If someone took the time to write your business, or checked out through your shopping cart – they have trust in your business. Don’t just serve them a standard ‘Thank you for…’ page. Use this valuable real estate to extend your relationship with their business.

Matt McGee has a nice write up about the four most underutilized pages on the web. His focus was on SEO, however, the title inspired this thought so throwing a little link love to a good read. According to Matt (who I respect) his top four underutilized pages for SEO are:

• Glossary
• FAQ
• About Us
• Contact Us

While I agree those pages are generally underutilized for SEO; I think the most underutilized real estate overall comes from user engagement after they have decided to act.

If someone gave you their email address through a contact form, they trust you with their email address (and possibly a name, phone number, etc) and wish to hear from you. At this point, engage them with other conversion possibilities like a newsletter signup, an RSS feed, white paper download, etc.

If someone checked out on your site, they gave you a credit card. This is a lot of trust. There’s nothing people hold more dearly than their finances. Don’t just serve them a page with a ‘Thank you for shopping click here to print your receipt’ – use this opportunity to continue to engage those visitors.

In each of the above situations, do you give someone the ability to continue to interact with your site? Or are you saying ‘Thank you very much, now go away’? Don’t just lose that customer interaction, continue to engage them towards other aspects of your website or business.

The most difficult thing for a business todo is form the initial relationship with another party. Here’s your chance to not only form a relationship, but nuture it to grow overtime.