How to use Thank You pages to keep people on your site longer, start new conversations, strengthen relationships, and facilitate additional conversions.
Thank You pages are a vital step in the sales, sign up, and opt-in conversion processes. They are also an opportunity to enhance subscriber, client, and customer relationships. Unfortunately, website Thank You pages are also some of the most underutilized pages on a website.
In fact, when writing website copy, most freelancers don’t even consider Thank You pages as part of their content strategy, instead, viewing them as an afterthought; the last obstacle to finishing their website copy.
Website Thank You pages may play an “after the fact” role but they deserve your full attention and must be part of your website content strategy.
When leveraged strategically, Thank You pages can be used to keep people on your site longer, start new conversations, strengthen relationships, and facilitate additional conversions. The key is thinking about Thank You pages as an opportunity to create a positive experience for new customers, clients, or subscribers and add value to their interaction with your brand.
Thank You No-Nos
Visitors who reach your Thank You pages aren’t just new clients, customers, or subscribers, they are hot leads ready for the next step of your sales funnel. They have already decided they trust you enough to take action — what happens next is up to you and far too many website owners never think this through.
As a result, when a visitor takes action:
- Nothing happens and visitors are left wondering if the website is broken.
- An unclear message is displayed like, “Thanks, we’ll be in touch soon,”, which could mean anything. Will they be in touch right away, later today, tomorrow, in a few days, or in a week?And, what will they be in touch about exactly? Who knows!
- Something unexpected happens and visitors are confused and left feeling a little betrayed or tricked.
- A generic, impersonal, cold default response is shown and visitors see a message like form received, request submitted, message sent, action complete, or purchase success.
Thank You Page Use Cases
Rather than showing a generic, uninspiring message after a conversion, send visitors to a Thank You page and make sure it helps them feel confident in their decision and excited about the next step. With this approach, every qualified subscriber, client, or customer visits a Thank You page and you get to design the user experience.
When including Thank You pages in your website content strategy, they become valuable tools to build your brand reputation, deliver an extraordinary user experience, and drive more engagement, interaction, and conversions.
For each website conversion, consider the type of Thank You page that is needed:
- Transactional: Providing a receipt and purchase details.
- Celebratory: Cheering for or congratulating the visitor.
- Informational: Delivering important information and details.
- Instructional: Outlining next steps and instructions.
- Opportunistic: Pitching or selling the next thing in the funnel.
- Welcoming: Making the visitor feel at home and where they belong.
In many cases, a Thank You page will play more than one role. For example, the Thank You page for a list-building free offer may be celebratory, welcoming, and instructional. With an understanding of the roles a Thank You page will play, content can be mapped and written to deliver clear communication and a positive experience.
Common Thank You Page Goals
Not sure what to include on a website Thank You page? Here are a few things you do:
Provide Reassurance And Set Expectations
A Thank You page is the perfect place to set clear expectations, reinforce that taking action was a good idea, and eliminate buyer remorse. Use the page to immediately thank new clients, customers, and subscribers for taking action and remind them:
- What they bought or signed up for and how to access it
- What to expect and what’s coming next
- Why they should be excited and happy they took action
- What they need to do next
- Who they can contact with questions
Introduce Yourself
When a visitor reaches a Thank You page, it’s because they believed in your offer and message enough to take action.
A high number of people opt-in, sign up, subscribe, and register because of an opportunity to get something for free — and some of them do so without getting to know the person or brand behind the offer. This means the Thank You page is prime real estate to introduce yourself, get personal, and help people get to know you and connect with you on a deeper level.
A few easy ways to get personal include:
- Adding a photo and a short personal message from you.
- Sharing a first-person, more casual version of your bio with some more fun/less professional details that say, “Hey! I’m just like you!”
- Shooting a video message that shows off your personality through clothing, voice, body language, and more.
Share Tips And Tricks
Whether a visitor signed up to download a free resource, registered to watch a webinar, or enrolled in a course, or bought a product, you probably have some aces up your sleeve that can add value to their experience.
- If they opted-in for a free download, communicate how they access the item, how to use it, how to get the biggest benefit from the information/tool, etc.
- If they signed up for a webinar, share tips to help ensure they show up and not miss it, offer advice on how to prepare for the webinar, hint at what they can look forward to, share a bit about any offer that will be made.
- If they enrolled in a course or program, communicate how they access the materials, offer tips to help them maximize their investment, and share insights on how to best participate and interact.
- If they bought a product, provide details on how it works and how to use it, share how to get it/when it will arrive, point them to your knowledge base or FAQs, share common mistakes/problems and how to avoid them.
Provide Upsells And Opportunities
By taking action and reaching the Thank You page, visitors have not only demonstrated trust, but have also shown exactly what they are interested in. Use that information to invite them to take another related action:
- Upsell a complimentary item. If they bought a camera, upsell them accessories, a case, or even photography lessons.
- Ask for more information. If they provided their email address, ask for their mailing address so you can send them a special gift.
- Share the next step. If they signed up for a free webinar, invite them to go further and buy a mini-course, join a program, or hire you for consulting.
- Ask to connect on social media. Provide links to your social media profiles and ask them to introduce themselves.
- Invite additional actions like checking out your latest blog post, listening to your most recent podcast episode, or watching your latest YouTube video.
Keep Visitors On Your Site
Do not use a landing page template for your Thank You pages!
Landing page templates typically remove anything that distracts a visitor from taking action, which means no navigation, no footer, no sidebar — no way for visitors to keep browsing your site. And, because they have nowhere to go, they leave your site.
When creating Thank You pages on your website, use a standard website template that includes the navigation menu so visitors can keep looking around and explore more of your content. The longer they stay, the more likely it is that they’ll take action again.
Your Homework
Review the Thank You pages on your website and identify opportunities to:
- Improve the visitor experience
- Make the content and message more clear
- Set better expectations
- Introduce yourself
- Add an upsell or new opportunity
- Invite visitors to connect with you on social media
- Get visitors to stay on your site longer
Remember, a Thank You page can’t be an afterthought. It is part of the conversion process and deserves to be part of your website conversion strategy and content plan.
