I’m going to come right out and say it: Thank you page optimization is the most slept-on opportunity in eCommerce right now.
If you’re like most merchants you spend hours tweaking your ads, offers, product pages, and everything else for a small boost in revenue.
But your thank you page? Well, most likely you’re just using whatever stock thank you page came with your eCommerce platform.
Now, you have to ask why that is.
Especially when you consider that giant players like Amazon and eBay are leveraging their thank-you pages to generate more conversions and get more sales on auto-pilot.
In this post, I’ll break down Amazon’s thank you page and show you the tactics they use to make more money. But before that, let’s dive into why optimizing your thank you page matters in the first place.
Why Thank You Page Optimization Matters
As a merchant, you’ve got a million and one thing on your plate. So, if you’re going to invest time and energy into something, you probably want to know why.
So here are four big reasons to transform your Shopify thank you page from a simple placeholder, into a revenue-generating machine.
Massive Conversion Potential
According to researcher Rober Cialdini, the psychological principle of consistency states that customers who’ve converted once are much more likely to do it again.
Seriously, this principle is why fundraisers on the street will ask you a question like ‘But you do agree that clean water is a human right, yes?’.
Because they know that once you say ‘yes you’ve essentially converted - and they can continue to get you saying yes until you sign up as a donor.
In a similar way on your thank you page, customers who’ve just bought from you are much more likely to agree to your future requests.
This could be an upsell offer, a survey request, a request for a review, or any other post-purchase conversion.
The point is that folks who’ve landed on your thank you page are primed to comply with whatever conversion goal you want to achieve.
So stop giving your eCommerce homepage and your product pages all the glory - realize the potential of your thank you page and get it up to speed too!
100% Of Customer’s See It
Your thank you page is also an incredibly valuable piece of digital real estate. When you think about it, it’s essentially a post-purchase landing page.
If you were designing and merchandising a landing page for a front-end campaign, you’d almost certainly spend time making sure it was optimized for conversions, right?
This is why I find it baffling that so many merchants are okay to just use the standard thank you page template provided by their platform of choice.
Plus, unlike post-purchase emails where you may struggle to get decent open rates, your thank you page gets seen by literally everyone who buys from you. In fact, it actually gets seen an average of 2.2 times by each shopper as they return for shipping updates.
With a 100% ‘open rate’ you’ll pick up a boatload of impressions for whatever post-purchase goal you want to achieve. And as you know, more impressions mean more conversions.
A Quick, Low-Cost Investment For Massive Return
Optimizing your marketing funnel can take heaps of effort and investment.
However, the beauty of upgrading your thank you page is that it already exists on your site. You just have to make a couple of tweaks to put it to work.
You don’t need to spend hours coming up with unique marketing strategies or creative angles. Your thank you page enhances the rest of your marketing funnels by driving more conversions and delivering a better campaign ROI with the right approach.
A Less Distracting Way To Boost AOV
When most merchants think about cross-selling, they think about pre-purchase cross-selling. But moving your cross-sell offers to after checkout is an awesome way to get more conversions.
This way, you're not confusing or distracting shoppers with pop-ups that might cause them to bounce. Instead, you’re only showing your cross-sells to qualified shoppers who have their cards in hand.
5 Things You Can Do To Leverage Your Thank You Page
Okay, now that you understand why optimizing your thank you page matters, it’s time to look at the specific tactics Amazon uses to upgrade its post-purchase experience.
Let’s dive in.
Put Cross-Sell Offers On Your Thank You Page
As we discussed above, the thank you page is fertile ground for cross-sell conversions. Amazon cleverly displays related items to tempt shoppers to spend more.
Cross-sells and product suggestions are by far and away from the most predominant feature of Amazon’s thank you page. And with good reason - they understand just how much extra revenue (and especially profit) these suggestions can generate.
The trick here is to use smart recommendations that use triggers, or data to suggest items based on the customer’s browsing behavior. Obviously, Amazon has access to vast amounts of customer data and can suggest products with pinpoint accuracy.
Seriously, adding personalized offers to the thank you page will send your conversion rate through the roof. Especially if you reduce the friction to complete the order by making it a one-click upsell.
This isn’t a tactic used only by Amazon - many of the big retailers implement the same strategy. For example, check out this cross-selling approach used by AliExpress:
Add Social Links & Sharing
Amazon adds social sharing links to their thank you page which means shoppers can easily flaunt their new purchase to their friends.
This is huge - it’s free advertising combined with social proof. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t love to show off their new shopping haul!
Adding a social sharing widget to your thank you page introduces your brand to potential customers who may never have found you. And what’s more - 92% of consumers trust suggestions from friends and family more than advertising. Talk about a win-win!
Another clever tactic that Amazon overlooked is to drive customers to follow you on social media immediately after post-purchase. Warby Parker implements this strategy well on their thank you page:
On average, customers spend 20-30% more with the brands they follow on social media. And that makes sense: when your brand repeatedly pops up on customer’s social feeds, you’re indirectly building rapport with them.
So instead of waiting to ask for the following in your post-purchase email (which may never get opened), just ask directly on the thank you page!
Display Your Latest Promotion
Amazon also displays on-site promotions on their thank you page as a banner up beside the search bar.
These promotions vary from season to season to always stay relevant. They’re an excellent way to tempt customers to return to your store that feels exclusive to them as shoppers.
For example, you can see how Amazon uses the call to action (CTA's) ‘get ready for summer to entice customers to continue their shopping journey.
The key thing to get right with your promotion is that it’s something interesting enough to get customers to click on it out of curiosity.
Add Navigation Links Back To Your Store
Notice how Amazon keeps the same header menu on their thank you page as they have on their store.
This creates a continuity that encourages shoppers to keep browsing. The search bar is especially useful here. If the customer’s suddenly remembered they forgot to buy an item, the search bar allows them to rapidly go back to get it.
In addition, they’ve got the ‘Shop by Department’ dropdown menu which tempts people in shopping mode to return to browsing.
Add Order Tracking Widgets
There’s nothing that’ll kill your customer satisfaction faster than leaving them in the dark about when their order is due to arrive.
Order tracking widgets are great because not only do they help quell post-purchase dissonance, but they also give customers a reason to come back to your thank you page multiple times.
The more times customers return to your optimized thank you page, the more times they’ll see your post-purchase offers and the more likely they are to convert.
Go Forth & Optimize Your Thank You Page
Optimizing your thank you page is up there with ironing out your Shopify taxes when it comes to the easiest ways to immediately make more money. We’ve looked at how Amazon leverages its thank you page to power up its average order value in this post.
However, when it comes to what you can do with your thank you page, we’ve only scratched the surface. There are heaps of other brands who use their thank you pages to do things like:
- Run surveys to collect valuable customer feedback
- Collect customer birthdays and send special promotions
- Display trigger-based videos to build brand loyalty
- Add scarcity and urgency with countdown timers
- Use thank you page pop-ups for any conversion goal & more
So, if you’ve been struggling to boost your average order value, increase customer retention, and deliver a memorable post-purchase experience - it’s time to fix your thank you page.
About The Author
This guest post was written by Fintan Meagher and the team at ReConvert. ReConvert is the easiest way to add thank-you page upsells, cross-sells, surveys, and more to your Shopify store.
Ricky Hayes
Trisha Ballesteros