The Art of the “Thank You” Page

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Websites are like people, there are billions of different people and websites, but you are able to group them together by similarities. Some people are great at networking (lead generation), others are great at sales (e-commerce), some people just like to help and educate others (content sites), and…well, you get the picture. And despite people (and websites) being different, they all have one thing in common: they all have goals. Their goals aren’t necessarily the same, but they do have them. Maybe a website is hoping for more newsletter signups, or maybe your goal is to get people to subscribe to your blog. Regardless, every website has some sort of conversion point.

Most of these websites also have another thing in common: their “Thank You” pages suck. Most of the time this is a direct result of them not having one in general. Let me give you an example that I recently experienced myself.

I was reading one of my favorite blogs, the Bruce Clay blog, and decided that I should listen to The Lisa, and subscribe to the Bruce Clay newsletter. After all, they are one of my favorite blogs for a reason: they present strong educational content with an entertaining and engaging writing style. So I moseyed on over to their newsletter signup page, and entered my email address. This is a great place to pause to point out the wonderful sign-up form for their newsletter:

Do you see how wonderful that is? All you have to do to sign up is give them your e-mail address. They don’t need my name, address, company name and any of that other crap that has nothing to do with me receiving their newsletter. Don’t you just love it when a form only has one field? It is almost like Christmas morning…well, not quite, but it is really nice.

Back to our story. I input my email address and clicked submit. A page came up saying that it was processing my information and then…nothing. All I saw was this:

So I sat here wondering, “Did I actually sign up or was there an error? It says ‘done’ so I guess that is a good thing, right?” I was so confused as to whether or not I successfully signed up that I didn’t bother trying it again (well I did, just to see if I could duplicate my results).

So where did Bruce Clay go wrong? They don’t have a “Thank You” page letting me know that I had correctly signed up for their newsletter, and that I would be receiving it shortly. In my opinion, a “Thank You” page is equally as important as customizing your 404 page (for conversion reasons).

What should their Thank You page say? It depends on what you are selling, but in the case of the Bruce Clay Newsletter, I would recommend saying something like this:

Thanks for signing up! Now you don’t have to worry about falling behind on the latest SEO news, tools, and techniques. You should expect to receive your first newsletter on (insert date here).

You may also be interested in the topics we featured in our last newsletter:

[insert old newsletter topics here]

Thanks for signing up!

I’m sure their awesome writing team could easily come up with something better than that, but it tells me two things that I really care about: 1) that I successfully signed up; and 2) when I should expect to receive the next newsletter.

No matter what your “Thank You” page is for, you should make sure it is more than a generic page. Future conversions may suffer because of it!

Tagged as: conversion