Jason Hawkins Why a “Thank You” Page is Crucial for Small Businesses 45 Wow-Score The Wow-Score shows how engaging a blog post is. It is calculated based on the correlation between users’ active reading time, their scrolling speed and the article’s length. Learn more Why a “Thank You” Page is Crucial for Small Businesses Jason Hawkins
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A “thank you message” is a small gesture to make when a customer makes a purchase on your website, signs up for your email list, or makes any other action that contributes to conversion on your website. These kind of details can definitely enhance a user’s experience on your website, but for small business owners, it does even more than that. In fact, having a “thank you” page is actually crucial for small businesses success when it comes to Analytics.
Below walks you through some of the reasons that “thank you” pages are so valuable, and then give you some tips for best practices when putting them together.
1. Tracking and Analytics
Tracking every time the Thank You page loads and displays to one of your customers allows you to have valuable information on conversions and completing actions on your website. This is really key for analytic purposes, and it allows you to measure any action where you have routed to a “thank you” page.
For example, let’s say you’re putting a lot of effort into marketing your new workout product. In your Google Analytics, you can set a tracking goal that will track every time this Thank You page is served, which means you’re tracking each time someone followed-through with a purchase of that product. This is the number one reason Thank You pages matter.
You can learn more about tracking Analytics Goals here, and below is a screenshot from one of our clients who recently started tracking donations. As you can see, they only have one goal right now, but you can create multiple goals and compare them. This may work well if you have two similar products and want to know which to discontinue and which to keep on the market.
2. Increase Returning Customer Base
Since the probability of selling to a new prospect is between 5-20% while the probability of selling to a returning customer is 60 – 70%, you want to do everything in your power to build up a returning customer base. A Thank You page is a nice gesture in expressing gratitude for their purchase and for choosing your business, but it also gives you the opportunity for further calls to action or suggestions to turn a recent purchase into a second conversion opportunity.
Here are a few questions to consider in consideration of designing your “thank you” page and leading to a second conversion opportunity:
- Can you recommend another product or service?
- Is it the right time to direct them to a member of your sales team or someone who can reach out immediately?
- If they completed X action, what is the most logical step afterward?
- How can you get them excited about the action they just took? Is there a video demonstration or some other content that you could direct them to?
Learn more about how to optimize your Thank You page for better future conversions and returning customers.
3. It Serves Multiple Functions
A Thank You page is available to do so much more than just thank a customer for purchasing, contacting, signing up, or scheduling with your business. In fact, according to HubSpot, the anatomy of a good thank you page contains several features:
• Thank your customer and remind them of the value of the action they took
• Offer content (especially if they signed up for a webinar or a mailing list)
• Include a secondary CTA to encourage returning actions
• Allow the customer to share their action with social media buttons
• Make sure you provide the opportunity for them to connect with you on social media
• Provide links to other free relevant content (blog posts, videos, webinars) on your site
• If they haven’t at this point of the process, give them the opportunity to subscribe to your email list
This goes back to optimizing your Thank You page, so refer to the link above for more ideas on how to be successful.
4. It Confirms Success of the Customer’s Action
Thank You pages also confirm that the form your customer submitted did actually go through successfully. After people make a purchase (especially) or taken any other form submission action on a website, they like some affirmation that the web page did, in fact, submit correctly.
You can certainly send an email to confirm purchase/subscription, but it helps to have something immediate to confirm that everything went through as planned.
5. A Gift to Say Thanks
You can treat thank you pages as an opportunity to say thanks with a gift. This could be handled several different ways. You could offer them a discount code for use between certain dates, send them a free sample or gift, or give them a certain amount of store credit for making a first time purchase.
By offering a small gift you are making a sincere effort to thank them for their business, while at the same time adding to the likelihood that they will return and make a purchase again. Below is a screenshot from Practical ECommerce:
6. Survey and Generate Feedback
After a customer completes a purchase or action, it is often a good time to survey and collect some feedback. While many businesses use this kind of survey to figure out how the experience was for the clients shopping online or making a product decision, it is also a great opportunity to get creative and get other kinds of information out of your newest customers. For example, what should you plan in the near future for marketing:
• What kind of content would they appreciate seeing?
• What products would they like you to offer?
• Would they benefit from a webinar or tutorial on the product they just purchased?
Collecting this kind of data as a small business can help you figure out what else to offer and the next steps in your marketing strategy.
The Takeaway
You should treat Thank You pages as not only necessary but as the (potentially) last interaction that someone will have on your site. You don’t want customers to have the “one and done” mentality, you want to encourage them to build loyalty with your brand and return shortly to purchase your products or services again.
The Thank You page should really be designed, specific to your business, to get secondary conversions and turn a one-time customer into a repeat customer.
Be sure to amplify gratitude while also having marketing objectives in mind. If you’re still unsure, I recommend using the new Google Analytics Demo page to see just how crucial creating a Thank You page and setting up a goal can be.
How have you used “Thank You” pages in the past? What do you think about the strategies in this article? Let us know in the comments section below, we would love to hear from you!
