How Your Online Store’s ‘About Us’ Page Can Help You Get More Sales

Your landing page has the potential to appease or annoy your customer, for the obvious reason that it is the first thing that your visitor views on your store. After the landing page, your customer moves to your products, their real motive behind visiting your store. If your product or service matches to their expectation, then congratulations you just converted your visitor into a potential customer.

Now, when your customers are well past your landing page and products, they would want to know about YOU and that’s when ‘about us’ page comes into the picture.  

‘About us’ page is the part of your online store where you address two questions: “what your customers want to know about you” and “what you want your customers to know about you”.

‘What your customers want to know’ are the questions that your customers could have raised to you, had you been sitting beside them while they were scouring your website. This could be anything related to your business, team or your background story. And “what you want your customers to know” is essentially how you want your customers to perceive you. In the upcoming part of the article, you will see how  the ‘about us’ page serves both the purposes;

But people are often skeptical about whether or not they should invest their money in ‘about us’ page. A genuine doubt indeed and following two reasons would clarify why they should indeed be concerned about their ‘about us’ page:

A simple inspection of google analytics will reveal to you that your ‘about us’ page is one of the most visited pages of your online store.
Why? Because, customers are inquisitive and they want to know about you. In case of a store selling niche products like designer apparels, antiquities, curated items, the importance of the “about us” page is hugely amplified.

Only a hoax online store does not have an ‘about us’ page. An ‘about’ story inspires the trust of your visitors. Consider a man in your area whose whereabouts are unclear to everyone. Would that raise a suspicion in you? Absolutely it would unless you are shifting or probably one of them.
Similarly with an online store, if your users are not getting information about you as much as they want, then they would find it extremely difficult to repose their faith in you. Hence, you would losing your customers.

Having discussed the imperative of an ‘about us’ page, let’s look at the other side and see what are the ingredients of an effective “about us” page. Also, we will see why creating an ‘about us’ just for the sake of it is not a good idea.

1. Your story

Write your story but understand that you are not writing your personal journal rather you are writing for your customers. You have to build a connection here with whoever reads them. Take an unconventional approach to telling your story but make it totally humane and an interesting read.

We can learn from Chumbak whose amazing explanation of the etymology of its name would inspire its share of awe in you.

Your team

Your customers want to know who is responsible for the site that they have been browsing all this time. It would please them to know that the site that they have been scouring is not run by the bunch of some robots rather by average human beings who just like them breath, laugh and have a family.

If your team size is not in the range of hundreds and thousands then create individual profiles of your every team member. Add their picture and crisply define every one of your members. Some websites today add “Ram is a software engineer and doting father of two awesome kids” adding humanness to the description. You might as well create a separate team if you don’t like to clutter everything in the ‘about us’ page.

You might want to take inspiration from Goodreads’ team page which has brilliantly created the profile for its every member in an innovative format that syncs with what they do.

2. How are you different

“You want to be better and different than the crowd then why do you sound like everyone else in the crowd”.

Your products might be similar to 999 other entities in the market and there is no shame in that. But the most important part is what distinguishes you and makes you better than everybody else out there. And then, are you able to perfectly convey it to your audience?

Andrew Reifman is a freelancer like million others on the internet, but he sure has a way to distinguish himself from the rest of this amazing description of himself.

3. Stay away from boasting and hardcore jargons

While I already stated that you should convey your USP to your audience, you mustn’t indulge in blatant self-promotion.

Almost every second company’s description that I read, they particularly don’t miss out adding “leading name in the industry” or “one of the best companies” or “largest company in the state” and similar heavy phrases. Seriously? Do you like to believe that we are going to buy that? Nobody does but this act certainly leaves a not-so-positive impression on the minds of your user and they start doubting your genuineness.

Refrain from being pretentious and learn from Less Films.

4. Put your pictures but make sure that they are real

Putting a picture of your company, team, office inspires the trust of your visitors and make you’re about us page look good. So, don’t shy from putting a picture or two of your company on your about us page.  Having said that, some organizations tend to download some high-resolution, jazzy images from the internet and use it to make their webpage look appealing. But when they do that, they forget that in this digital age, a human mind has the great tendency to distinguish between what is what is real and what is the download.

5. Keep your About Us page updated

You about us page should be the answer to the question “what is your company” if anybody asks this to you today, not if they would have done a year ago. A Lot many things keep happening to your company once you create the ‘about us’ page, so it is imperative that you keep updating or modifying it. Therefore, it is required that while you design the wireframe of ‘about us’ page you leave enough scope for modification in future.

6. Use effective CTA

So you have everything in place in your ‘about us’ page that is going wow your customers and your visitor has started liking you, so why not take advantage of this opportunity.

You can ask them to follow you on social media or subscribe to your newsletter or check out your product with an effective CTA button. Check out the dotp’s ‘about us’ page to draw some inspiration.

Now, that your ‘about us’ page is ready, it’s time for you to show it to random persons and ask them the probability of them clicking on the CTA if they were your visitor. If the average response is 60% or then it’s your time to flaunt it. Meanwhile, do drop by Zepo’s about us page and tell us how you rate it. Also, do share your thoughts in the comment box below. Happy ‘aboutification’.

P.S: This post was originally written by Ajit Kumar Singh for the Zepo Blog: the E-commerce Blog for Small and Medium Enterprises.