Through many years of research on product details and those pages, it’s easy to realize that optimizing product descriptions is crucial. In fact, it offers high returns and is a low investment option for an eCommerce website.
The question is why. Ultimately, product descriptions are a huge part of the decision-making process for potential customers. About 87 percent of all consumers rate the product content is very important when they’re deciding on what to buy.
Therefore, if you don’t have an enticing description, you’re ultimately turning away money and missing opportunities for your online store.
With that, the goal is to have more traffic to your website, and a great way to achieve that objective is to write effective product descriptions. A product description focuses on defining your brand and why consumers should care instead of crafting the best sales pitch. Chances are, you’ve already started.
What’s more, you don’t have to do complicated tasks, such as rebuild your site, focus on PPC, or block out time to write each product description. With a little effort and a few steps, you can create or optimize existing product descriptions to become your friends, full-time salesperson.
Most people think that a product description is there to describe the product. Yes, the name suggests that, but product descriptions aren’t just there to tell others what they’re buying on the eCommerce site. They can also:
In a sense, product descriptions are retail associates who work 24/7 in your online store. Just as with a live associate, these descriptions could hurt or help conversions for the potential buyers.
If the product description does its job well, it draws visitors to your store. However, if it’s done improperly, visitors get frustrated and move away, hurting sales.
There are two primary extremes for a product description to land on. One is sure to generate sales while the other does not. You need to know about both to know where to go and not go.
This is where you don’t want to end up. With each product description example below, they are meh or blah. Typically, they make one of the mistakes listed below (or many of them)
Generally, they either focus too much on the product features and don’t take into account the target buyer and what they need.
The goal for your basic descriptions is to make the person feel like they need it immediately. That’s the job of your product descriptions. A product description example that fits the bill has all the right things:
There isn’t one perfectly great example because different methods and writing styles can all do a great job. Success stories don’t just come from a single template or technique. However, you want to tell the facts within the product description, explain why it’s needed, and focus on the features that the customer wants.
The product description template shown below is just a starting point when you write product descriptions. It’s more like a guideline than a blueprint, and you can and should customize it using the steps listed later.
You now have a rough outline for product description writing. Now, you take information about your brand, products, and customers to fill in the rest. Here are a few steps to help you along:
At the end, you should have a product description that converts potential buyers, though you should test the theory.
It’s important to remember that each person reading your product descriptions isn’t your ideal customer. You can’t sell to everyone because then you have no conversions at all.
To avoid that issue, speak to the ideal customer and ignore the rest. That means knowing who your potential customer is, what difficulties they face, and how your product helps them.
If you’ve never defined the ideal prospect, ask these questions:
With those in mind, you can create buyer personas, even if they’re rough. Keep those people in mind when you begin writing your engaging product description. If you must, tape the points next to the computer while writing your product descriptions!
Just remember to answer questions honestly. A great example comes from natural deodorant. The potential customer includes men and women who don’t want deodorants with chemicals. They stay stink-free for a while and can feel more responsible and healthier. Ultimately, they may worry that your product doesn’t work or you’ve lied about the ingredients. Compared to the competition, your deodorant does what it claims. With that, they might use words to describe your product like “fresh,” “natural,” “confident,” and more.
You should create a buyer persona for each product description you write!
Once you know who you’re talking to, you need to figure out how to do it. Do you need to be formal, or should you be friendlier? Chances are, natural language (like what you use in everyday conversations) is best for your product descriptions. Online shoppers want to feel like they’re chatting with someone instead of being pressured into buying.
Just as a retail associate might talk to you in a store differently, there are many ways to converse with a visitor. Make sure you keep your brand voice in mind and focus on tone.
Before you can master product description writing, you need to learn about tone and voice. For example, you might have the same voice when you speak, but the tone can change. You may talk quietly sometimes or have a more formal tone when talking with your boss. With that, your emotional state can change the tone.
Remember, when writing product descriptions, the goal is to figure out your ideal prospect and what state they’re in when looking for your product. What language might they use to search for it or talk about it?
Most companies focus more on the product features and quality of the product. However, they need to think more about the user’s results from using it. In a sense, your target audience isn’t as interested in the product benefits; they want to know what they can do with it. In a sense, they want to feel more awesome by buying and using it, and mundane features just aren’t where it’s at.
You can show them their awesomeness in the product descriptions. An easy way to achieve this is to frame the product benefit and relevant information into must-buy benefits. Yes, product quality is a concern, but don’t go into all the technical details right now.
For example, you should be:
To do a good job here, you need to focus less on the technical specs. The product description should include that information, but it can be lower in the text. Focus on selling the idea of your item instead of just listing features.
Specs are still important, and many people use them to decide if they should buy something. For example, what if you need a new water filter. You’re camping, and you could save time and money by not having to pay for water or refill them all the time.
However, you are short on space and don’t want to carry something heavy, so you need to know the weight, volume that the filter handles, and the molecule size. In a sense, you required that information to choose the best water filter, and product descriptions should focus on that but in the right location.
Yes, you need the specs, but the question is: “Where are they effectively placed?” The answer is as supporting material.
The best product descriptions start with tangible benefits that solve and illuminate customer problems before getting to the features. Once that happens, you can include the “nerdy facts.”
When you know what benefits you should lead with, you must balance out saying too much with saying too little.
You could deliver way too much information. While it’s useful, it’s overwhelming on those simple product pages. The “text wall” approach paralyzes visitors and makes them click off. However, you may not include enough details when you write product descriptions, and that can be just as bad.
In fact, it’s the most common mistake for product descriptions.
Think about it for a minute: Do you want potential customers to leave your site confused about what they looked at? The product description should explain it well enough that they know what to use it for and why they need it.
You should strive to have one paragraph of useful benefits, but make sure that it’s scannable. In a sense, the product descriptions should be structured for visitors to scan them quickly. Short paragraphs, bullet points, and headings can boost readability so that the product description is easier to digest.
With that, you’re also helping with search rankings. The search engine crawls your product page to know how to rank it. If you’re not writing effective product descriptions, it might think you’re a spam site. It’s important to be on the first results page, so don’t negate readability.
Consider this template for your next product description format:
Another great way to make the product description simple without value loss is to use a video. Many consumers dislike reading at all, so when they can watch something and know what it does, they’re more likely to do so.
Graphics and icons are a great way to create a skimmable product description without cutting the important information. Sometimes, you can even use them as the bullets, which draw attention to that feature.
Most of the top copywriters have a trick when writing product descriptions, and you can use it, as well: write directly to a single person.
For you, this ultimately means writing like you’re describing and selling this product to the prospect you identified in the first step. They’re standing in front of you, so you need to be energetic and persuasive. Try to use the word “you” when addressing the target audience because you’re talking directly to the person.
If you find that it’s hard to be persuasive, here are some more tips to create an item description that converts and persuades:
For example, if you’re talking about a skincare product, you should highlight how the visitor feels after using it (refreshed and brightened) and the lifestyle they can achieve (beautiful-looking skin).
Once you’ve written the description (or while you write it), test it by reading it out loud. Make sure it sounds like you’re having a real conversation with the targeted customer persona.
Pay attention to the words, and if you get tripped up on a particular phrase or word, that’s a sign that this copy doesn’t feel natural or sound great. Keep tweaking the description and read it aloud until there are no stumbles along the way.
You should also ask yourself:
If the answer to any of those is “no,” revise what you’ve written and continue to the next step.
You have no created your first draft of the product description. There may have been a few revisions here and there, but you’ve made progress and deserve a pat on the back. However, you’re not finished yet!
The last step is to run through the checklist below. It’s sure to help you ensure that you’ve got the big-ticket pieces in place, you’re not sloppy, and you’ve got SEO and grammar down pat.
Here are the big-picture checkpoints. Have you:
If all of those things are great, now you should consider the finer points:
Remember, these are all guidelines and not hard rules. For example, some brands might be very informal, so it’s okay and recommended to use those “lazy” words (but do so sparingly). If those are words that the target prospect uses in everyday conversation, it’s okay to sprinkle them into the description if you own a casual brand. It helps your writing feel conversational.
However, it’s best to treat “lazy” words as a bit of sea salt on your chocolate chip dessert. A few flakes are ideal, but if there are too many, it’s inedible.
Before you post it to your store, you must check for duplicate copies (plagiarism). You can find free plagiarism tools out there, but it’s probably best to go with Copyscape. That way, you aren’t stealing from another site. Remember, you should never copy the manufacturer’s product description. Search engines don’t reward cloned content.
While it is true that imitation is considered a form of flattery, you should never copy the description from a competitor or manufacturer’s website. No matter how you look at it, this is considered stealing, and you can get into big trouble by Google.
Even if the process was ethical (it’s not), there isn’t a guarantee that it could help you or be effective. You don’t know if that product description is already converting customers; you could be cheating from the low-end of the spectrum.
It could be the best description for that product, but it’s only ideal for that particular customer and brand. Yours are different, even if your products are similar. It’s well worth the time to understand those differences, both for marketing copy and product descriptions).
You can quickly search Google to find power words suitable for copywriting, and there are plenty of power adjectives. They aren’t baseless, and most of them use words that make you feel. Since purchasing something is ultimately emotional, words that make others feel powerful are persuasive.
However, adding them doesn’t necessarily guarantee that your persuasive product descriptions convert better. These words are indeed focused on action, but you must sprinkle them in and use them correctly. Otherwise, the visitor isn’t likely to do anything. With that, many of these words are just overused, and everyone’s tired of reading them.
Instead, focus more on bullet points and creating the problem/solution and go from there.
Now that you know exactly what product descriptions are, it’s time to go back to what you have and use the tips talked about above. While it takes time, it’s sure to improve sales for your online store and is worth the investment.
Optimizing and writing descriptions effectively isn’t difficult. Most eCommerce sites do it well, and you can, too. If you own an online shop, you must focus on the necessary site functionality features to ensure that people can navigate easily and find your products. However, once they get to the page, they must be compelled to buy.
Focus on creating the best product descriptions, and you’re likely to see conversions and more sales.
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