Thank you page tips for effective B2B lead nurturing

A visitor to your company’s website has just downloaded one of your content offers; they have entered their details in a form on the relevant landing page and are now a lead.

That’s great news - but there’s no time to kick back and relax. This action marks the start of the conversion process - and creates a window of opportunity that we, as B2B marketers, should seize with both hands.

Typically, the new lead will now be directed to a thank you page - and the efficacy of this page can be the difference between whether a person decides to begin to consider you as an answer to their business challenge or not. 

That means it’s worth spending time fully optimising our thank you pages, to ensure that potential future customers - whose pain we could successfully relieve - don’t slip through our hands. 

Thank you page tips 

Writing on Unbounce, Karon Thackston says: "Thank you pages are much more than pieces of virtual real estate on which to display gratitude and order numbers. These pages are an integral part of an optimized conversion system that, when used properly, can continue to boost your revenue."

A thank you page should do a number of key things:

• Deliver the promised content offer
• Return the site navigation
• Encourage social sharing
• Provide another valuable content offer 
• Express genuine gratitude 

Each of these stages enables effective B2B lead nurturing - making it more likely that the individual or company will want to foster a business relationship with our brand. 

1. Delivering the offer

By providing their details, visitors to our site have given us a valuable resource – so they deserve not to be short changed. A good tactic is to include the offer title in the thank-you page, to reassure the reader they have in fact landed in the right spot. Then, we can prominently provide the means to download or view the content. 

More importantly, we should ensure that the content is valuable. You can gather hundreds of leads with the promise of a well-researched and informative eBook, for example - but if that material instead turns out to be thin and inaccurate, those people will soon drop out of the buying cycle.

2. Returning the navigation

One of the basic rules of landing pages is that they should contain no navigation, in order to keep visitors focused on accessing the content offer. But once a visitor has given us their details, we ideally want them to peruse our website further and find out more about how our product or service can help them.  

Returning the navigation to thank you pages means people are more likely to read our blog, view an educational video or delve deeper into the ins and outs of our business.

3. Social media sharing

It’s a great idea to include social sharing buttons on our thank you pages. If someone has already taken the step to download your content, they may also be inclined to tell their colleagues and friends about it too. 

So why not make it easy for a new lead to tweet, share on Facebook, or email the piece of content to others in their network (just make sure it's the original landing page that is shared, rather than the thank you page). Even if others aren't interested in the specific topic being addressed, there may be another aspect of your business that piques their interest. 

4. Calls to action

If a site visitor downloads our content, this indicates that they potentially have a business challenge they are looking to solve and that they might be interested in other content we have created on the topic. You can facilitate this by placing another call to action button on your thank you page.

The new call-to-action should be based on the type of content and offer the user responded to. In this way, you are constantly providing more and more relevant, useful content to strengthen their connection to your business – and take them further along the buyer’s journey.

5. Emphasising the "thank you"

In between delivering our content offer and trying to keep up the momentum with our newly-acquired leads, it can be easy to forget that the fundamental purpose of a thank you page is to say, well, thanks.

Writing on HubSpot, Billy MacDonald says: "Saying 'thank you' just isn’t enough. Explain why you’re so grateful that they found your offer and took action. Even though they’re not a customer yet you can begin treating them like one. There’s nothing like a great first impression."

You can make your new leads feel really valued by demonstrating sincere appreciation that they have made a connection with you – giving them a taster of what they can expect if they eventually choose to do business with your company.

Thank you pages provide a major opportunity to build on the foundations of procuring new leads. Optimising these pages effectively can be a key step in converting these leads into customers - bringing a tangible ROI for your business.  

It looks like it's still worth minding our Ps and Qs in the digital age.