Use Thank You Pages to Convert More Visitors

Conversion rate optimization is at the core of any website. You want your web visitors to convert, to complete a business goal, whether that’s to make a purchase, complete a web-form or find a contact number. There is a science behind it,which ranges from customer feedback, AB testing and analyzing webpage behavior. But not all improvements are based on scientific research – Some improvements are just about being that little bit smarter.

Whether you are business-to-business, eCommerce or non-profit, you will have a thank you page on your website. Thank you pages are prime real estate for up-selling and cross-selling and keeping your web visitor in the frame of mind of taking action and completing your business goals.

Improvements made to the thank you page

Up until recently, SuperOffice had simple thank you pages asking the visitor to wait until they were contacted. A simple thank you page is better than no page at all, as it serves its purpose of informing the reader of what happens next, but it’s a great opportunity to ask for more.

Converting thank you page 1

SuperOffice had more than 5 thank you pages that were available to be updated. The simple solution was to include links to CRM guides and white papers and suggest further reading.

Converting thank you page 2

An immediate impact on goals completed and conversions

The timing of this change could not have been worse as July is a slow traffic/ conversion month. Based on yearly trends dating back since 2010, traffic starts declining in March all the way through to the end of July. Since 2010, July has been the lowest traffic month of the year.

However, even due to seasonal trends, the results have been immediate. We can see that the number of goals completed have increased by 105% and conversion rate has increased by 90%.

Use thank you pages to convert visitors

By diving deeper into the data, we can see that we have almost half as many goals completed in the first 10 days of July compared to the entire month of June. And if we compare the first 10 days in June to the first 10 days in July, traffic in July is down only 1.4% but goal completions have increased by 17% (and conversion rate has increased by 19%).

The new thank you pages have been live on www.superoffice.com for 2 weeks and will now be rolled out globally. The next steps are to improve the conformation emails, auto-responder emails and ‘thank you’ pages for when a visitor has downloaded a white paper or product sheet.

How do you use for thank you page? Do you use it to cross-sell? Let me know below.

If you enjoyed this post, you should read:

Case study: Increased Email Marketing Activity Drives Online Sales Up 58%

Did you know that more than 294 billion emails are sent daily?

How many unread emails did you wake up to this morning?

Email marketing is big business. In 2011, email marketing brought in an average of $40 for every $1 spent and this year, US retailers are expected to send more than 258 billion emails.

The ROI of Email Marketing

Well, a recent survey held by MarketingSherpa asked participants to estimate the return on investment (ROI) from their email marketing campaigns. The response was incredible, with marketers claiming an average ROI of 119%.

Email marketing ROI MarketingSherpa

Schoffa, one of Finland’s fastest growing retailers for men and women’s dress shirts have seen their online sales rapidly increase since implementing a more frequent email marketing strategy.

Email marketing is a channel all marketers use, yet as much as 97% of businesses get it wrong. It’s common for brands to send one email to their entire subscriber list with a link to their home page and then expect sales to flood in. This is not the best approach to take and ultimately leads to a failed sales channel.

Email marketing is the most preferred channel

In April 2012, I wrote a blog post titled “Is email marketing still relevant in a world full of social networks?”. Due to increased social media marketing spend and an increase in the number of Facebook success stories, I came to the conclusion that email marketing was on its way out of the online marketing matrix.

I was wrong. In fact, a few months later, research came out that email was the most preferred method of marketing communication with more than 77% of consumers choosing email marketing as the preferred method of contact from a brand. The second most preferred method was direct mail with only 9%.

Email martketing mopst preferred communication channel

Lessons learned from the top 10 converting websites

One of the most insightful white papers I have ever ready is the Top 10 Converting Websites report from SeeWhy. The report explains why the top converting websites in the world are able to reach conversion rates of more than 35-40%! This is compared to the average conversion rate for an e-commerce site being 1-2%.

The reasons why sites could convert more visitors into customers include:-

  • Provide excellent customer service
  • Offer a wide range of products
  • Focus on customer lifetime value
  • Email marketing & Remarketing

By implementing the same strategy as Amazon, Office Depot and Pro Flowers (capturing the email address!), Schoffa was able to use email in a more strategic approach, which helped sales increase by more than 50%!

In the last 6 months of 2012, Schoffa sent 8 emails to their subscribers. During the first three months of 2013, Schoffa has sent out 14 emails. Your first response will be, how well are these emails performing?

The results of a sample of newsletters sent in in Q1 can be seen in the following table:

Email marketing statistics Schoffa

The statistics remain pretty consistent even though the frequencies has increased the subscriber base has grown.

What have we done differently?

  • We now send out one email per week
  • We send out the email on the same day and time each week
  • The emails are more text based than image based
  • The emails include a greeting and sign-off from the CEO
  • The sender name is the CEO’s name
  • The emails include multiple links to relevant sections on the website

The impact of frequent and personalized email marketing

The first quarter of the year has been exciting. Although the increased email marketing efforts were expected to produce great results, the overall performance has been beyond expectations. The results are as follows (compared to Q1 2012):

  • Subscribers list has increased 31%
  • Web traffic has increased 32%
  • Online sales have increased 58%
  • Average order value has increased by 245%

Capturing the email address of a web visitor is one of the first things you should focus on for your website. Once you have an email address, you can target more personalized offers to your reader, which results in higher customer satisfaction levels and increased profits. The days of ‘one-size-fits-all’ are long behind us and when implemented successfully, email marketing is quick, easy and highly effective!

How often do you send emails to customers? Do you think one email per week is too much?
Feel free to comment below.

If you enjoyed reading this post, you might also like:

Organic Keyword Conversion Tracking in Google Analytics

Tracking revenue generated from each organic keyword is a common report ran by SEO’s for e-commerce stores. Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking is a powerful report that makes budget allocation a lot easier as you can see which channels generate revenue.

Lead generation websites are different.

There is no on-site sale, no e-commerce tracking so therefore SEO’s need to be able to report the number of leads generated from their search efforts. The basic report in Google Analytics allows you to track conversion rate for any given keyword, but SEO’s also need to see which keyword generates the most leads by number, not a percentage.

The following explains how to set-up a custom Organic Keyword Conversion Tracking Report that provides data on visits, organic searches, goal completions and goal conversion rate.

1. Goal Tracking In Google Analytics

Before creating this report, it is important to have goal tracking implemented. Without website goals, your analytics loses purpose. Whether your websites goals are sales, to capture leads or download a PDF product sheet, the goals of your website should reflect your overall business goals. Setting up goals will show you exactly how many goals were achieved but also how they were achieved and through which channels.

To create a filter, you can visit Admin > Account List > Analytics profile > Goals

Google analytics goals

The most common goal is URL destination. For example, if you want to track the number of newsletter sign-ups on your website, once the newsletter form is submitted, the “thank you” page URL is usually www.domain.com/thank-you. In this case, you would enter /thank-you and click save.

2. Setting Up The Keyword Conversion Tracking Report

To create the Organic Keyword Conversion report, you will need to visit Traffic Sources > Search > Organic and click Customize:

customize

To create the report, you will need to add metrics to Report Content. The metrics you need to add are:

  • Visits
  • Goal Completions
  • Goal Conversion Rate
  • Organic Searches

Note: If you do not add ‘organic searches’, the report will include keywords from your paid search campaigns.

You will then need to add ‘keywords’ to the Dimension Drilldowns section (you can ignore ‘filters’).

Custom report

You can now apply the Organic Keyword Conversion Tracking report to all profiles within your Google Analytics account and then click save.

3. Getting The Keyword Conversion Tracking Report Data

Once the report has been saved, the data will be presented.

Keyword tracking data

The report will show keywords based on visits to the website. You can filter by goal completions and to view all keywords that convert, change rows from ‘10’ to ‘100’ found at the bottom of the page.  As per usual, the report will automatically show data for the last 30 days.

Goal filtering

4. Exporting The Keyword Conversion Tracking Report Into Excel

Once you have the data, you can then export the Keyword Conversion Tracking Report to Excel and filter the report by branded and non-branded converting keywords. You can also use this data to find any increases in organic leads and view the progress of your SEO efforts.

The Keyword Conversion Tracking Report is a simple yet powerful report you can create to showcase your SEO investment is paying off.

Bonus: Convert more organic visitors

I want to help you increase your website conversion rates, so I’ve developed a keyword strategy that you can use to grow organic sales.

  • First: I’ve created a secret keyword strategy that will send your organic conversions through the roof
  • Second: This strategy is yours to download as a PDF (or for you to save it and print it out)
  • Third: I’m giving my strategy away, for free.

Does this sound good?

 

2013 advice from 7 world leading online marketing authorities

What will you focus on in 2013? We asked 7 online marketing authorities for their best tips. Here’s what they said.

 Brad-Geddes-1 Brad Geddes | CertifiedKnowledge.org

This has probably been overstated, but I find that most companies are still not treating mobile properly. You should have a mobile site, dedicated mobile advertising, and track conversions and phone calls separately for mobile than for desktops. In just 2012, smart phone adoption increased 55% in the US; and that adoption trend is seen globally. If you don’t have a mobile friendly strategy, you will be left behind by your competition in 2013.

 rand-fishkin-1 Rand Fishkin | SEOmoz

Understand your audience before you market to them. You need to feel empathy where they feel pain, feel a desire to help where they have a thirst for knowledge, feel intellectual curiosity when you visit the sources they read – in short, you need to be in their shoes. This won’t just help you create specific marketing campaigns; it will tell you where to market, what to say, how to say it, and even find that perfect product/market fit.

 Bryan-Eisenberg Bryan Eisenberg | Best Selling Author

Success in 2013 will be all about improving your corporate metabolism and your marketing agility. Look for every opportunity (and the tools) to increase the speed to get things done in as close to real-time as possible.

 Neil-Patel Neil Patel | CrazyEgg & KISSmetrics

Write really good content. Don’t focus on building links, or getting press or trying to game search engines. Instead focus all of your seo efforts on content marketing as that will produce a higher ROI in the long run then link building.

 Ben-Jesson-Karl-Blanks Ben Jesson & Dr Karl Blanks | Conversion Rate Experts

Even if you end up outsourcing conversion, it’s becoming increasingly important that you know the basics yourself. It’s astonishing how many marketers still don’t understand the fundamental concepts, like those we describe in our Split-testing 101 article.

 Stephen-Pavlovich Stephen Pavlovich | Conversion Factory

As conversion optimization becomes more and more competitive, we need to find new ways to out-convert the competition. At the moment, companies that have an effective strategy across desktop, mobile and social are leading the way – and they’re building a massive advantage over other companies who are just focused on desktop conversions.

 Linda-Bustos Linda Bustos | Get Elastic

My top marketing tip for 2013 is to invest in working out attribution. Just over 1/2 of marketers (according to research by Adobe) use any form of attribution, and most of them use last-click. Though it’s challenging to work out the IT issues and to determine which approach to use, the result will be a better understanding of channel contribution to the bottom line (including offline, mobile and social touch-points), which will lead to better marketing decisions.

What is your best marketing tip for 2013? Feel free to comment below.

Getting started with email remarketing campaigns

7 out of every 10 customers abandon their online purchases, resulting in over 300 billion dollars of lost E-Commerce sales each year. The top 5 reasons for abandoning are split between price and timing. If a visitor leaves the shopping cart and does not return within the first hour, the probability of them returning to complete the sale is reduced by 90%.

Tribes - Abandoned cart reasons

With 90% unlikely to purchase from your site within the first 60 minutes of leaving, this means you have a very small window of opportunity to make an impact. Executing an effective remarketing campaign is difficult and why only 26% of e-commerce sites remarket.

Tribes - Only 26 percent brands remarket

Remarketing to web visitors that abandon your shopping cart is at the top of US marketers activity list, according to E-Consultancy, One of the main reasons for this is a recent report from Forrester Research that found that remarketing emails can generate nearly 4 times more revenue and 18 times greater net profits compared with marketing using simply non-ntargeted mailings.

Shoppers that abandon your website are visitors that almost purchased from you. It’s no surprise that real time, personalized emails within the first hour at highly effective. The more personal and relevant the email campaign is, the more likely the shopper will convert.

Many shopping cart recovery emails under perform because they look either like generic promotional emails or automated messages. Based on research from SeeWhy and E-Consultancy, there is a formula to getting the best out of your remarketing campaigns. Here are five tips for effective email remarketing:

1. Send your email remarketing campaigns within the first hour of abandonment in order to keep your brand at the forefront of the customers mind. Remember, they almost bought from you.

2. Personalize and tailor each remarketing campaign to the abandoned shopperr. Address them by name and offer your support in helping the visitor purchase your product or service. They may have left due to a technical error and are in need of assistance.

3. Tell your customer when his/ her shopping cart will expire. Make it clear that you will save the product/ service and you are happy to keep it until X(eg. 30) days before you put it back on sale on the site.

4. Show which item is in the shopping cart to remind the abandoned shopper what they almost purchased. Provide a clear image of the product and support it with guest reviews within the email.

5. Make your call to action prominent and link directly to the saved shopping cart. You want your abandoned shopper to see where to click within the email and that they arrive at the shopping cart checkout page. Do not send your shopper to your home page. Make it as easy as possible.

As online marketers look to find new ways to generate traffic and sales, get ahead of your competition and implement remarketing. For best in class campaigns, each email sent will probably be your most profitable campaign, generating up to 100 times the return that you would expect from a regular email campaign.

How you seen a significant increase in conversion rate since implementing email remarketing? Please share your comments below.