Your website should be a source of leads and subscribers to your email marketing lists. So why clutter it with an About Us page? From what I’ve found when researching this article, most company websites have them. They are often beautifully laid out, the text generally inspired and the images well chosen.
How irritating is it then, when studying the data from your website, to discover that your About Us page only got three visits last month. One of them may have been me, of course. I’ve been viewing a few.
Email marketing is all about measurement. If we can’t prove it increases our ROI, we should discard it and try something else. Why, then, do companies persist in having an About Us page despite its lack of response?
The problem with such pages is that they start from a poor premise. It is, obviously, there to sell the company. They tend to be boastful; a sort of ‘look at us, we’re quality’. It would be great on a CV with your qualifications listed in date order, but few customers want to know your degree grade.
If you are considering writing, or rewriting, your About Us page, consider not what you want to say, but what your customers want to read about you. Funky can look great as it lends itself to uninhibited graphics, but you need to consider if your head of the email marketing design team on a skateboard will create the right impression.
One of the common features of such pages is a paragraph, or even three, headed Our Mission. I’m sorry for those who put so much effort into creating them, but they are boring, mainly because they are self-indulgent. Telling people what you want to do conveys little. Doing it is much more convincing.
On the other hand, a promise, put simply and directly, of how you deal with customers who are unhappy with the service they receive is better. It states, which is a lot more convincing than attempts to convince by empty wishing. I like the idea of photographs of staff, but these need to go on the contacts page. Knowing whose desk your query will make its way to can be reassuring.
Despite thinking there’s little point in About Us pages, I have them on my websites. I’m not sure why, so in that respect I’m probably similar to most of us. Mine are short, and to the point. I have click throughs to further information, and Calls to Action for specific products.
Yet what is remarkable is that CTAs were few and far between. We deal in email marketing. CTAs are our meat and drink. A page without such a box is a wasted opportunity. If you boast that you publish the best-selling book in a specific genre then put a click through from your About Us page to the landing page.
The alternative is to delete the page, take the copy you’ve worked so diligently on, and put it on other pages where it will be seen.
