Three reasons why you need a separate Thank You page url on your website
Most websites have contact/enquiry forms.
Very few of them trigger a separate url after the form has been submitted.
For example: yourwebsitehere.com/contact/enquiry-thank-you
There are three reasons why this is important:
- Understanding what led to an enquiry
- Linking enquiries back to marketing
- Stopping a technical problem from losing you business
Reason 1 – understanding what led to an enquiry
You receive an enquiry via your website contact form.
You know what the person wants and you respond to them.
Good … but not good enough.
What if you knew what the enquirer had been looking at on your website (page by page) before and after filling in the contact form?
If you knew that they looked at pages other than what they enquired about, then could that influence how you respond to their enquiry?
The image below is an example …
The enquiry form was completed at 17:14 and would have contained details of what they were interested in.
However, the arrows in the image above show that the person had looked at multiple pages before making their enquiry.
With that knowledge, the company can tailor their response to the enquiry, incorporating reference to other products that they also sell (that they know the enquirer has looked at on their website).
If your website has a separate ‘thank you’ type url that’s triggered when someone completes your contact form, then you can use A1WebStats to:
- Receive an instant email, showing you what the person looked at page by page before and after completing your contact form.
- Use that instant email to decide how you will tailor your response to the enquirer.
The video below (skip through to 4 minutes 10 seconds) shows you how to create those instant alerts. Alternatively, contact us and we’ll be happy to set them up for you.
If your website doesn’t have a separate ‘thank you’ type url then we’d recommend that you speak to your website people, as it’s an easy amendment to make.
Reason 2 – linking enquiries back to marketing
There’s another benefit of receiving an instant email when your contact form has been completed – linking enquiries back to forms of marketing …
You can see an example of this below, which shows that the person who completed the enquiry form had found the website via Google Ads and the keywords +bottling +system.
For the company that received the enquiry, that’s a tick in the box for Google Ads, which brought them the enquiry.
Reason 3 – stopping a technical problem from losing you business
Website enquiry forms are fine until they go wrong.
The first you realise this is when it’s been some time since you last received an enquiry. You may think that it’s just a slow time for enquiries but in reality there’s a problem you weren’t aware of:
Your website contact form is failing to deliver enquiries to you.
This is normally a problem related to what happens after the form is completed – the enquirer thinks their enquiry has been sent, but it, and others, get clogged up somewhere within your IT system.
If you have a ‘thank you’ page url after someone completes your enquiry form, and have set up A1WebStats so that you get an instant alert when someone has completed the form, this could happen:
- You receive the alert from A1WebStats, showing you the page by page movements of someone who had filled in your enquiry form.
- You don’t receive the actual enquiry itself.
So you contact your IT people, telling them that you think you should have received an enquiry. They look into it and find what’s blocked that from getting through to you.
The problem is fixed and everyone is happy.
Here’s what happens when you don’t have A1WebStats alerting you that someone has completed an enquiry form:
- Multiple people fill in your enquiry form but you don’t receive their enquiry.
- Nothing is there to make you aware that an enquiry form has been completed.
- By the time you work out there was a technical problem, many of those enquirers have gone elsewhere, thinking that you don’t care about them.
Technology does sometimes go wrong but techniques such as this help you to avoid losing lots of potential business.