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What are thank-you pages? Do you need them? How useful are they? What’s the best practice? These are all questions we get asked on a regular basis, and we’re here to answer them.
What are Thank-You Pages?
When a website visitor fills out a form on your site, you have two options: to display an in-line thank-you message or redirect them to another page. Our best practice is to redirect to a dedicated thank-you page, where the user can access the content and continue their journey.
Thank-you pages are recommended for two primary reasons: improved user journey and better analytics.
Improved User Journey
Creating a good user journey on your site is all about understanding how the user will get from point A to point B. In this case, point A is your landing page. Point B is wherever you want them to end up, for example a services page or a contact page. Map out your ideal customer journey from the landing page to the desired outcome, identifying all possible next steps that could get them to where you want them.
Because landing pages should have only one call to action (to fill out the form), an inline message turns them into a dead end. There’s nowhere else to go, and the user journey ends there. However, creating a thank-you page allows you to continue the journey by offering relevant calls to action and pieces of content on the page without distracting from the download.
By doing this, you are giving your website visitors the opportunity to spend more time on your website and further download related pieces of content. If you’re using progressive forms, this allows you to acquire more and more information about them, and it gives you insight into what topics they’re highly motivated by. This can help shorten the sales cycle, generating more revenue more quickly for your business.
This also helps to build brand equity with the users. If you are able to provide answers to all of your users’ questions through additional resources as displayed on the thank-you page, this will create a relationship where the user views you as a solutions partner and someone who cares about helping them solve their biggest business problems. The more trust there is between the user and your brand, the more you’re going to encourage exploration and the more receptive they’ll be when you reach out in a marketing or sales capacity in the future.
Better Analytics
The other reason why thank-you pages are so important is better analytics. Sure, you could track submissions of your form in order to determine landing page performance, but you miss out on a lot of other analytics opportunities.
First of all, thank-you page visits can be used for retargeting-based purposes. Targeting based on web visits is often easier than list-based targeting, and audience size is less of an issue. Secondly, you allow for more of a journey on the website, allowing you to better track strings of conversions and user journeys in order to optimise.
So start incorporating thank-you pages in all future campaigns to improve user journeys and enable better analytics. For more information on what you should be including in your campaigns and why, click here to download our Ultimate Campaign Checklist.
