Thank-You Pages That Say Nothing

One line after the button

Somebody fills in your contact form, presses send, and the page answers with a single line: thank you, your message has been sent.

On some sites it is less than that. The page reloads, the boxes empty, and a small green sentence appears at the top of a form the visitor has already scrolled past.

Either way, the visitor knows no more than before: not whether it arrived, who will read it, or when anyone will answer.

For a business that lives on enquiries, that is the most nervous moment in the whole exchange, and most sites leave it blank.

What the visitor does not know

• Whether it worked, since everybody has had a form fail on them.
• Who will read it, a person or an inbox nobody checks.
• When they will hear back, this afternoon or next week.
• How the reply will come, by phone, email or text.
• What to do if it is urgent and cannot wait.
• Whether to keep looking at other businesses in the meantime.

The last is the one that costs work. Somebody unsure whether they will hear back keeps searching, and the second business they contact may well answer first.

How sites end up with one line

Nobody chooses it. Form plugins come with a default confirmation message, and the default is rarely changed.

Whoever builds the site sends one test, sees the message appear, and ticks the form off the list. It works, in the sense that the email arrives.

The moment after the form is never treated as a page, so nobody writes it, or checks it on a phone, where the message can appear off screen entirely.

What the page should say

Five things, in plain sentences, in roughly this order.

First, that the message arrived, in one short line at the top, so there is no doubt.

Second, who reads enquiries and when: the office, between eight and five on weekdays, replying the same working day.

Third, how the reply will come, and from which number or address, since many people ignore calls from numbers they do not recognise.

Fourth, what happens next: a call with a few questions, a visit to measure, a written quote.

Fifth, what to do if it cannot wait, which deserves a section of its own.

A promise the office can keep

The reply time is the heart of the page, and the easiest part to get wrong.

A modest promise kept is worth more than a quick one broken. A reply within one working day is fine, if that holds every week of the year, holidays included.

Say what happens to a message sent on a Friday evening. A visitor writing on Saturday is reassured by a reply promised for Monday morning, and unsettled by silence.

And update it for closures. A page promising same-day replies during a two-week shutdown does more harm than the single line ever did.

The urgent route

Some enquiries cannot wait, and the person sending them often does not realise a form is the slow way in.

The page after the form is the last chance to tell them. Say plainly what counts as urgent in your trade, and that anyone in that situation should phone now rather than wait.

Make the number a link that dials when tapped, so nobody has to copy it out.

That moves the urgent customer to the phone, where they belong, and stops a real emergency sitting in an inbox overnight.

A worked example

A company that installs and supports point-of-sale systems for restaurants and cafes took most of its work by phone, but some arrived through the website form late in the evening.

A manager in the middle of dinner service would find the card terminal refusing payments, fill in the form, and see one line: thank you for your message. The office opened that inbox at eight.

By then some had called another company, and the office regularly found the same message sent twice, an hour apart.

The new page says the message has arrived, that enquiries are read from seven in the morning, and that someone will call from the main number to book a visit.

Above that, in larger type: if a till or card terminal has stopped during service, call the after-hours line now, with the number as a link.

The page created no new work. It moved urgent requests to the phone, where the on-call technician could take them, and told everybody else when to expect a call.

Send the same words by email

An automatic email sent the moment the form arrives does the same job somewhere the visitor can find it later.

It confirms receipt, repeats the reply time and the urgent number, and includes a copy of what they wrote.

Send it from an address that accepts replies. A no-reply address turns away exactly the response you most want: a person writing back.

And keep it to the enquiry. Adding somebody to a newsletter because they asked a question is a separate matter, with its own consent rules.

A page you can count

A thank-you page with its own address has a second benefit: every arrival on it is an enquiry.

Analytics can record each visit to that page as a goal, and AdWords conversion tracking can use the same page, so you can see which sources and campaigns produce enquiries rather than just visits.

An inline message makes that harder, since no new page loads. Keep the page out of the menu, so the only way to reach it is by sending the form.

The counter-case

Not every form needs a full page after it.

A business whose customers almost always phone, or one that genuinely answers every message within the hour, can manage with a short confirmation, provided it says when and how the reply will come.

Online orders are a different case: the order confirmation belongs to the shop system and already does most of this.

For a business that waits on enquiries, though, the page after the form should say what happens next, when, how, and what to do if it cannot wait.

What to do

1. Send your own form from a phone.
2. Read what appears after you press send.
3. Agree a reply time the office can keep.
4. Write the page around that promise.
5. Add the urgent number as a tappable link.
6. Send the same details in a confirmation email.
7. Set up the page as a goal in Analytics.

Step three decides whether the page helps or hurts. A page promising a reply by tomorrow that the office cannot keep is worse than the single line it replaced: it is a broken promise, in writing.

Seeing that page the way most visitors will see it is covered in the phone version nobody at the office has seen.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.