Own or looking to start an ecommerce business and don’t want to fork out thousands for expert written copy? I don’t blame you.
How to Write Product Descriptions
In fact, learning how to write product descriptions for ecommerce will further allow you to be a benefactor of your online endeavors. Knowing what strategies to use when writing content for your ecommerce website will promote your business to exist sufficient upon yourself, not expensive creative professionals. Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?
Use A Natural Sales Tone
Competing as an ecommerce store is volatile. No matter the niche or product, reality is people are not naturally compelled to buy from you. Thousands of other vendors exist selling products similar to yours, and customers are ready to buy from any one of them. There are only two ways to sway the perception that digital customers have. Either have a product that is dramatically different, and better, than the rest of the market or earn loyalty towards your brand.
Products that are vastly superior than anything else out there sell themselves. Utilizing a strong brand and marketing strategy helps to broaden the scope of these businesses, but is hardly ever the driving force behind sales. Product descriptions in these cases do not need to be written with a hard sell. Instead, highlight key features and perceived benefits. Inform customers of your product, not necessarily why they need to buy it.
For the other ecommerce businesses who sell great products that are not uncommonly unique, it is important to inform customers and encourage them to buy. Since the product you are selling is unable to sell itself, the product description will need to persuade instead. Always appear conversational in product descriptions. Descriptions that read as “pushy” lead many site visitors to stray from the product. Appear genuine in elaborating on perceived benefits to earn the user’s trust, who then will learn to trust your brand as a whole.
Identify With Pain Points and Desires
Anyone with a motive to buy has either a pain point or a desire. Whether it’s finding a tool to solve a problem they’re facing, or wanting to treat themselves to something nice, everyone is motivated to buy based on pain points and desires.
Appealing to pain points is relatively simple. So long as your audience has been properly identified, offering a solution to the challenge they’re facing increases the likelihood of them buying. As a user begins to notice that a specific product offers solutions to the majority of their challenges, they will feel compelled and satisfied with purchasing said product from you.
Identifying with desires is a bit harder. Audience desires involve thinking past simple direct response marketing. Picturing yourself in the shoes of a random audience member, think about their aspirations, goals, and other self-actualization needs. These same needs will likely coincide with their objectives in buying your product. Test various sales lines that appeal to your audiences’ assumed aspirations. Outline how your brand will help a user achieve their actualization goals in the context of the product you’re selling.
Write For People and Search Engines
Ecommerce product descriptions are oftentimes wasted SEO opportunities. Many businesses opt to prevent search engines from indexing their product pages, causing them to miss out hundreds, if not thousands, of long-tail keyword rankings. From a user perspective, a page that is a direct match to the actionable query searched provides additional motive to buy. As many users see it, a high ranking product page entails a reputable seller as well as quality product.
To rank product pages highly on search engines, optimize headings, images, and where content is most prevalent: the product description. Don’t “keyword stuff” a description in hopes that it’ll rank. It won’t. Even if a high position could be earned by keyword stuffing, attempting to maintain such a ranking is much harder than just using organic content. Feel free to use the product name, related synonyms, and even a more general keyword in the description. Just make sure that the content reads naturally, otherwise you could jeopardize the ranking and sales potential of the product.
Utilize Social Proof
Every brand writes about their product being so great. Readers have conditioned themselves to be relatively disinterested in these claims. Unbiased and positive reviews of your product are more effective in elaborating perceived benefits than just a business claim alone. Incorporate one to two outstanding reviews into the description itself, or opt to have on-site reviews that users can contribute towards regularly. Either strategy works well, but if you find a customer who was blown away by your product, it’ll have the most sales drive directly in the description.
Set a Key Performance Indicator
Using a key performance indicator (KPI) helps to establish a time bound metric on a particular piece of marketing. In the case of product description copy, use a KPI such as total revenue growth to help analyze whether your copy is actually driving sales. If revenue growth is substantial then your product description is doing its job in getting more customers to buy. Notice no change in revenue, then it is likely best to rewrite the content and analyze results after a specific time period.
Of course, KPIs as general as total revenue won’t provide much information to large ecommerce stores. Instead, opting to use metrics regarding conversion rate or organic rankings would be a good indicator of product performance. KPIs can vary from business to business, the most important takeaway being: have some way to measure product/page performance in order to identify whether descriptions need to be adjusted or are succeeding in motivating the user to buy.
