If you are in the business to sell a product, especially if your business is online and the customer won’t have the opportunity to touch and feel the product before buying, the product description needs to help you make the sale. If your product description doesn’t help the customer to make a connection with the item, they will likely abandon their visit to your website, and may even take their business elsewhere. As such, writing persuasive copy is essential to helping you close the deal.
But it isn’t easy to write compelling product descriptions. In fact, many creative writers will tell you that short pieces of content, especially product descriptions, are far more challenging to write than long-form content. With short-form content, you only have so many words to drive your point home. So how can you make sure that your product’s description will make a lasting impact?
Eight easy tips for writing engaging product descriptions for your eCommerce site
If you have a great product to sell on your online store, the next step is to make sure that your customer gets as excited to buy the product as you are to sell it to them. That means that in addition to great product imagery, you need a rock-solid product description. Follow these easy tips to help you write an engaging product description that will sell.
- Understand your target audience. Just like any marketing strategy, you need to understand not only what it is that you are selling, but who you are selling to. This means that you need to have a buyer persona, which is a fictional description of your ideal customer. This persona is developed based on market research and insight that you have uncovered regarding your intended customer’s demographics, behaviors, shopping tendencies, motivations, and goals. If you don’t know who your customer is, you will never be able to write a description that will appeal to their needs.
- Make sure your product description spotlights the product features and benefits. This means that you need to include factual statements that provide technical information about the product, as well as how the product will create positive change for the buyer. A good rule of thumb to follow is that for every feature to list, you should have a corresponding benefit.
- Provide all of the necessary information. Make sure that your product description is designed to create a reaction in the customer. You want to make an emotional connection with the buyer by providing all relevant details so as to convince them of the product’s benefits that you provided.
- Speak in a language and with a tone that your customer will understand. It is probable that at some point, you have heard the famous quote from Albert Einstein that “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” And this quote holds very true regarding product descriptions. Make sure that you use simple, everyday language. Writing your product description is not a good time to grab your thesaurus to look for flowery or complicated words. Make it easy for your customers to understand what you are trying to say.
- Practice the power pose in your prose. Just like when you stand in a power pose, using certain words and phrases will bring about an emotional response in prospective buyers. And this is an excellent outcome for eCommerce site [AJ1] owners as it means an increase in sales. When you are mindful of these words or phrases and use them effectively, you can easily convince your customers to take action and make the purchase.
- Be concise and save the verbose prose for your blog. Most shoppers will read less than 20% of the description that you write for the product, and that means that the shorter you keep it, the more likely they will read the entire thing, or will get the most essential information out of the beginning of the description. Make it easy for your buyer to find the information that they are looking for. A great strategy is to include bullet points or short paragraphs with just two or three sentences each. Consider using white space to make key points stand out, and only use bold font for the most important words or phrases.
- Don’t forget the importance of SEO (search engine optimization). Do your homework and understand the keyword terms and phrases that customers use when searching for your product. Google’s keyword planner is an excellent resource to help you find the right keywords, and once those words are identified, include them in your description. Especially important is to include the primary keyword within the product title, as this will be most meaningful to search engines.
- As we said at the beginning, in addition to the rock-solid product description, you need great product imagery. It is well known that the use of images will help a customer retain information that they have read. It is also true that customers will often spend more time looking at the images of the product than they will read the product description. So, when you do both (imagery + product description) well, you will be far more likely to get your customer to convert.
You don’t have to go it alone in writing your product descriptions
If you find a product description writing formula that works for you and your brand, that is great. Be sure to implement that formula and use it going forward. But, be sure to pay attention to how your products are performing. If you do not see the engagement you expected on the product, it might mean you don’t have the right formula yet. But, if you start to see a lift in sales after you have added your new description, proceed with making similar changes to the rest of your products on your eCommerce platform.
And if you find that you are still struggling, it might be time to get help. Shop Style Design is made up of highly skilled and experienced marketing strategy designers and developers. Our experts specialize in eCommerce site set up and design, and can you develop a product description formula that you can emulate going forward. Contact us to set up a free consultation so that we can help you help your site become profitable and meet, if not exceed, your goals.
