I recently had a post here discussing the need for your digital ad and landing page to be in harmony with one another in order to convert, where I promised a follow-on discussion about pulling that harmony through to your thank-you page too. Well, I always keep my promises, so here we go.
You may wonder why the thank-you page needs to maintain the harmony since the landing page already converted. The visitor wouldn’t have reached the thank-you page otherwise.
The simple answer is that your thank-you page provides an excellent opportunity to create another point of engagement between you and the visitor. [tweetthis]A thank-you page is an excellent opportunity to create another point of engagement w/ the user[/tweetthis]He’s already shown sufficient interest in your original offer, you’d be remiss if you let him flounder now without showing a clear next step.
The range of potential “next-steps” is vast, depending on what type of landing page offer was made. So I’m going to focus on creating a harmonious thank-you page for a B2B landing page that made an offer of content; you can read about using a B2B PPC campaign to generate leads here and how to select the right kind of content for your B2B landing here.
As long-haul sales, B2B always requires lead nurturing, which gives a natural focus for a B2B landing page thank-you page. Rand Fishkin at Moz notes that visitors make, on average, seven and a half visits before they sign up for a free trial of Moz software. Your thank-you page is the moment to encourage that next touchpoint.
Using the Harmony Principle to Make the Right Content Offer
The original piece of content offered on the landing page was selected based on the persona targeted and where in their buyer’s journey they were. (At least it ought to have been.) You create harmony between your landing page and thank-you page offers by building off this foundation.
There are two general choices. Your thank-you page content offer can either:
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help them explore their current phase more deeply, or
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move them into the next phase
If you want to help them explore within their current phase of the buyer’s journal more deeply, offer content that refines with the original topic. Using an example from the earlier post: A visitor has converted on a landing page offering a CRM solution report titled “Why Sales Needs to Care about Marketing Automation.” An appropriate content topic to offer on that thank-you page can get more granular, say an industry benchmark report on how marketing automation reduces customer acquisition costs.
But let’s say this isn’t the visitor’s first time downloading a piece of your content, or the piece they’ve just requested is already in the far-end of that phase in the buyer’s journey. These are signs that you can gently move them into the next phase. Sticking with our example from above, the harmonious content offer may instead be a call-to-action to sign-up for a webinar on how marketing automation makes identifying qualified leads easier.
[tweetthis]A thank-you page can certainly have more than one call-to-action. #CTA[/tweetthis]
In fact, you may decide to offer both pieces of content on your thank-you page. Unlike your landing page, a thank-you page can certainly have more than one call-to-action. Indeed, making offers of content you’ve associated with different places in the buyer’s journey can help you assess where in the journey this visitor really is. But limit your multiple content offers to three – too many options and people won’t choose anything.
Getting Creative with the Content Format
I refer you again to the earlier post on effective content types for guidance on types of topics and formats to use depending on where you want to take this visitor.
However, the thank-you page following a landing page content offer doesn’t always have to be an offer to download or sign-up for another piece of content. You’ve captured their contact information during the landing page conversion, so you may decide to encourage a different type of brand interaction on the thank-you page.
For example, you might present some interactive content directly on the thank-you page. This could be a quiz, a calculator, perhaps an interactive history. Again, the exact topic will depend on where in the buyer’s journey the visitor is, but the interactive format will definitely strengthen the connection between the visitor and your company.
A second option is to make a call-to-action asking them to share the piece of the content they’ve just requested. Not the download itself, which they may or may not have yet. But create pre-fabbed tweets or posts they can use to share the content’s title and landing page link with their community. If they found the topic interesting, they may well think their community will also.
If your visitor is in or near the decision-making phase, fill your thank-you page with testimonials and a call-to-action for a free trial version or to schedule a call with a sales rep – whatever makes sense in the context of your product or services sales cycle.
Don’t Waste This Opportunity
Ignoring the post-conversion thank-you page is wasteful from a marketing and branding stand point. [tweetthis]Ignoring the post-conversion thank-you page is wasteful from a marketing and branding stand point.[/tweetthis]
Where the goal is to forge an on-going relationship with your visitors in the hopes that they become customers, why wouldn’t you provide another chance for them to engage with you?
Yet equally as important – why would you ignore someone who took the initiative to make some sort of contact with your company?
I don’t mean this strictly in the “strike while the iron is hot” sense, but in terms of building a genuine interaction between your company and the person who just agreed to consume your content and shared their contact information with you. Not saying thank-you, regardless of whatever else is on your thank-you page, is just bad manners.
Elisa Silverman is a B2B content writer with a background in law and technology, who’s spent a career helping diverse groups of people communicate well with each other.
