Happy Thanksbuying - Irv Brechner

First, have a great turkey day and enjoy time with family and/or friends.

But before you finish work this week, check out your thankyou page on your website, also called the confirmation page. It's where you confirm the order and (hopefully) thank customers for buying – hence "thanksbuying" as the title of this article.

Your thankyou/confirmation page and email (and one or more shipping confirmation emails) are valuable real estate that should be maximized, and it costs you nothing to do so. Yet in so many sites that I visit, they are ignored. By adding value to the consumer on these pages and emails, you can improve the overall improvement of your customer acquisition campaign, whether it be by direct response TV, search or other tactics.

So let's look at some of the many ways to use these pages and emails. Since they are real customers who have paid for one or more items, you can afford to give them another offer that's of great value. Maybe it's giving them an additional one of the same item "at cost" or related items. The ideas are endless. So making them an offer is the first use of thankyou pages and emails. Other ways are:

· Ask them to join your email list. After all, emails to known buyers can be very productive and have a high ROI.

· Ask them for comments.

· Ask them for product testimonials. You can never have enough quality endorsements.

· Ask them to refer a friend. Friends and colleagues are valuable additions to your email list.

· Ask them to review their email preferences, so you know how often to email them with relevant offers.

· Do some branding. Provide branding messages that drive home your unique selling proposition.

· Ask them what they'd like to see in the future. Could be a good source of new product ideas.

I'm sure you can come up with many more uses for the confirmation pages and emails. So in this season of giving thanks, make sure your thankyou real estate is rewarding your customers.

Irv Brechner has written over 100 published direct marketing articles and 13 books on a variety of topics. He's been a pioneer in online customer acquisition since 1996 and offline for his 35-year career. He has developed Acquirgy.com's "Customer Acquisition Intel Center" (acquirgy.com/intel ) he evangelizes best-of-breed tactics to help companies acquire customers in the digital age. He can be reached at: irv@acquirgy.com .

Read all Irv's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Customer Acquisition Intel.

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