How to Create a Killer About Page That Converts

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular interviews tips and tools for
building your business online [Music]
well hello and welcome to the ecommerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson whether you are just starting out or
whether like me you've been around for a while in the world of ecommerce the goal here is simple and that's to help you
grow your e-commerce and digital businesses and to do that every week i
get to talk to amazing people from the world of e-commerce today is definitely no exception let me tell you or
exception exception exception and i get to ask uh these amazing folks
all kinds of questions about what they know and how it's going to help us develop online yes i do i try to have
the conversation that you would have with them if you got to sit down and grab a coffee or cup of tea or you know
whatever floats your boat really we dig into their story we'll learn the principles that can help us start and
adapt and grow online ourselves and today you are going to love this episode
i cannot begin to tell you how much i enjoyed my conversation with rhys speichmann we're going to talk about how
to create a killer about page that converts
we're going to get into all of that and let me tell you are going to absolutely love it she's just
fabulous rhys fabulous conversation uh i'll i'll explain a little bit i'll
store that sentence again i'll explain a little bit more about reese but first
here's a quick word from this week's show sponsor hey there are you a business owner here
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brilliant yeah reece you're going to love reece we're going to talk about the about page which well
let's just be real is one of the most neglected pages on everybody's website but it's actually one of the most
important as we're going to get into that whole thing uh just a heads up all of today's notes the transcript from
today's show the links to recent all that sort of stuff can be found at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
because this is uh indeed episode and you can find all of that information there
ecommercepodcast.net forward slash so let me tell you a little bit about rhys then we'll bring her on to the show
now reese is an e-commerce conversion expert who has spent more than years
working closely with entrepreneurs and brands on their online marketing and let's be real years in e-commerce is
a very long time right today she helps e-commerce brands quadruple their monthly revenue and
website conversion optimization and email automization yes she does automatization is that the
right word automation is probably a better word she has lived in malaysia for seven
years rhys is now back in her home state northern michigan where she lives with her husband
and her dog beautiful little dog she is an introvert this is what the bio tells me
after the interview i genuinely don't believe it but apparently she is an introvert
and also as we are going to discuss she is a lover of detroit style pizza and is
obsessed with the tv show monkeys have to be honest with you i haven't seen that tv show maybe i should watch
it i don't know but i've not seen it so i can't comment myself what i can comment on though is this interview with
uh reese i genuinely really really enjoyed it uh really enjoyed my time with me she was fantastic so without
further ado here is rhys spikerman so rhys welcome to the show great to
have you on this is your first time with us it's not the first time we've talked but it's definitely your first time on
the show and we'll just say and then weren't we before we started recording it's really great and i'm really excited about this show so uh thank you for
joining us yeah you're welcome and i so enjoyed our initial conversation
when we talked about all right what could we do this particular show about so
i'm really excited to see where it goes you were fun to talk with them and i know this is going to be a great conversation for the audience
yeah no pressure but if you're not fun i'm just hanging up that's the way it's going to work right
excellent so when we were i mean just give people a little bit of background obviously we talked a bit about you in the intro but
uh you one of the things i i love about your bio uh was that you lived in lands a
foreign and and technically you still live in lanza foreign to me but you know you live in the states now
uh but just tell people a little bit about that journey oh boy all right so
i have i was born and raised in the united states and i had wanderlust at an early age so
when it was time to go off to college or i think as you call it university i went about miles away from my
current home and most kids will stay within a couple hours drive i was maybe
an hour drive so i went to a few states away um and then i
i ended up getting a job in florida i ended up moving to canada to to
be with my husband who was my then boyfriend and after three years there we moved to malaysia which is where he is from and
we were there for about seven years until there came a point where i was like uh i think i'm done with the
wanderlust and i'd really like to go back home and that was maybe six years ago
to the us and you and you've been freed from the wunderlust ever since
yeah i have you know when you when you live in three different countries some people want to do that
for the rest of their lives and for me i got it out of my system and now i'm kind of a homebody
yeah it's interesting i think for a lot of people there's a very dif i think for me that was a very definite season you know
living abroad and then you coming back and actually now i'm okay now i i feel like that's got out of my system so
you're you're back in the states you're back uh you've been back uh six years you said and one of the things that's
said in your bios which i wanted to ask you about which has absolutely nothing to do with e-commerce right uh but
intrigued me uh is you're a lover of detroit style pizza
okay now explain to me what a detroit style pizza is and how that's different from
pizza yeah i'm so glad you asked this because i kind of have on a mission to tell the
world about detroit i might be getting some of the details wrong but
let me just tell you a quick history so in detroit michigan i believe in maybe the late s early
s someone came up with an idea to take you know um
like a cake pan a say nine by nine inch i don't know what that
is in centimeters square pan with the sides okay and i don't know if it was because they were
out of other materials or whatever they got scrappy and they used it to put dough in there and i think it was a
bunch of italians who had moved to the us who tried this and what happened is when they tried it
this way it made the edges of the pizza all seared and like
um really browned almost kind of cut like a caramelized so when you eat detroit
style pizza it comes out like a square instead of a round pie and those edges are just so crispy and
umami and the cheese gets all almost not burnt but just that real nice brown so can you see
why i have become a bit of an evangelist for this yeah yeah absolutely i i think
and why not i definitely need to try one now being from europe i am obviously
uber familiar with the italian style pizza and in the uk you either get thin crust or deep dish right
but it wasn't until i went to chicago um with my boys a few years ago that
actually we really understood what deep dish pizza is you know oh my god it's like a foot deep it's unbelievable
it was like calories a slice is what it told you on the menu that was
insane it was like your whole day calorie count in one slice of pizza but it was
amazing uh and i remember we ordered the pizza and he said what size do you want i said well we normally have a large
pizza and he looked at me and said you don't want a large pizza so we ordered the small pizza and i
could only eat half of it so if if detroit style pizza is anywhere
near as good as the chicago deep dish pizza i'm in i think it's better okay no no offense
to any chicago wins if that's what you call them watching but i gotta tell you i think detroit peach edges it out
okay well challenge is said everybody uh listening to the podcast uh this is just
you know this is just the kind of information we bring uh on the ecommerce podcast go and
try a detroit style pizza i dare say there'll be a million videos on youtube telling you how to do one really well so
have a go let me know what you think which one wins the italian thinkers pizza chicago deep dish pizza or detroit
style pizza that's what we want to know what are the important things here
yeah we're solving the world's problems one at a time right so first let's deal with pizza
so other than loving pizza um what's um what's your work passion
oh my goodness well matt i really love optimization
so this used to just be kind of websites
optimizing websites the conversion rate we're going to talk about that a bit today but i realized a lot of what i do
is optimization on multiple levels for example you can optimize your email marketing by
doing automations and a lot of people don't they don't take advantage of automations to just kind of make money
in the background for them while they're just sitting around or let's look at optimizing even your
customer onboarding experience their unboxing or things like
reducing your internal load with dealing with customer inquiries and questions and complaints
and problems by optimizing say your faq area so there's all these little places
in a business even how you go about making your schedule that can be optimized that
can be working harder for you without you having to work so hard in them and that's that's my big passion
that's a really good definition actually of optimization because you hear a lot of people in this world
talk about you know optimizing uh and cro and and all these kind of fun
everything has to have three letters doesn't it and and we just we will try and create three letters with a word optimization in there somewhere in
multiple different ways in the digital world because that's just what we do right um and so but i liked your
definition of optimization is getting things to work harder for you without you actually working harder yourself
and i i quite like that it's like how do i get this to be better how do i get this to be smarter how do i get this to
work harder without necessarily in some respects actually decreasing the burden upon myself right
because you can have both would you say or is it is that not possible
do you mean that you can't decrease the burden on yourself while
like well yeah it's the it's sorry i didn't make that question clearer i've just heard it back in my head uh it's
it's the golden it's the golden goose isn't it it's the i want my website to work harder and smarter and i want these
things to do better but actually at the same time i want to decrease my personal workload as the entrepreneur is the
leader i want to i want to work less but i i want the results to be more if that makes sense
and it's like the silver bullets the thing that we all chase and that's where optimization i would
say has a real sweet spot it in some respects it allows you to do that
agreed and i think one thing i love being honest with people about this because matt you and i dance in a world
where people dangle a lot of those magic bullets and they make it seem like it's seamless and
in two weeks you're gonna have seven figures in your pocket and it's total crap so what people need to know
is the path that optimization path you can bring in people like me or like
matt i'm sure to help you but there will be a bit of a slog while you're in it
right you're gonna have to kind of put in like front load the work to buy future you a better life
so i don't i do think the end goal is being able to find that silver i think you call it a silver bullet but it
doesn't happen overnight and and to optimize things whether it's your schedule your email automations your
website your customer experience it does take some work some thinking
some critical thinking about all these paths everything from your customer journey to your internal processes so there is work involved
and actually the you could argue that the work that is involved is
probably the work you should be getting involved with right because certainly as the leader as the the entrepreneur as
the founder as the person responsible for the business um if you're certainly if you're a small operation as well it's easy to get
caught up with everything else uh and the the the stuff that you're talking about is in my head it should be
it's a work you should be doing as the leader responsible for that organization but we i don't know do you find people
just put it off yes it's interesting matt i was just looking at a steven pressfield quote
about how they're i'm going to slaughter it but it was something to the effect of there will always be urgent tasks that we want
to front load and prioritize but it's the important things that
obviously are important they're the things that are going to help us make progress in our work basically
and what you and i are talking about here this work of being a leader this optimization this understanding for
example your customer journey it's not easy to just pick up and put down like you just pick up and put down responding
to an email and so i think that's part of why people resist it because part of it is where do you even start where do
you bite off this elephant and then you know when you get into it it it's thinking time you know it's not you sit
down for minutes and you solve the world's problems you sit down for three hours and you look back and you might
not have something tangible to show for it right away but you're on your journey yeah no that's so good so so good well
let's get into this then because i'm one of the things that i i enjoyed recent our conversation
was we started to talk about this and we went off on a tangent which i thought no one has ever come onto this show and
talked about before and it all came and as you were talking about it just little light bulbs were
going off in my head because i say this to clients all the time i say to our team all the time
if you can tell me what the most visited pages on your website tell me and everyone will go it's the
home page which nine times out of ten it's the homepage then you follow it up with a question what's the second most
visited page on your website that becomes a much more complex question for people to answer but nine
times and again this is my experience and rishi tell me if i'm if i'm missing it here
nine times out of ten the second most visited page on anybody's website is the about us pages that our story pages
where people go to to find out who you are and your story
are my when i say it's like of the people that i deal with do you find it's a similar step
context is everything here matt i i could say yes but i really think it depends on
how buried is that about paige for example is it in the main navigation is it way down in the bottom when i was
prepping for this episode today the show with you i was looking at some bigger brands and looking for their about pages
and i couldn't even find them oh wow so with that said
we can have you in a great discussion here about whether it should be in the main navigation i can go either way on this i've kind of gone back and forth
yeah yeah but yes in general it is a pretty
heavily visited page i have found especially
i think especially if you're leading people there are you leading them there from your homepage if not in the main navigation do you have a little chunk on
your home page that's maybe a bit of your founders story your mission your values whatever it is that's
pushing people over to that page so it's all about how are they coming in that i think will dictate whether it's a really
highly visited page on your site yeah that's a good answer right i am
i i i've noticed one of the things in my own shopping habits is if i'm on a
website an ecommerce website you know and i'm thinking do i want to buy something from this website and i've
never been there before and i'm kind of getting that vibe from this site that i've i don't know how i don't really it's not
like nike do you know me i may not have shopped on night before but i know the brand and i know what you know the
experience is going to be like first page i always look for is the about us page and if i can't find it
i don't buy from that store it's as simple as that and if it becomes complex to find it i'm i'm lost i'm out i'm off
to somewhere else and so and when you do find it it is the most dull and boring page on the website
and this is where this again comes back to our conversation so let's get into this let's talk about the about us page
because i think there's so much opportunity here for people listening to just do some simple things and and
and see some good actual results as as a result of doing it so let's go let's go back to the
beginning the about us link so obviously we need to link to the page uh there are
two places that i tend to see it in the main navigation uh or more recently it's become more of a popular thing to put in
the footer navigation um of the website you said you're you kind of go back and forth what would be
some of the good reasons for putting the about us link in your main navigation hmm
let me explain the a little bit because i think matt you've you and i
talked about we've seen an emergence of so many newer businesses into the e-commerce
market in the last one to two years before that most the people who were in e-commerce not most but a lot of them
were at that seven figure and beyond range and so there the revenues they were running the type
of store they had it made sense to me at that time to have the mostly it in the footer
um because i wanted the focus to be primarily on the products but
this is where i kind of go the other direction if you are an indie brand and i i mean
you can be a seven-figure business and be an indie brand but if you are even like let's say a real small business
you're working your way up i think that having the about page in your header is really
it can be really helpful for building trust especially for people who are looking to buy from small businesses for
a reason and so we're leveraging that buying behavior we know they're looking for
some a smaller business experience and the other example that i think people listening can relate to is if you
are a maker so some of the clients i work with make handmade soaps right or dog clothes
and they haven't moved to the point where they're fully manufacturing it or even if you're starting to automate some
of it when your business is made by your hands i think there's even more of that sort
of artisan mentality behind it that people want to read about and it makes a lot of sense to me to have about or
about the maker for example in the in the main nap but i would love to know what you think
yeah i i i loved what you said there about the maker you know if you're kind of an artisan uh i get that that's
actually part of your story and that's a big part of your selling proposition isn't it and it's like
putting that in the main navigation makes an awful lot of sense uh yeah when we started out in
e-commerce the about a section definitely was in the main footer and then over the years it kind of migrated to the sorry it was in the main
navigation then over the years it migrated to the footer um and we tested it we tested it in the
main navigation we tested in the footer did we uh what happened as a result did i mean
and actually we didn't lose anything by putting it in the footer we just cleared the main navigation up slightly
and made it easier for people to find the products but we were a big site we were a well-established site
i think that um so i like that i think the other place where i've seen it work well in the main
navigation is actually if you're quite um you call them an indie brand i
if you're a a very strong values-led organization and you need your customers
to be on that values journey again you would put it in the main navigation i think
and when we look a little bit later at some examples that i've brought for you
one of the ones is someone who's been on your show and their company is a very much
values-led mission very sort of company business it absolutely makes sense to me
that they have about in there because they want to pull in customers that are aligned with that mission and values
yeah no great great so i think um i think
do you put it in the main navigation there are reasons to put it in the main navigation do you put it in the footer navigation maybe if you're a bigger more
established company you'd put it in the in the footer i think probably the thing to say here reece the thing that i'm
picking up from you is put it in one or the other but put it in there
right yes don't not have a link to your about us page make it easy for people to
find that link from every page of your website right including your home page would that be a fair fair comment
absolutely when we talk about putting in the footer i really like it where you group your things in your footer so
maybe you have a column of links or if we're on mobile it's a tab for example related to your company and in there is
a perfect place for your about page it could be slipped in the same column as things like your shipping policies your
faq those to me from an organizational and grouping point of view make a lot of sense but please do put an about page on
your website and link to it yeah from your header or your phone and i like that i think one of the things that i've
noticed over the years is actually more and more people as they use the web i think people have got accustomed to
looking in the footer for the about us link it's kind of it's become one of those things it's learned behavior isn't
it it's something that we've learned over the years when navigating sites i'm just going to scroll to the bottom to find the about us page
and have a have a look i'll have a look at that so um yeah i i i get this okay so
we've got the link to the about us page would you would you promote the about us page on
the home page independent of it being in the main navigation did i mean so would you have like a section on your home
page with an excerpt or something from your about us page link and more info you
know or find out more about us click here kind of thing would you do that another it depends answer
and here's why so when we think about you're talking about your e-commerce
business that you had and you had moved it out because you had a pretty big product catalog am i making a correct
assumption there yes yeah yeah okay there are two methods that i tend to
work with people on for your home page layout approach and want to call the pro
the catalog method which is probably what you would have done and the other i call the storybook method and i often
recommend the storybook method for people who have smaller product catalogs and who really are relying on their
brand story to carry that home page to pull the customer in and in that storybook method
we aren't emphasizing tons of different product photos there's some you're going to have like say a row or two of best
sellers maybe some categories but you're gonna have chunks on the page that are telling the story of your brand
and in that instance i love having one of the chunks be a bit about
say the the back story why you started something like that but relate it to your customer
and then have a link that says read more about xyz brand name or about us and then that
would go yes to the about page now with the catalog method that i have i am talking about which
would have probably been more like your site matt it's not a no
but do you see this on for example i don't know marx and spencer or home depot or
something probably not it doesn't necessarily structurally make as much sense to me but i'm not gonna give a
hard and fast no here yeah i think for me um it all depends on
who the founder and leaders of the business are right so um
if you go to marks and spencers no one knows who owns marks and spencer's because it's a shareholder thing and i
mean it's a faceless company there's not somebody driving that brand if i go to any virgin
website right virgin atlantic virgin whatever do you mean that if i go to there there's
always a photograph of richard branson right always because he is this vivacious larger-than-life character
that everybody associates with the virgin brand so they're gonna you're gonna find out about his story
and about how the brand got started a lot easier because of who he is right
and i think with um with our site we were the catalogue the con concept that you
mentioned so it's very much catalog driven we did have a section on the home page though
uh which just had a team photo this is who we are and it was just genuine because we just
wanted just to be you know kind of fun and just a bit out there and so we had team photos and we were just having a
laugh on the home page and it said you know sort of click here to find out more about us and then that took people to the
homepage and that worked really well actually uh i thought that was that as a concept works super well
so i think if you're i think you're right i do think you're right you know with these these bigger
corporate brands for me it all depends on who the leader is who that who that person is behind the brand
uh and if you've got any kind of personality behind it you you want to get people to that page the way branson
did it i don't know if you've ever seen what he did i don't actually know if he still does it this way it was a few years ago when i was i was doing a
bit of research around this there was a button on the home page with a picture of richard branson and it just
said do not click this button right that was that was what it said and of course
you're gonna click the button right it's just human nature i thought it was the best bit of sort of conversion rate
optimization just tell people not to click it and so i clicked the button and then
there just came up this big photograph of richard branson in a wedding dress with makeup and everything and just a
headline saying we told you not to click the button now you can never unsee this image or whatever it do i mean it was
very good very good tongue-in-cheek anyway so so we've got our link in the header
we've got uh or a link in the footer we've maybe got a bid on the home page let's get into
the about us page um because so many people
why don't you tell people what's the what do you see is the default about us page that everybody goes to that you and
i just put our heads in our hands like this and we're like what are you doing what is the default
all right so the default has two main problems with it it probably has more
but from a copy branding slash positioning point of view
it's all about them the header will literally say about us or if it's a
really a one-man or one-woman show about me and then it rolls right into
paragraphs of when i was a child i wanted to do this and
okay not all companies will do this but on a more corporate level so not the single business you'll see
marx and spencer was founded in or by bob and it's kind of
it's so self-absorbed it's about the company but the problem is from a design point of
view too it's literally paragraphs of text no headlines to break it up nothing about
the customer it have i described it well is this probably what you were gonna say oh yeah
yeah totally yeah yeah and for me the best the best websites if you ever if you ever know what want to
know what we're talking about just google uh your local accountant and go to their
website and in effect i i remember doing this live on stage once it was hysterical we we
googled our local uh accountants and uh everything was about them i mean
everything was about them they had a picture their hero image was a picture of their building
which but and the bit that they zoomed in on was their logo on the building so
they had their big logo on the corner of the website then a huge photo of their
logo of their building and then it went to the they had one of these carousel things right so it went to the
next image oh and you know the next do you want to know what the next image was in their carousel it was a picture of
their business cards with their logo on and i was just
i was just crying all the accountants in the room were going what's wrong with this oh no
so i totally agree with you reese it's everything is about you uh and i'm i'm as a consumer as a
visitor i'm bored before i've even started right i'm out i don't care about your logo i genuinely
don't i don't care who not once have i ever gone to a website and gone i'm gonna buy from these guys because
they've got a beautiful logo just as i've just never done it i don't
know why i'm maybe i'm missing out i think so there's so many mis-buying opportunities for you matt
yeah yeah i i i get what you're saying i'm and this is my bed so but you get the
point right and i think this is what you're saying that actually the the text the images
are it's just done in a way that no one actually cares so
i can hear the listeners going hang on a minute reese this is the about us page surely this is what people actually want
to know but here we are actually criticizing people that just do that so where are
they missing it um i have to tell you matt this is probably
one of the biggest questions i get and i see and i get why people are confused because it's built right into the name
why aren't i supposed to talk about me what else am i supposed to do so i understand the confusion and the
overwhelm for people listening your about us paige
yes it's about you but it's much more about how does the customer fit into the story
of your business and what you can do and we're gonna break this down
you lead with them first because they feel seen they feel appreciated it's
catching their attention let's look at the other side of the issue that most of us about pages we say are
self-absorbed if we know that then we know that's probably also true about our
customers and it's not a judgmental thing this is just human beings this is how we are
so what if we turn that around our head and if we know that most people care mostly about themselves
we can give them what they're looking for by talking to them first on our about pages
and then you transition and you tie your own story into the customer story whatever pulled
them in on that about page so there is a chance an opportunity for you to talk about you or your company your mission
your values but lead with the customer first to hook them to capture their attention and to like avoid what matt
just described where you're there you're boring them right out of the gate with the first two words
yeah i i remember um the first time i ever thought about
this as a concept uh have you come across don miller with the story brand
you read his book um years ago i i did one of his courses when he was just starting out don miller
and storybrand was just taking off and and this whole idea that actually when we tell stories
to our customers we need to make them the hero and not ourselves you need to tell the story in a way that
the customer becomes a hero you're not the hero you're the guide and the way if you've ever watched the star wars movies
the way he explained it was brilliant for me because it's like i understood it in an instant he said your customer is
luke skywalker your obi-wan kenobi so if you get the star wars connection you'll
understand what that means right so is that is that what you're talking about is that what you're saying it's
actually paint this story in a way where the customer is the hero of that story you're painting them into it they can
see themselves in in there as you were talking i was thinking about um
a tv show i can't remember i was talking about this the other day but i was thinking about a tv show we used to have in the uk called the house doctor
and the house doctor was this beautiful american lady who came into your house because you'd put it on the market and
nobody was buying it so she'd walk in and she'd work her magic and she'd you
know your house would sell for twenty percent above asking or whatever you know it went for and all she did was she went in it was
the same every week but we all loved it as a nation she walked in and she went and cleared all the clutter out because
her thing was you need to get your visitors coming in they need to be able to see themselves living in this house right that's what
the show was for and so that's all she did she staged the house so that when people came in they could go we could
live here right and by clearing the clutter that's what she did so i'm kind of like that this in
my head is what you're doing rhys right you're you're going to these about pages you're clearing all the clutter
and you're staging them in such a way that when somebody comes they can see themselves
in it they can see themselves buying from you as a business because they like you they've connected with you somehow
would that be a fair reflection not only is that a fair reflection map but you have
accurately described what i could do with my life and career if e-commerce
would you ever go away i age homes you go and you look online and
a home has so much clutter like you said you can't see yourself in it let me tell you we did the same thing
with our house like we staged it ourselves and we also baked chocolate chip cookies in the oven before the
beans trigger that scent like sense memory and for people to be like oh i can imagine
myself baking cookies in this house this being my home we are effectively trying to do
those types of things with this about page yeah that's very good i like it so
the about page doctor.com is reese's new website
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[Music] let's talk about then some of the key
things that you think make up a good about us page right so we're going to focus on the customer so how practically
do we do this what are some of the things that we could do okay
we want to basically look at the structure of it
okay and we also want to look at the design so let me break this down and then i always think what's really
lovely about this show with you matt is we can do screen shares the visuals that i'm going to show i
think are really going to drive this home so under structure we want to first think about
what are the words that we are using especially the most important words are
generally at the top of the page what we call a headline and i don't know how familiar some of your audience is with
this so when you go and visit a website and it's a well done one you will often notice
there'll be a sentence for example that is in a much bigger text size than say paragraphs of text that's what
we mean by a headline and we want to start out our about page and our approach to our
copy for maybe the first to percent of the page
with a strong headline and then using the word you i mean that is honestly my
big secret to immediately pulling someone the customer in
to the page so it's a powerful word it's an underused word and the minute we as your as a
customer read the word you we think they're talking to me and only to me
okay so we perk up you have a strong headline
that's something like this you know your horse is your entire world and he doesn't let you forget it right you're
doing a couple things there you're saying like i get you you're using the word you
and it depending on your brand not everyone is cheeky like this but if your brand is more cheeky you're kind of you
know ahaha with them so you're immediately building rapport with this headline out of the gate and
that's what you want to do like if you do nothing else with your about page please change your top headline from
saying about us to something that's related to what your customer desires cares about
has a problem with their main big pressing issue or desire so before i go on like what do you think
of that matt i think that's brilliant advice i love using the word you in the headline and
it and it forces you as as the website owner to go actually how can i write this
in a way that connects them so that the example you gave of the horses i thought was great you know so rather than just
going years ago i set up a horse shop which i mean it's like yeah no one cares
right i mean it's nice that you ride horses and there may be a picture of yours but the way that you turn that around to say
you know this is about you this is about your problem right and you and you're bringing and everyone that's on that
page is going to read that and go totally yes that's me i'm in and so they're going to read the next bit so yeah
totally it's great the headline you read that that takes you to the subheading you read the subheading and if you're
bought in there you're going to read the first paragraph of text and everything leads into the next thing right so
if you've got a great powerful headline you're going to read down to the next section
the goal of any good copy is to get them to read the next line of copy because
first to capture attention but then capture attention enough that they want to read what comes after so what i like
to do after we have this headline that is very much like ding ding hey
they're talking about me don't jump into you yet meaning you the business owner the
founder if we take the horse example i'll just riff on what you could do you could have
something like horses are so expensive from trainers to shoes to that psychic median you brought in to read his
astrological chart parentheses true story the costs never end and let's not
get into the bet bills that's why we believe that washing his blanket should be the one thing you can count on to not
break the bank so do you see i continued with that to make it about them there's so much
empathy in that paragraph and then we segue a little bit more we're hinting now at the back story the mission the
values of this particular company that's what's going on
yeah it's very clever and very simple actually how you've done that you know you've taken you've emphasized
the problem you've kind of hinted at the fact that you yourself as the owner have had that problem and somehow you join the two
things together in a very fluid and easy way right and that that seems that's that whole paragraph right there so by
the end of that paragraph i've read it i'm i think as the buyer you know what my problem is you've had that problem
awesome let's read on yeah so once we get this idea in our head
this mindset of we're thinking about this from the customer's perspective instead of my
perspective as the founder let's talk a little bit and i'm going to show some examples matt about what we do
design wise because we talked about a big problem being this just long boring wall of text
the way you can deal with this is you want to chunk it up because what we know about people
especially the or more people who are coming to your site on their phones they're scanning like this
they are not reading like they open a book to read they're kind their eyes are dancing all over looking for something
that will pull their attention so we want to leverage what we know about this
and that means you have a sub headline chunk of text sub headline chunk of text maybe you
throw in some icons in there that represent for example your values or
that kind of thing and then you can break it up further by putting in macro images of your
materials or your ingredients or matt talked about the example of his
team photo on his old website those kind of things too so you start to weave in
imagery as well that's creating either a sensory experience or kind of letting
people into how like what your brand story is visually but the idea here is you don't want that
paragraphs all looking the same use little bulleted list use little icons break it up and
can i like would not be an okay time map to show exactly what i'm talking about yeah let's do this yeah yeah absolutely
go ahead show your screen and let's pull this great so
i've got a couple different ones to share so like people can see some different examples about how you can do this let's start with
christy sumer her she has been on your show and she's a friend of mine she's got a great actually christy yeah
yeah i've been on her show and she's been on mine she's she's great so sorry i interrupted you no it's fine i've been
on her show too we're in that kind of very incestuous small world thing [Laughter]
christy site i will return to time and time again as examples to the clients i work
with for how to knock an about page out of the park so at the top in this hero this is what we're talking about with a
headline we're pulling people in she's using that word you like you we're tired of seeing
compromise in the fashion industry then as we go down
it's still talking about maybe a problem in this case that the customer has so if you remember the horse example i gave
we're talking about issues that they all get this is what her customers are sacrificing just to look stylish
then check this out matt she's got some icons here now i would love to see these icons maybe be a
little bit different instead of the check marks like maybe actual visual representations but you can
absolutely do this so do you see we're chunking the text out here right yep yep and we're bringing in visuals behind the
scenes her measuring things what's going on you know in the back room with how she's
making the clothes she goes on with more chunks of text that are more still about the customer
but they're starting to be also about the company so fast fashion and trends are disposable our clothing isn't so at
this point we're moving away from it being totally focused on the customer and more about encircled being the
provider of the solution to this problem okay
another chunk of text a cool photo then i want you to see like she talked
her about paige actually goes it's more in depth than i think a lot of companies need to do
but if you go down here not near we're talking down the page
finally we hear christie's founders story okay so it segues into
why she made what she made so why did she create encircled
and then we're gonna get to this in a minute there's something really important going down here with a call to action
now now i would love to show a couple other examples but i don't know if we have time for that what do you think no no let's do it let's go for it yeah yeah
because i think when people see there's more than one way to kind of skin this proverbial cat it's helpful yeah yeah so
the kind bar have you heard of them like do are they in the uk yeah they are yeah yeah yeah
tasty expensive tasty bars yes exactly there's this one i love and i
won't get into it but anyway i know what to say for christmas now that's the main thing
but you've got to get the right one i like it when it's nice and chewy okay anyway now people are going to be sending me
chewy kind bars you too matt yeah yeah with detroit-based pizzas yeah yeah it's fun
um kind bar this is their headline at the top this is their about page
so we've got that power word the u yeah the your okay
and then what's a little different here that kind bar is different from what i showed you
on encircled is they kind of move right into their mission and values
but they're still tying it to their customers so we've got a blurb a headline we believe if you
can't pronounce an ingredient it shouldn't go into your body so there's still that you're there it's merging the
two stories together of the company and the customer and then look at what they're doing with the photos it's really cool they've got
these nice ingredient shots it's kind of creating the sensory experience for us it's a really good idea for food brands
and then this is their call to action in the middle if you want to go work for them
they've got company photos here but do you see how the design okay there's something i want to get into the dime is
really broken up but this is interesting we've got more about the founder and i
think you absolutely depending on your brand can do fun things like this little
tidbits that are about your personality so christy for example could have done this what's her favorite um dress uh
where's her hometown what's her family like is there a tv show she likes this just humanizes your brand even more and
people will be like oh my god his quote is my favorite quote i have found my people in my place
right and um i'll show one more
um that's a little different it's casper mattress okay okay
so they're starting out of the gate about themselves and i'm not
in my opinion i think casper could probably bring in their customer a bit more but design wise they very well
emulate this whole idea of chunking bits and pieces headlines and even though they're talking about
themselves here we believe sleep is the superpower that charges everything that people do do you notice there's a
difference between a sentence like that and something like we believe that we have the best
mattresses in the world yeah right this is actually customer centered
it is but do you think they could take that headline further so for those who are just listening to the audio podcast i'll just read the headline out here it
says we believe sleep is the superpower that charges everything people do
if you just took the word people out and trans and just put the word you in
there you know you talk about you see that instantly changes that sentence doesn't it it becomes we believe sleep
is a superpower that charges everything you do oh just see what i mean it's instantly
changed hasn't it yeah so before we have a wall we're talking about these ambiguous people who
are these people but you believe that superpower uh sleep is the superpower that charges
everything that i do as i'm reading this wow i'm leaning in tell me
more yes so exactly they're just can you see how you can just tiny tweak what you
might already have to make it more customer centered yeah you go down the page and they
we could they could it's fine that they've got we've dreamed a big dream but maybe it's here we're here to awaken
you to the potential of your well-rested life yeah that kind of thing
they have a video on here that's something else you could pop on your about page it will may increase the time
spent on this page which sends a signal to google that um
people are really liking the page the more time that's spent on the page the more google basically makes it important
so a video can help with that and but you can see it there's this similar
idea of chunking things having little bits and blurbs for people who latch on to but where casper could take and tweak
it a bit further is again like we talked about matt pull that customer into the story more with some of these headlines
yeah yeah i think you're right i do like the design of their about page i think listening to you talking about their
their text um i think they could definitely improve that which is probably why caspar is
just sort of blending i don't know if it's the same in the uk but uh sorry in the states but in the uk caspar have
kind of blended into this whole mattress company ether where there's like companies
all playing now and so to stand out is becoming more and more complicated um
and so i think they could definitely rework that uh from a text point of view to draw
people in you know i yeah like you said making the customer the
hero yeah yeah yeah that's really interesting so those are a few different examples of
how you can do this and but you can kind of see this unifying theme here of it's not a long block of
text and it's not all about you yeah no i like that and i and one of the things that i um i i i let me just bring
this back here one of the things that i i noticed actually um as you were scrolling through them very short
paragraphs of text very chunked up with images from a design point of view made it easy to skim through
but the bit about the founder was towards the bottom of the page right
on both those sites both on encircled and and kind this sort of founder bit was at the bottom
which i thought was quite fascinating because i kind of figure if you've got that far down the page you now want to
know about who the founder is right and it's kind of that i think it's very clever the way they've
done that and they've kind of warmed up the audience and now they're getting drawn into the founder story
but the founder story is not at the top and i thought that was that was very
well done you know you're drawing them in step by step and if they've got to that stage they're going to read the
founder story because they're going to want to know about you right so very very clever
i like your examples reese i thought they were brilliant really really good thanks
you know matt you were talking about once people are at that point on the page
they're going to probably want to read about the founder well we can take that idea and expand it
further i showed you at the bottom of encircled she had some pictures to her best
sellers yeah and then casper i don't know if you
caught this at the bottom has a email list sign up
so here's the idea if people have taken the time and you've kind of chunked out your page this much
so they're browsing with intention they get to the bottom it is such a ripe opportunity
for capturing a next step and having a call to action whether it's to go shop some specific
things in your shop best sellers or to get an email to sign up or in the case of the kind bar they were trying to
encourage people to come apply for their company but this is a missed opportunity that i see
places that even have really nice about pages will often just end at the bottom it's like people just spent five minutes
on your page they're probably the most invested that i've ever seen a customer on a page in
general and now you're just gonna leave them hanging no you're gonna capture this opportunity man
yeah yeah the call to action yeah it's so it's it it's these little
things isn't it and i appreciate if you're you know if you've not got the experience and you're new to ecommerce
and you're just building your business there's all these things that you don't think about that when you hear you know re talk about the call to action you go
well of course you're going to put a call to action then why would you not it's the most sensible thing in the world to do
and i i find often with e-commerce none of this is rocket science a lot of this is just straightforward common
sense but if you don't know you get so called up in it don't you you get so tunnel visioned in what you're trying to
do that you you don't think about it from the customer side you don't think about the sort of the customer journey
and and i think actually if you do that with your about page if you do that with
every page on your website to be fair you kind of you know you win in the battle and so i love that they've got to
the bottom of the page they're the most invested they've ever been give them something to do what's the
next logical step for these guys to take at this point is it to sign up to your
newsletter is it to go browse something what is it now i don't
one of the things that i've noticed over the years recently i don't know if you've if you've got any experience with this actually
as well is the people that come to your site they're at different part there are
different places in the buyers journey aren't they so some are ready to buy i mean they're red-hot right and some i'm
just kind of browsing just having a look i'm not in a rush to go anywhere i want to know you know i'm going to make an informed decision and blah blah blah
and so you've got to think about the different types of customers that you have
one of the common themes i've noticed with all of these customers is they a lot of them will go to your about us
page if it's well crafted they will stay on it they will engage with it so what sort of calls to action do you
think work particularly well on the about us page
um it's a tough question basically because of what you described where we have
different people at different points in their journey and even one consideration could be you have someone who bought a
product from you before visiting your about page and they're actually going to your about
page to reinforce in a positive way this buying decision
that they made like it's psychology with that said my personal favorite and i don't have
big data to back this up map i really like encouraging to sign up to the email list because
man we live in a time where it's so increasingly hard to acquire customers through ads got we we could have a whole
episode on that yeah and other and so i'm really pushing people to do whatever
they can to get the customer or potential customer on the email list so you can
have that one-on-one conversation i think there's a case to be made for sending them to a product pages to buy
but i think matt a lot of times conversion is not this instant event where someone
comes to the site and within five minutes or less it's their first experience they come to the site they buy something and i think a lot of
people think that's how it works but it may be more like they come and then a couple months later
they remembered they wanted that thing and then they come back and there's a bit more lag time here that is
affecting conversion rates and because of that that's part of why i like encouraging the email list sign up more so than
pushing the product page because i can always push them to my product page from an email if i get them on there that's
my take what but i i mean this is what part of why i love these podcasts is we get to talk about and nerd out together
what do you think what's your take on this i think you're totally right i think the um the the call to action is all you've got
to have it somewhere on your about us page join our email list and again you've got to present that in a way that is a tr you've got to give them a really
good reason to sign up to your email list not you know sign up to my email list i'm going to spam the crap out of you right people are just not they're
not interested um but it's like if you if you inform people of a great reason a great benefit to
sign up to your email list they're going to do it especially if they've got that way you know all that way down the the bottom of the page i also find putting
links like instagram feeds in on the about as page works people will connect with your social media from the about
page um but again i think it like you i it all comes down to
who's on there and at what point of their journey are they you know are they are they already subscribed to your email list could you know this do you do
you have a cookie on their computer which is a bit more tricky to do these days or maybe i show them something else do i mean if they if i if i can make my
about us page a bit smarter you know as my business grows to show stuff maybe
they've been to a specific product page three times let me show them that product you know or maybe a blog post
which talks about that product so they can start to dig in a little bit um
i know if people are like me and i you know most people are we're all fairly similar creatures of habit i'll go to
the page the product page i'll watch the videos i'll come back at a later date blah blah blah and i've got to feel
confident in that company it's fundamentally what i've got to do and so the about us page getting me to
sign up to the email getting me over to the social media getting me feel like i'm connected with you in some way
that's a win for me that is a win because like you say not everybody's ready to buy straight away and it's a
bit like a courtship isn't it it's like you're not you've got to win you've got to win them you're not going straight to a marriage
proposal right we've got we've got to win these people and you never win anybody on the first date by
just talking about yourself the whole time just it just never happens so basically rules of dating
if you don't want to be a douche about it apply to e-commerce credit pretty much everything
we do don't talk about yourself first you'll be
fascinated in your customer do what matt's doing now while we're having this conversation look them in
the eyes be very engaged how do you do that digitally i think what happens matt is
everything that we know about human nature inherently as humans flies out the door when we sit in front of a
computer and we start hacking away at our website and it's for some of the reasons you cited a lot of people listening are doing it
themselves they have tunnel vision and that's not a judgment that's like me having empathy for the fact that you
have so much on your plate it's hard to know and see all of this that you alluded to and
it is a lot of is common sense but we forget in the digital world how to bring common sense over to our websites but
you've gotta rule people you gotta court them you need to make it about them and when you do that they'll love you if you
do it right yeah and by doing it right it's not manipulation
it's actual general it's it's a general care you know it's like i i care about
our customers i have a general con we're authentic we're transparent we like people we want to see the if we're not
the best for people we will tell them and if you've got that attitude if you have that
coming across in your content in your about us page i think people buy into it and i think
people connect with that they do i do believe matt that when you
are sincere in your intentions you really are coming at it from
not an intention of manipulation but of connection um having resonance seeing that customer
empathy all that good stuff creating an amazing experience people can pick up on that sincerity um
just like they can pick up on sincerity and within five minutes of a conversation with someone there's there's a reason you and i were like
yeah let's do this show together because we jived and you want to create that kind of dive
for people with the words you use the even the images you select all that stuff it'll tell them you belong here
you belong here that's great i love the fact you use the word jive
yeah yeah it's not a word i hear much these days but the fact you used it was great
jive brilliant listen rhys i'm aware of uh
i'm aware of time and i i i like with all i guess i just i love it i
love these conversations you feel like you learn a lot i don't know about you i always feel like i learn something new every time i have this kind of
conversation it's brilliant and it gets you excited and it makes you rethink about about your whole business in some
respects so thank you for your time it's been absolutely wonderful to chat with you
if people want to reach out to you if they want to connect with you how do they do that
great question i'd love to connect with anyone who wants to come my way say hi
um really probably the best way is if you want to grab
one of my goodies i've got a like website fixes that you can do fast that might be causing you leaks if you go
there you'll get my emails say hi like reply i replied every email i received and you can get that at by
designbyrees.com forward slash fixes if you just want to say hey and you don't want to sign up for that it's fine
i'm not going to push you into it you can find me on instagram reese spikerman like one word
all one word and you'll be there in michigan eating your pizza no doubt
yeah of you yeah absolutely no listen
rhys honestly it's been absolutely wonderful thank you so much uh for being with us we will of course
link to uh reese's website and the freebies and all that sort of good stuff
which you can sign up for in the show notes as well uh but for now until we have you on again recent no
doubt we will uh thank you so much for being with us really really appreciate it thank you
thank you matt bye everyone didn't i tell you didn't i tell you that
rhys would be great and she did not disappoint this is one of those episodes where i kind of
think you might want to watch the video to see some of the screen grabs i tried my best
to sort of explain what was going on and and why reese was you know talking about some of the things that she was talking
about but you may you just may want to go watch the video which you can do on our
youtube channel just go to youtube.com ecommerce podcast look out for reese's episode uh episode
number and you will see it there we will of course link to this video episode in the show notes
ecommercepodcast.net forward slash and you can find all of that but thank you again reese absolute legend i loved
that interview genuinely loved it um extrovert no no no detroit pizza oh yes
yes we definitely want to try some of those okay so coming up next week we have joseph wilkins who is actually a fellow
brit but he is living in the us at the moment and joseph has created some of the best
and most entertaining videos on the web so i was super keen to talk to
this guy i've got a big thing in my head about video and e-commerce and how it's the two things are inextricably linked
for our future yes they are and so next week we get to deep dive into joseph's eight-step process for
video creation you're not gonna want to miss it so here is an excerpt and what
you can expect the most important part is making sure
you know before you produce this video that people are actually going to respond to it and that doesn't just mean
laughs to it that means understand what the problem and the solution is that you're presenting and what the offer is
that they're supposed to take advantage of when the video is over
so there you go that's joseph next week make sure you subscribe to the podcast or to our youtube channel and you'll get
access to joseph's insights as soon as they come out just like you got access
to all the amazing stuff that reese bought for us today finally one last time
ecommercepodcast.net forward slash is the link you need to get the transcripts and notes and the links to all of
reese's stuff so do check out the website that's all from me thank you for listening have a great
week i'll see you next week so bye for now
you've been listening to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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