About Us page: nice to have, or revenue-driver? Let’s find out.
Most websites have an About Us page, and although marketers love talking about themselves, the question often arises “will anyone actually read this?”
The answer, of course, lies in your analytics. A simple pageview report will reveal what percentage of your site’s visitors go to that page.
But if you’re building a new site, you won’t have that data. So a little conversion theory shows why About Us pages are important – theoretically.
Bryan Eisenberg taught me one my favorite frameworks for understanding how people make decisions online, and what questions we need to answer for our site’s visitors:
In creating web content, we need to pay the most attention to the top-row buyers: the Competitive and Spontaneous buyers, because if they don’t see the information they’re looking for in the first few seconds of landing on your site, they’re gone. So in your headlines, subheadlines, tagline and hero shot, succinctly explain WHAT you do, and WHY someone should choose you over any other option.
But the bottom row, the Methodical and Humanistic buyers, are no less important to create content for. They just take their time finding the information that meets their needs, so it doesn’t need to be front and center. In fact, if you feature the content for them too prominently, you’ll turn off the Competitive and Spontaneous buyers. The Methodicals and Humanistics will scroll and click around the site to find all the details on HOW your process works, and WHO you are.
And it’s our right-side bottom quadrant – the Humanistics – that go to the About Us page. These are the people that want to have a human connection with your company. They want to see the people behind the brand. They want to hear the founder’s story. They want to get to know you a little before buying from you.
What makes a good About Us page
- Feature people: Tell their stories – especially the founder’s story. What problem was s/he trying to solve? What are the employees passionate about?
- Share the company’s mission or values. Mention any charity work or team building you do. Show pictures of your team doing these activities. Remember that this is also a sales page for attracting prospective employees
- Be relatable and likable. Although this is the one page where you can get away with talking about yourself (because the rest of the site’s copy should focus on what the customer gets, not what you do), you still need to frame the language around solving customers’ problems. Stay on point with your brand, but even very professional brands can relax and show some personality on this page.
- Highlight your company’s credentials. We ran an A/B test on a client’s About Us page, where we added a few sentences about their credentials before jumping into employee bios. We were astounded at the lift we got: 68% improvement (99% statistically significant)!
Note: we used Optimizely to run this test, and since the primary conversion goal for this client was a phone call, we had to integrate call tracking with Optimizely.
Wrapping it up
Although when we talk about improving conversion rates, we tend to focus on the top of funnel and bottom of funnel pages, don’t overlook the importance of a good About Us page.
And don’t hide behind your brand. Use this page to complement and compliment it.
Be real.
Be likable.
Profit from that.
Theresa Baiocco-Farr
Latest posts by Theresa Baiocco-Farr (see all)
- Case study: An updated design isn’t good enough - April 12, 2019
- Protected: Testing for Increased Quantity of High-Quality Leads - April 12, 2019