Five Tips for B2B Online: Getting the Most From Your Thank You Pages
Website thank you pages are like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Your Visitor just did something to engage your company. That’s good. Now you want to do three things:
- Make your Visitors feel good about their decision to engage
- Reward Visitors for engaging
- Keep them on your website you so have the opportunity to improve the relationship
That’s a lot for one page, but with some adjustments your thank you page can leverage the Visitor’s current state of mind to accomplish a great deal. Here are five fairly easy (OK, some of them require just a bit of server code, not much) things to do with Thank You pages to make the Visitor’s experience richer and improve your take from the visit. These are pretty much the same if you run a simple on-line email service such as AWeber or Constant Contact, or are invested in comprehensive marketing automation such as Eloqua, Marketo, or Exact Target/SalesForce.
1. Always have a custom page for each action. If a Visitor just signed up for your newsletter, thank him/her for that. Address them by name if possible, after all, the Visitor just gave it to you, did you already forget it? Most online mail houses such as AWeber or Constant Contact will hand the results of a form transaction back to your thank you page, a small amount of code can change “Thanks!” to “Thank you Janet for subscribing”. It’s a small thing, but think of the psychology here; you haven’t already forgotten who they are. (Note: for those of you involved in B2C, a payment gateway will hand back everything EXCEPT the credit card data).
2. Use your full page formatting for thank you pages, including site navigation. You want them to continue the experience on your site. Now, you could have your thank you page set a session cookie with the Visitor’s info, so that he/she is greeted by name on every page visited. OK, this one is not always in the simple class, as your developer needs to put code on every page for it, and some Visitors find it a little creepy. Know your audience, and be careful how far you go.
3. Reward them if possible. Put a download link to a new research paper on the page, or a complimentary invitation to a webinar you are sponsoring. Something tangible not available elsewhere on your site. They will remember it.
4. Tell them what will happen next, and commit to action on their behalf. If they will be getting an opt-in email, tell them to expect it, and tell them exactly what they need to do in order to confirm their subscription. If they requested support or a reply, make a time-based commitment to get back to them (note: 24 hours is pushing it, any more is way too much, plan to have resources available for this).
5. Ask for more. If they just signed up for your newsletter, maybe they would be interested in your next webinar. Chances are (again with a bit of code, great investment) you can put the title of your next webinar on the thank you page, along with a sign-up link.