With so much attention given to fine-tuning and fussing over sales pages and lead generation pages, it’s easy to overlook the other core elements of your sales funnel that could be working much harder for you and your business.

Whenever someone fills in your opt-in form, they will typically be taken to some form of confirmation or thank you page; and the same goes for when they join your membership site or purchase your online course. More often than not, these pages are overlooked in terms of strategic use; so let’s look at just a handful of ideas for how you could better leverage them for your own sales funnel.

Start your onboarding process

You probably know by heart the journey a user takes from initial opt-in right through to joining your membership site and beyond; however just because your process is clear and makes sense to you does not mean all of your leads and users will understand it too.

Losing customers and leads because they couldn’t figure out your process is just a waste of your hard work; so for the minimal effort it takes it’s well worth clearly laying out the next steps a user needs to take at each stage on the relevant pages.

This could be as straightforward as making sure a newly opted-in lead knows to check their inbox and confirm their subscription; or even a list of 5 actions a new member to your site should complete to get started with their membership.

Member onboarding is such a critical element to successful membership sites, but is so often ignored – so be sure to utilise the relevant pages of your site to make your customer journey as clear as possible.

Use Facebook tracking pixels to build a custom ad audience

When it comes to using Facebook advertising to promote your membership site or online course, the most effective campaigns are those where your audience is highly targeted; and with remarketing and Facebook’s ‘Custom Website Audiences’ you can really drill down and fine tune the ads you’re showing to select people based on which pages of your site someone has viewed.

If someone views your lead magnet “Thank You” page, then obviously that means they’ve just opted into your mailing list – so here is where you could include a Facebook tracking or conversion pixel which identifies that person as someone who has opted in. This way, you build up a custom audience in Facebook of people who have signed up for your mailing list, meaning that you can then target ads specifically to those people.

Or alternatively, you could exclude that audience from your broader ads – so if, for example, you were running an ad to send people to your lead magnet page, wouldn’t it be useful (and more cost effective) to avoid showing that ad to people who have already opted in?

Thank you pages and confirmation pages are the perfect place to insert the tracking codes that Facebook provide in order to flag people as having completed specific actions related to your sales funnel.

Set up Google Analytics goals to track your funnel performance

In the same vein as with Facebook tracking pixels; the fact that people will only be viewing thank you and confirmation pages when they’ve completed a specific action makes them perfect for use in tracking goals and sales funnel performance within Google Analytics.

If you don’t already have funnel tracking and website goals set up in Google Analytics, check out our walkthrough video and get this set up it right now for your own website; otherwise you have no real means to determine how effective your sales funnel really is.

There’s a lot that can happen between someone visiting your site, and them opting in to your list or purchasing your product; so properly tracking and measuring your sales funnel is critical to knowing what’s going right and, more importantly, what’s going wrong!

Promote your products

A user seeing a thank you or confirmation page has either just bought something, or has expressed an interest in the content you’re putting out and the knowledge you’re imparting – both perfect times to raise awareness of your product range.

If they’ve just joined your membership site or online course, then you could use your confirmation page to make mention of any upsells or cross-sells you may have available.

There’s a balance to this, as the last thing someone wants when they’ve just parted ways with their hard earned money is to feel as though you’re just trying to pump them for more cash; however that’s not to say you can’t simply make them aware of their available options. While you wouldn’t go for the immediate hard-sell here, the product awareness could work in your favour for future promotion of your upsells.

When it comes to promoting your products on your lead magnet thank you pages you can obviously push a little harder. While you don’t want to immediately put someone off by hitting them over the head too hard with the “buy my stuff” spiel, presenting your membership site (or tripwire/front-end offer, if you’re using those) as the “next step” a new lead should take is a worthwhile idea.

Encourage visitors to connect with you on social media

The inclination of site owners to push hard for people to connect with them on social media is a bit of a bone of contention for me; as far too often this is done at the expense of keeping a visitor's attention on the sales page, content or lead magnet.

However, your opt-in thank you page, in particular, is a great place to encourage people to follow you, connect with you, circle, friend, fan you or whatever else the cool kids are doing these days.

There’s great value in getting people into your “tribe”, and by opting in to your email list people are showing an affinity for you and what you have to say, so inviting them to further connect with you is a natural progression.

As you can see, those all-too-often overlooked pages can certainly play a vital role in a variety of areas related to your sales funnel, so you should definitely be looking at how to give your thank you and confirmation pages a little more “oomph!”