Thank you pages should be a vital part of your website and marketing funnels. They’re an integral part of your automation process and should be one of the most visited pages on your website.
Thank you pages allow you to do three things.
- Lower the number of spam and fake email addresses being used in your list
- Generate sales and revenue on automation
- Increase clarity and visibility of optin metrics
We use a thank you page after someone signs up to a lead magnet. When a new subscriber signs up and enters their details into an optin form, we redirect them to a thank you page.
Most businesses will redirect their new subscriber straight to the lead magnet content. But we’re not going to do that.
First, as we mentioned above, we’re going to tell all new subscribers that their lead magnet is going to be sent to their email address. That means they’ll have to use a real email address to access their new content. Meaning they can’t put a fake one in and get the download.
Second, the thank you page allows us to up-sell a splinter product or tripwire to a new subscriber. We’ll go into that below.
Finally, we can use the thank you page as a goal in Google analytics or any other analytics package and measure our most popular blog content.
We’re going to use a real thank you page from Sell Your Service as a case study and look at the features of the page. Why it gets up to 50% conversion rates and what you can copy for yours and your customer’s thank you pages.
How’s this for skeletons out of the closet?
Remove menus and links
We don’t use a menu in the header to increase the time spent on this page
First, we like to remove all distractions. Similar to a landing page or squeeze page. We want to remove as many distractions as we can from the viewer as possible.
Use a template or design that removes the header and menus from the top of the page. We use Beaver Builder which comes with a “no header/footer” template built in.
However, we don’t want to lock people to a page. I’m more than happy to place a menu at the bottom of the page or have some blog links in there too. We’re supposed to be removing links as a distraction, rather than forcing people to stay.
On this particular page we’ve also left off the footer menu. We’re experimenting with this particular page.
Call to action
This is key to a thank you page, the call to action or CTA.
I put the CTA as high as possible on the page
The CTA is what makes the thank you page worth having. What is the most important thing that someone could do after signing up?
Ideally, we’ll have a tripwire or splinter product ready to go, and that’s what we want them to do. Buy our product.
You need to have a priority when designing and building your thank you page. A priority CAN’T be two things. By definition, you need to have a most important. To me, getting someone to buy my splinter product is important.
Before we build the rest of a thank you page, I’ll write up the sales copy and decide what the CTA is. Is it a buy button or add to cart?
Usually, the easiest thing is just a PayPal button to a product. We use PaidMembershipsPro to manage all our eCommerce payments and purchases.
We also have a CTA section at the end of the page for those who scroll down
Acknowledge previous action
When someone signs up to an optin or subscribe form, there is a small risk associated with signing up. People are worried that you’ll spam them or they’ll never get their download.
In order to reassure them that they’ve made the right decision, we’re going to acknowledge their previous action.
It’s a brief message, but thank you’s come after an action and we want to acknowledge that
First, we remind them of the action they’ve just taken. Telling them that they’ve signed up to our download.
We also need to SAY thank you! It goes a long way and further reinforces that we know they’ve done something for us.
On this page we not only kept the header, but the thank you was much larger
We also might expand on the reason they’re seeing this page. Like above, we mention that they’ve signed up to our 21 Product Guide and it’s on it’s way to their inbox.
Next steps
Next steps mean what they need to do next. Now in some cases, the next step is to check their spam folder and access the lead magnet content.
Feel free to swipe the copy we use for the thank you pages
For example above, we lay out the 4 steps to accessing and finding their lead magnet. How they can add us as a safe sender and where they can get their download.
But for our thank you page, we want the next steps to be “watch this training video/sales letter”.
The next steps need to be another compelling headline making the reader want to stay
On our thank you page, we offer free training on how we generated $100 000 in 30 days with 27 emails. I want people to watch this video and see exactly how what we did.
Sales copy
Then we’ll use sales copy, that I’d written earlier, and use that in the page.
Ideally, you’ll have a video sales letter (more on that below), but we have seen long form sales letters and sale copy work just as well.
We use a very simple formula for our short sales letter copy.
Make a promise our outline – in this case it’s “I’m going to show you how I generated $100K…”
Then explain the problem we’re solving. Our customer wasn’t emailing his list and it was costing him money. He wasn’t emailing because he had no automation.
Finally, I make 3 guarantees or promises. Refunds, what they get, the deliverables and what they’ll be able to do.
Plain English. Just telling them what they’ll get.
-or-
Video sales letter
Personally, I love video sales letters or VSLs. They’re easy to produce, fun and I tend to make them into training rather than just an advert.
Use the same copy and produce slides that show the same text.
Doesn’t need to be fancy – just needs to be visible
Live presentations that use the same walls of text, suck. However, research has shown (and our own data) that text broken down in to basic line with a voice over has a very high view rate.
Notice that we have the buy now button underneath too.
Other worthy mentions
You don’t have to do these but we’re experimenting at the moment with what works.
Testimonials
Live testimonials, quotes and screenshots have been proven to work for our pages too. Just place them somewhere people can see them.
Comments
On some of our pages, we encourage people to use comments too. Don’t get disheartened if no one uses them though.
Analytics
Finally, set up analytics with a goal inside Google analytics to see where people are converting from. You’ll then see what your highest converting post is.
A thank you page is a mixture of acknowledging a previous action and telling them what’s next. It’s a wonderful example of automation done right.
The trick is to make sure that you publish SOMETHING as a thank you page, rather than leave it.
DON’T use the optin message “we received your email, we’ll get in touch shortly!”. It’s such a wasted opportunity. And don’t redirect people to the content, for your own sake.
Are thank you pages a part of your automation? Have you set them up for customers? Make sure you sign up below to see a live example of the same thank you page you’ve seen above AND get 5 pre-wrriten sales emails.
