Mind Your Manners: Using ‘Thank You’ Pages

“Mind Your Manners!” – MomWe modern marketers ask quite a lot from the universe: click on our ads, visit our landing pages, submit a response, and convert. We shamelessly request that they ‘Like’ us, re-tweet us, pin us, and of course, give us their business. Worse still, we do all of this so frequently—so casually—that we often times forget to say ‘thank you’ when all is said and done.

It’s time to take a page from “mom’s book” and mind our manners.

Despite some excuses like, “I’ve already generated a response. My job is virtually done,” putting a little bit of thought into your confirmation pages is worth the effort. Here are just a few of the many dynamic roles that thank-you pages can assume:

• Add supplementary calls-to-action and sub/micro-conversions
• Prime visitors for a sales call
• Get visitors engaged on your company’s blog or in the social sphere
• Add value propositions to reinforce e-commerce desisions

Some innovative marketers have already found new ways to leverage their thank-you pages as part of their existing landing page strategy. At CDCNews, confirmation pages have become part of a three-step sequence, with the last offer allowing respondents to ‘skip the line’ and immediately speak to someone from the sales team. Replacing a standard confirmation page with this third step turns 57% of new respondents into converted inbounds, boosting lead quality and exposing those who don’t sub-convert to more valuable content.

Thank-you pages have enormous potential as secondary (or even tertiary) conversion points.At ion, we’ve seen some pretty impressive results from our own thank-you pages. Since adding demo forms to select confirmation pages, we’ve observed a healthy rise in both registrations and quality leads.

Confirmation pages can also become great social portals, encouraging your respondants to keep up with your brand(s) in the social sphere. You can truly add a tremendous amount of great content into your confirmation page, but remember to prioritize with intent.

Perhaps most importantly, thank-you pages allow you to fulfill your promises by giving your visitors what they’ve come looking for. One way to accomplish this is by allowing converted prospects to download whitepapers directly from your landing page by placing links directly on your thank-you pages. You can also trigger supplementary fulfillment events like e-mails and streaming video, or provide your shoppers with tracking codes, surveys, and links to contact your customer service team.

All that said, what you do with your confirmation page depends on the outcomes you’d like to achieve. As savvy marketers start leveraging these useful devices to do some extraordinary things, we’re (humbly) realizing the true power behind simply saying, “Thanks!”.

PS: You can read more about CDCNews’ LiveBall success story by checking out the case study here.