- Friend Get A Friend (ask happy customers to refer others, maybe even incentivize them)
- Cross Sell (especially related products or add-ons)
- Tips (for getting the most out of the product)
- Product Tour (if you have a product video or tutorial, show it here)
- Customer Support Information (phone numbers, hours, etc.)
- Advertising (monetize the thank you page with Google adwords; I don't recommend this for big brands)
- Tell Your Story (Make people feel good about the purchase)
The last one especially presents an opportunity to reinforce the brand and even have some fun. For an example, let me direct you to another blog, Media Post's E-mail Insider. The blogger, Melinda Krueger, cites an confirmation/thank you email from CDBaby.com. I urge you to check out the post for yourself, but I have to say that I especially admire the way they worked a simple "shipped date" into the following.
- ...the whole party marched down the street to the post office, where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, July 10.
If you work on big brands, you can probably imagine the suits saying, "transactional emails need to deliver information, not fluff." You can hear the dreaded literalist saying, "we don't have a private CD Baby jet." And face it, most brands, especially the big ones, will not let you go so far over the top as CD Baby.
But it's still well worth a few extra words to use your "thank you" to add any value you can to your brand.
