Make ‘thank you’ pages work harder

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that editorial on your confirmation pages is somehow dormant – every page on your website provides you with an opportunity to cross-sell.

Registration forms, newsletters, forum comments. One thing unites them all: the ‘thank you page’.

An age old requisite, the thank you page is often given a low billing on the list of priority pages by site owners. Like the About us or Contact us page, we can be all too quick to paste in perfunctory copy on how an email has been sent to an inbox or how something will be processed by a someone soon.

Instead of wasting that valuable real estate with a standard throwaway line, why not offer the user a related link or a special offer?

Sizeable click through rates of 40 per cent are on offer to those who direct their customers to a related service or newsletter, thanks in part to users being more receptive to new offers having just committed to filling out a form or submitting a comment on the previous page.

Whether creating content or migrating it, be sure to include confirmation pages in your content matrix. If you find your users are ‘warmed up’ by the time they reach this page, then why not make this page as important as your homepage?

Be sure not to overlook hard-coded pages too. Most CMS platforms allow web editors to edit ‘contact us’ pages, but dynamic confirmation pages are sometimes then missed after falling into a form of content limbo between editors and developers.

It’s a mistake to think that editorial on your confirmation pages is somehow dormant, after all, every page on your website provides you with an opportunity to cross-sell. Overlook that and you’re wasting a powerful call to action, or worse, leading your customer to a dead end.

Read more about the power of web copy

Published: 10 Mar 2008

Tags: Customer insight, Seo sem & content