If you’ve ever conducted business with a particular company over a long period of time, you’ve no doubt formed relationships with the people you regularly speak to and also built up a mental image as to what they look like. Understandable when more often than not, the only visual connection with them or their company is their website.
Say Cheese!
I have clients I’ve dealt with for years but never met face to face: all communication has been via phone or email. Recently though, one of those clients added staff photos and bios to their website and now I could see the people I had been dealing with all this time.
I quite liked the fact that I now had an image that came to mind whenever I communicated with anyone from that company and felt I knew them just that little bit better. At the same time, I got to wondering if staff images play a significant part in attracting website visitors and converting them into paying customers.
Good to See You
To my knowledge, there are no definitive statistics as to whether the use of staff images actually makes a significant difference to sales one way or the other, but from what I’ve researched so far, many companies feel that putting a face to the name is more about forging closer business relationships than anything else. To me, this makes sense because it follows that if a business relationship is strong and solid, the sales should follow naturally anyway.
No Pictures Please!
I’m sure those businesses that dislike the idea of displaying staff images have their own good reasons for not doing so such as data and privacy issues or perhaps just a preference for anonymity. Whatever the reasons their views should be respected as it’s obviously a matter of personal choice.
The internet has made it easy to form business relationships all over the globe but perhaps at the expense of personal interaction so the use of staff images on websites might in some small way go towards redressing the balance – or not, depending on your point of view.
Until next time.
