Use Thank You Pages to Drive Lead Nurturing

If you have been using, or researching, inbound marketing for a while, you know the importance of optimizing landing pages. After all, they are the place where visitors who fill out a form in order to access an offer become leads.

But don’t drop the ball after they click that button to “download.”

The next page your visitors-turned-leads see will set the tone for the rest of their interaction with your website and your business. What do you say when someone chooses to do business with you? (I feel like I’m talking to one of my kids: What do you say???)

Thank you.

After a visitor converts on a landing page to access an offer — whether for an ebook, a webinar, a free trial or a consultation — tell them “Thank you.”

An effective thank you page provides opportunities for your leads to access the offer they wanted, to share your offer with friends and colleagues, and to reconvert on secondary calls-to-action that move them further through the sales funnel.

Let’s look at the three components you should include in your thank you pages.

1. Access to your offer

Take care of first things first. Your visitor has taken the time to complete your form because your content or other offer is something they are interested in, so the first order of business on your thank you page is to provide access to the offer and to say “Thank you.”

Just as you have aligned the verbiage on your calls-to-action with the associated landing page, it’s also helpful to include the title of the offer clearly on the thank you page. This reassures your visitor that they have reached the right place.

Then provide the offer itself, which could be in the form of an embedded video, a link to download a PDF or information confirming a consultation or free trial.

2. Social media sharing links

Another component you should be sure to include on your thank you pages is an opportunity for your lead to share your offer with friends and colleagues. Social media sharing links provide one-click ease.

Be sure these sharing links will take new visitors back to the original landing page, not the thank you page. You can also customize the links with a message making it clear the person sharing it is recommending that others download it as well.

One advantage the social sharing links on a thank you page have over those on the original landing page is that once a lead has reached the thank you page, they have also likely accessed the offer and may be even more likely to share it.

3. Secondary calls-to-action

The third component of a thank you page is designed to urge your leads to a greater connection with your website and your company. Secondary calls-to-action can invite a lead to engage with you as a blog subscriber or social media follower, or they can lead to an offer that would bring them to the next stage of the sales funnel.

For example, a thank you page for an introductory ebook on small business taxes could then offer a 30-day free trial of a bookkeeping service. We use a secondary offer following a case study to invite leads to download an inbound marketing campaign checklist.

An extra step: Auto-response emails

While they aren’t technically part of a thank you page, auto-response emails should be another component of your response when visitors convert to leads on one of your offers, starting the process of lead nurturing.

These emails should feature the same components found on the landing page: access to the offer, links for sharing the offer, and calls-to-action for a secondary offer or other engagement with your website and social media.

Using strategies such as these, and the others outlined in How to Optimize Landing Pages for Conversions, should help you generate higher-quality leads that will be more likely to convert into customers for your business.