Take advantage of “thank you”

In response to Matt McGee’s list of the four most underutilized pages on your site, Brad Geddes at eWhisper.net blogged today on what he thinks is the most underutilized page on your website: the “Thank you” page. Brad says of “Thank you” pages:

[D]o you give someone the ability to continue to interact with your site? Or are you saying ‘Thank you very much, now go away’? Don’t just lose that customer interaction, continue to engage them towards other aspects of your website or business.

Brad’s on to something here: once you’ve acquired a lead for your business, are you taking full advantage of their interest? Do you offer them more opportunities to find what they need from you or other things that might interest them?

MarketingSherpa’s blog this week suggests that you should definitely include offers on your “Thank you” page. On Monday, Anne Holland, President of MarketingSherpa, provided some cold, hard data to back up this common-sense suggestion. In 2001, their click through rate on “Thank you” pages was 40%.

Being MarketingSherpa, they gathered more current data and found that at least one thing hadn’t changed very much in the intervening years: as of last week, their “Thank you” page CTR was 39%. Anne adds:

Another interesting fact: the most popular offer on that page gets a 29% acceptance rate, which is fabulous, but not the whole 39%. That means giving folks a choice on that page has helped our overall offer conversions increase by 10 percentage points.

(This is *not* true of all promotions on the Net or in postal DM. Most often, single focus gives better results.)

My final takeaway — if you have any thank-you pages out there for anything that only say, “Thank you,” you are wasting very valuable real estate.

So how can you best utilize that precious real estate? Here are some ideas to get more from your “Thank you” pages:

• Lead/subscription/contact info — Brad suggests, “At this point, engage them with other conversion possibilities like a newsletter signup, an RSS feed, white paper download, etc.” (I must admit that whenever I see another interesting white paper advertised on a “Thank you” page, I almost always download it.)
• Purchase/check out — You might try cross-selling or up-selling, but once they’ve made the purchase, visitors are less likely to want to go through the process again. You might offer special offers, coupons, email or print newsletters, or sales notifications.

For both types of pages, you might also consider “Refer a friend” links. I’m sure Anne would suggest you test your offers to find the best-converting “Thank you” page for your market. Whatever you do, don’t throw away potential conversions anymore.