Conversion: Your About Us Page
Our “About Us” page is our third most popular page – right behind our main blog page and our homepage.
In fact, “About Us” is a pretty popular page for lots of sites. But some site owners treat it like a necessary evil, instead of a place that they can sell their product and services in the most subtle and wonderful of manners. So I wanted to evaluate a variety of About Us pages, and since my company is as guilty as everyone else, I’ll start with ours.
When you touch the “About Us” page of a consulting firm like ours, what do you want to know? Well, you want to know where they are located. You want to know if you trust the people, or if they are just going to steal your money. You want to feel like the people there are going to be your partners. And you want success stories. At the end of the day, you want to know that this is a company that you will feel really good about hiring. (See? I said that we are guilty of not having a great About Us page. Soon, soon.)
Similarly, we have a local customer who advertises themselves as a Pittsburgh company. They perceive that it’s one of their key differentiators. “So where are those Three Rivers pictures?” I wrote in the expert analysis. “I wouldn’t even be offended if your technical site’s About Us page ended, ‘Go Steelers!’ — it sure would make me believe that you’re a Pittsburgh company.”
Big, big companies can use their About Us page to humanize their company. Almost two years ago, I heard someone from Travelocity talk about their brand makeover. Users perceived that they were “just software” and not real people – and in fact, if you can find the Travelocity About Us page, you can read their Customer Bill of Rights, one of the campaigns they instituted as part of their “just us people” rebranding. Similarly, I didn’t believe that the people at Quicken were “real” until I saw this snapshot.
Sure, we little companies can use our About Us page to make us ourselves look bigger, more important. The Internet is the great equalizer. But I think (and test, test, test, right?) that we work too hard at having fancy photos and not hard enough to sound human.
About Us is the place to say, “believe in us.” So the question is always – what will it take the customer to believe in a company?
