When someone joins your email list, what happens next?
If you’re like most marketers, you probably send them to a simple thank-you page telling them that their free report, ebook or whatever they signed up for is on its way.
And that’s perfectly fine. But your thank-you page can do more than simply say “thanks”. It can become another opportunity to introduce your new subscriber to something else that could be useful to them.
Don’t waste your thank-you page
Think about what has just happened. Someone has entered their name and email address because they were interested enough in your offer to become a subscriber. They’ve taken a small step towards becoming part of your audience, and the opt-in has worked exactly as it should.
When the thank-you page appears, that little transaction has gone well. You’ve given them what they wanted, they’ve successfully completed the opt-in, and they’re now paying attention to what comes next. It seems a shame to use that moment simply to say, “Thanks for subscribing. Check your inbox.”
Instead, you have an opportunity to put something else in front of them while you have their attention.
It could be a related product, a useful service, another free resource, or simply some additional information that helps them with the problem that brought them to your site in the first place.
I learned this from my own campaigns
I’ve used thank-you pages in my own list-building campaigns for years. Originally, I tended to think of them as little more than a necessary step between the opt-in form and the email that delivered the freebie.
Then I started experimenting with putting a relevant offer on the thank-you page.
The interesting thing is that the person visiting the page has just taken an action. They’ve already decided that they want what you’re offering, otherwise they wouldn’t have filled in the form in the first place.
That doesn’t mean they’re automatically going to buy something else, of course. But it does mean that you have an opportunity to put another useful offer in front of them at a point when they’re already paying attention to you.
And that’s really the point. You’re not trying to turn every new subscriber into a customer immediately. You’re simply making better use of a page that would otherwise be doing very little.
What could you put on a thank-you page?
There are plenty of possibilities, depending on what you’re promoting and what the visitor has just signed up for.
For example, if someone has just downloaded a free report about building an email list, you could recommend a tool that helps them create opt-in pages and manage their follow-up emails. That’s one reason I like LeadsLeap – it provides tools for building your opt-in and thank-you pages, along with its SendSteed autoresponder for managing your email follow-up.
You could also use the thank-you page to recommend a related product, invite people to watch a useful video, offer another free report, point visitors towards a relevant article, invite them to join a community, or introduce your main product or service.
The important thing is that the offer should make sense in relation to what the visitor has just done. If your free report is about building an email list, for example, recommending a useful list-building tool makes much more sense than suddenly promoting something completely unrelated.
Don’t turn it into a sales pitch
There’s also a temptation to put every possible offer on a thank-you page. I wouldn’t do that.
Remember that the person has just given you their email address because they were interested in something specific. If you immediately bombard them with unrelated offers, you’re likely to make a poor first impression.
Instead, think about what would naturally come next.
If someone has downloaded a guide to affiliate marketing, perhaps you could point them towards relevant training. If they’ve signed up for information about building an email list, a recommendation for an email marketing or funnel-building service could be a natural next step.
The closer the connection between what they’ve just asked for and what you’re offering next, the more natural the recommendation is likely to feel.
Your thank-you page is part of your funnel
This is probably the biggest lesson I’ve taken from using thank-you pages in my own campaigns. Don’t think of your opt-in page, thank-you page and email follow-up as three completely separate things. They are all parts of the same funnel, and each stage gives you another opportunity to provide something useful and move the relationship forward.
Someone sees your offer and decides to opt in. They arrive at your thank-you page, receive their freebie and then start receiving your follow-up emails. Your thank-you page sits right in the middle of that process, at a point when the visitor has already shown an interest in what you have to offer.
So don’t treat it as an afterthought. Give the page a little more attention than simply putting a “Thanks for subscribing” message on it. Think about what would be genuinely useful to someone who has just taken that particular step, and give them a logical next thing to look at.
If you’re looking for a platform that gives you the tools to put this into practice, LeadsLeap is worth checking out. It combines traffic-generation tools with a page builder and its SendSteed email marketing system, giving you the tools to create your opt-in page, thank-you page and follow-up sequence as part of the same overall marketing process.
I’ve been using LeadsLeap for many years, and it remains one of my Top 5 Programs. I’ve also put together a series of LeadsLeap training videos that show you how the different parts of the platform work. If you’d like to take a closer look before deciding whether it’s right for you, watch the LeadsLeap training videos here.
David Hurley
#InspiredFocus
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