Companies tend to focus energy on getting people to their shopping carts and converting them to purchase. With a huge emphasis on the initial purchase, it’s easy to overlook the thank-you page. But if this page is optimized, it can be one of your best points for conversion because the customer is already in a positive frame of mind, they have a level of trust with your company and they have their credit card in hand. So let’s take a look at how you can quickly optimize your thank-you pages.

Ways to optimize

Thank-you page optimization can be broken down into two areas. The first area has an immediate impact on sales. It includes cross-selling complimentary products and upselling additional features, services and enhancements. The second area has an impact on future sales. It focuses on building long-term relationships through communication tools like email opt-in lists and social sharing.  

Which one should you use? Well, you should be using both because although having immediate sales is nice, building long term customer relationships (especially in the digital subscription space) is critical to the success of your company. Here’s a breakdown of each and how it can be applied to your pages.

Cross selling and upselling

Cross selling is a technique that brings attention to products or services that compliment the product that the customer intends to buy or has already purchased. These offers are often displayed on product pages and during the cart process, but you can also add offers on your thank-you pages.

Upselling is different because it focuses on selling additional features, services, or enhancements to the product you just sold. The trick to upselling is to highlight the value of what you are upselling to the customer.

The success of both of these tactics lies in the execution and testing. Firstly, make sure that what you offer adds value to the original purchase. Secondly, decide how many products to offer on your page. Some thank-you pages offer many products to choose from, while others only offer just a few, so test your pages to find out what product combinations work best.

Email opt-ins

Email is a great way to stay connected with your customers and build long-term relationships. It covers everything from newsletters and product updates to surveys. The catch with emails is that customer must opt-in to receive them. So how do you build an opt-in email list? One way is to sign up customers right from the thank-you page. Just create a sign-up form that asks for information that is absolutely required — usually name and email. Then add the form to your thank-you page in a couple of locations like in the header, in the right hand side bar or at the bottom.

As a side note, you’ll increase the number of opt-ins if you clearly state the value of being connected with your company and the types of information the customer will receive. Then follow through on your claims by delivering emails with great non-promotional content.

Social media follows and shares

A great way to boost your marketing reach is a call-to-action on your thank-you page asking customers to subscribe to your blog or follow you in social media. Having a social media presence is a great way to compliment your email campaigns because it something else that will help your customers stay in touch with you, while increasing your marketing reach.

Another way to leverage social media on your thank-you pages for is to ask your customers to share the offer with friends. Place an easy to share link that leads others back to the landing page for the offer — that will help your offer spread even further.

Start with one change

As with any changes to your website, it’s important to have specific conversion goals in mind before you being making changes. Are you looking to cross sell a specific product? Would you like to increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter? Are you hoping to increase the number of followers on your LinkedIn profile? Whatever your goals, take the time to document them and then build a testing plan. When you work from a testing plan, you’ll find that optimizing your thank-you pages will be much easier.

I hope you found this information helpful, if you have other ideas on how to optimize thank-you pages for conversions please comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.