You Pages. But it has to be offered carefully as giving them too generously could suffer the profits of a business and doing them sparingly is equal to giving them in the hands of the competitor.
Coupons have to be offered as a reward for a good behavior exhibited by the user. For example, a free sample can be offered after subscribing, offering a percentage discount with the second order etc.
Lead Nurturing:
The visitors of a website would be at different stages of the sales funnel of a brand. Some would be beginning to like the product, some would be at the beginning of the purchase decision; some would have problems in fixing the product etc. Brands should be ready to tackle all these types of visitors, a free source on the brands and services should be made available for the visitors to gain clear insight into the business.
People should be given a choice and be allowed to take the path which would appeal to them. Subscribers have to be nurtured along their buyer’s journey so as to convert them into possible leads.
Creating links in Thank You Page:
If a person chooses to be on a website, it means that they have been impressed by the content in the website and believe that they would be offered more such valuable contents in the future as well. Brands have to feed these expectations and provide links for other interesting content in their Thank You Pages.
It is okay to render these links through social shares as well, so as to benefit both the reader and the blog. It also creates an opportunity for higher link building and creates a better link building opportunity for result pages in search engines.
Opportunity to upsell a product or Service:
Thank You pages have tremendous opportunity to upsell a product or a service by the brand. Paid traffic is highly effective for prospecting online marketing campaigns and has the capability to escalate its ROI up to ten times. But paid traffic is not economical for businesses, especially startups and the best alternative for this is self-liquidating. Digital marketers use this strategy in their Thank You pages to convert their subscribers into customers.
Benefits of Thank you Pages:
Having discussed some of the optimal practices to be followed in the Thank you Pages, let us now discuss the inherent benefits of them.
It makes Analytics easy:
Metrics from the Thank you pages makes website analysis easy and simple. A simple confirmation or subscription does not mean robust analytics but helps in understanding the user behavior deeply so as to drive success in marketing.
The submissions and the feedback help to track conversions and there is a possibility to track activity on the previous pages of the site so as to calculate the website bounce rate.
Paves way for further action:
Visitors may feel that they have done their part after clicking on the confirmation link in the thank you page, but it is not so for the brands. They have to optimize this data for further action. They could present valuable offers which are just close to what the user subscribed before, that could help to fuel further website conversations.
By communicating incentives, special offers and promos, brands are indeed extending their engagement with their visitors.
Builds Connection:
Customers feel a sense of connection with the brands that value them the most as individuals. A simple confirmation of their actions taken in the website would not render them that value.
The best practice here would be to write them a personal letter from the founder or president of the company, to help them feel valued and respected. This also becomes a word of mouth marketing strategy for the brand.
What happens if the Thank You Page is not optimized?
On the other hand, if the Thank You page of a website is not optimized or is not personalized as it ought to; it could prove to be a deadly nightmare for a business. Customers stick on to a brand when they feel valued and personally connected.
Simply posing a thank you message when they have completed a particular action of the website could mean that they have been treated normally and are been sent a customized message. Personalized Thank you messages written by top officials of the brand could provoke the sentiments of the visitors, would make them feel valued and respected and improves brand loyalty.
Brand loyal consumers are more likely to propagate the product or the service to all of their close acquaintances and improve the audience base of the brand. Therefore it is vital that all businesses be it small or big should optimize their Thank You pages to get their business growing.
Conclusion:
A typical Thank You Page should be a sincere expression of gratitude from the point of the business to thank the user for their decision to take a particular action in the website.
It should be an unambiguous acknowledgment of their efforts so that it could enhance the conversion rate and improve the lifetime value of the customer. Personalized thank you pages that are compiled for every offer could change the behavior of the prospect towards the business objective.