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Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 by Jordan McCollum

20

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.

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20 comments on “Take advantage of “thank you””

  1. Kev Says:

    January 31st, 2007 at 6:23 pm

    That’s an interesting point, my thank you page just points back to the homepage. I’ll probably try promoting RSS subscriptions to my blog instead to see how this goes.

    I think you mean Brad not Brian ;)

  2. Andy Beal Says:

    January 31st, 2007 at 9:52 pm

    Gareth’s recent video included the 6 most important pages for an ecommerce site: http://www.gsinc.co.uk/tips/

  3. Jordan McCollum Says:

    February 1st, 2007 at 12:10 am

    Ooh, good call, Kev. Fixing…

  4. Igor M. Says:

    February 1st, 2007 at 12:54 pm

    I actually blogged about this back in July.
    http://www.bizmord.com/Blog/archives/81

    It’s a great tactic and I’ve been implementing it with every ecommerce company I work(ed) with. Customers are very careful on that “thank you” page as they want to make sure that everything went through.

    Also, they’ve just agreed to pay your company and still have their wallet out. Why not take advantage of it? It’s no surprise that “Order Thank you page” is so highly effective when it comes to cross selling and up-selling.

    Anyone who uses that page to simply say “Thank you, good bye” is a business schmuck.

  5. Drew Stauffer Says:

    February 1st, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    The thank you page would be a great place to offer discounts too. A user is obviously very interested in your business if they take the time to fill out the form, why not give them more incentive to continue business with you.

  6. Inventive Design | Paranna sivustoasi auttamalla muita Says:

    February 15th, 2007 at 7:36 am

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  7. Jordan McCollum Says:

    February 15th, 2007 at 4:27 pm

    Kiitos artikkelini maininnastasi. Olen iloinen että sinusta kiinnostui. Isäni tämän kirjoitti. Hän osaa suomea, mutta en minä.

  8. oda kapısı Says:

    June 20th, 2007 at 11:12 pm

    thanks

  9. sheds Says:

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:12 am

    Wow, thanks for this post it’s just given me an awesome idea for our sheds site. I’m off to see what other hidden gems of information you have on here. :)

  10. jenny Says:

    September 18th, 2007 at 11:26 pm

    hello, Can you please show some good thank you pages,kind of samples? thanks. Jenny

  11. peterson Says:

    November 13th, 2007 at 10:01 pm

    Hi very good info for newbies like me … thanks for sharing.Is there a site to see more samples and ways of doing it?

  12. Russ Says:

    January 5th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

    Thankyou for this thankyou page info. It is very insightful and helpful.

  13. sheds Says:

    January 17th, 2008 at 4:37 am

    Thanks for the reminder, I knew all this but sometimes you just don’t think about it until you get a friendly reminder like this. :D

  14. Paul Says:

    March 1st, 2008 at 9:01 pm

    Thank you for this information. I am only just getting my first real site up and going, and you have given me some great ideas.

  15. Scott G. Says:

    March 6th, 2008 at 3:59 pm

    Thanx for the info.
    I was just researching thank you page “how to”
    for my new site.

  16. Sergio Musetti Says:

    March 8th, 2008 at 2:32 pm

    Greatinput. I was trying to setup an autoresponder for my free business opportunity. Regards,

    Sergio Musetti
    [links removed]

  17. mr camping Says:

    March 18th, 2008 at 12:41 am

    Very well written and so true.Will follow this advice

  18. Kit Homes Says:

    September 14th, 2008 at 3:34 am

    Great information.will check out the rest of the site to see what else you can help me with.

    Thanks again for a great post

  19. YouGov Says:

    November 15th, 2008 at 8:34 am

    Thanks, some good ideas there!

  20. Christopher Says:

    May 27th, 2009 at 8:19 am

    I will!

    Thanks :)