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The Thank-You Page Should Say More Than Thank You

Feb 26, 2007 11:18 AM, By Anne Holland

Last Thursday I met with our new senior reporter, Sean Donahue, who covers the b-to-b marketing beat for us. He wanted to know best practices for getting more people to sign up for Webinars.

I said, "Don't forget the thank-you page. When a prospect signs up for a Webinar -- or a white paper or a newsletter for that matter -- be sure to include more hotlinks or offers on the thank-you page they see right after submitting their registration. Prospects are in the perfect mood right then to learn more about you, so they may click on links for white papers or other offers. Why not deepen the relationship right then?"

He said, bless his newly Sherpa-ized heart, "Got any data on what percent will click for another offer?"

Naturally, I did. The number was 40% ... but it was from 2001. It was time to get some new benchmarks. To get a quick read, I looked into our own inhouse numbers.

When folks sign up for an e-mail newsletter on MarketingSherpa's Website, the thank-you page features opt-in offers for additional newsletter titles.

When I checked the data last week, I saw that 39% of all visitors to that thank-you page had taken advantage of another offer. I was surprised to see how little has changed since 2001 (you can't say that about most things on the Internet.)

Another interesting fact: The most popular offer on that page gets a 29% acceptance rate, which is fabulous, but not the whole 39%. That means giving folks a choice on that page has helped our overall offer conversions increase by 10 percentage points.

(This is not true of all promotions online or in postal direct mail. Most often, single focus gives better results.)

My final takeaway: If you have any thank-you pages out there that say only, "Thank you," you are wasting very valuable real estate.

Why slam a blank wall in people's faces just when they've begun to respond to you? Keep that response curve coming.

And let me know if you have any data of your own on this front. I'm definitely interested.

Anne Holland is president of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing buyer's guides and benchmark data for its 237,000 marketing executive subscribers. For free trial access to the firm's library of almost 750 case studies, go to:
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/membertour.html?8966