How to create the perfect thank you page

We know that our web pages have to work pretty hard so we spend hours writing, tweaking and generally making them as close to perfect as can be. But when it comes to the old thank you page, we all tend to get a bit lazy. We dash off a quick ‘Thanks for downloading the free guide’, or ‘Thanks for your order, this is your confirmation’ and call it job done. 

But I reckon you could be missing a trick if that’s as far as you go with your thank you page because these little pages actually have a tonne of potential. Let me show you what I mean… 

What is a thank you page?

Whether you know it as a thank you page or as a confirmation page, I’m talking about the place your leads end up after they’ve taken some sort of action on your website. Maybe they’ve ordered something from you, downloaded a free guide, made a booking or signed up to your email list — whatever it is they’ve done, you should be redirecting them to a thank you/confirmation page.

Now, of course it’s important to thank people for investing in your business in some way and your thank you page is a great way to show your appreciation. But that’s just one of its tasks — I reckon if it’s really doing its job, it should be doing these three things too…

Confirming the transaction

Your thank you page is the ideal opportunity to reassure people that they’ve taken the right action. You’d be surprised at how many people go online and make spur-of-the-moment purchases or download things almost on auto-pilot. Or they’ll give you their name and email address and hit submit without really paying attention to what they’re doing. Then they’ll be hit with a hefty dose of buyer’s remorse or forget that they’ve even signed up.

So the thank you page and the confirmation page is the best place to make it clear to them that they have just signed up for whatever it is you’re offering. You can also use this space to reiterate the reasons that signing up/buying your stuff/downloading the thing was the right decision. When you confirm the transaction in this way, they’re far more likely to go off and actually consume the content or use the product they’ve just purchased. Which is a win for them and a win for you too. 

Measuring conversions

Your confirmation page should also be measuring your conversions. If, for example, you're running Facebook ads and want to drive people to a landing page where they’ll be invited to download a free guide, you want to be able to track how many people go from landing page to thank you page — because that’s the only way you’ll know whether your landing page is actually working for you. And all you have to do is add the Facebook pixel to the thank you page to track how many people are taking that action and to see how much you’re spending to get them to do so.

So, say you get 100 people onto your landing page and then 50 people visit the thank you page, you can see that your landing page has a 50% conversion. Now if you're running Facebook ads and you see that you've spend ￡50 to get 100 people onto the landing page and that ￡50 got you 50 conversions then you know that it's costing you one pound per conversion. Your thank you page actually shows you whether you’re meeting your goals.

 (If you’re not sure how to get those Facebook pixels working for you, check out this video.)

Making the next offer

Yes, someone has just taken you up on your offer, but that doesn’t mean that you’re done here!

Your thank you page is actually a fantastic place to make your next offer.

Think about it: when someone has downloaded your free guide, purchased your product, taken that specific action on your website or your landing page and they come to your thank you page, they’ve already shown intent. They’ve proven that they’re interested in what you’re doing. So you want to use that thank you page as a place to say, ‘Hey look, you've just taken this action, if you're interested in taking the next action you can do that by doing this,’ and give them the option to do it.

A simple example of this is what I do myself. I have my free Facebook ads blueprint that people can download. When they come to the thank you page it says, ‘Hey thanks, the blueprint is on its way — it’ll be in your inbox in ten minutes. However, you can watch this free training video right now if you'd like to learn more about how we run Facebook ads and if you'd like to learn even more you can sign up for a free trial to my funnel academy program just now.’

So I'm giving people the option to go deeper into my funnel by making them the next offer as soon as they've taken that first action. At this point they’re already primed and much more likely to take that next step with you there and then. You’ve already got their attention — not an easy task in the online world! — so make the most of it. It’s beneficial for you because you make more money per lead but it’s also really great for your customers because they can get the products or services they need faster and have an all-round better online experience too. So always, always, always use your thank you page to make the next offer.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to build thank you pages, landing pages, and run ads to your landing page and funnel profitably, you should check out my funnel academy program. It's an online membership where I coach and help people build profitable marketing funnels online and I'd love to have you in there. You can get access to that here.