Your online store needs to make an authentic connection with your customers to thrive. Your visitors need to understand how your products are the solutions they need. When your customers connect to the features, benefits, and values of your products, your conversion rate goes up.
Even more important: Your website needs to reach your visitors and customers emotionally. This is the first step in creating true brand loyalty and building a long-term relationship with your customers.
How do you do this? By writing clear product descriptions that make it easy for customers to see how their values align with yours, and how your products make their lives easier, more productive, and more fulfilling.
Writing product copy that boosts your store's conversion rate isn't easy, but it is possible—and profitable. Here are five tips for writing for eCommerce—read them to learn how to craft product copy that makes an authentic connection.
1. Focus on the Motions Associated with your Products
Start writing your product descriptions by focusing on the emotions associated with your product. Your product may relieve some sort of emotional pain—maybe it's an app that streamlines bill-paying, a new type of shapewear that makes your customer look breathtaking in a slinky dress, or an office chair that relieves back pain.
Perhaps your product brings joy or pleasure to your customers—a pair of shoes that feel like bliss after a long day of work, or a plant-based protein that truly tastes and looks like fried chicken.
When you focus on emotion in your product copy, your customers realize that you understand them. You become the answer to their needs, which creates the desire to buy.
2. Make Every Product Description Unique
You may sell a line of products that share the same fundamental features and benefits. Let's say you sell phone cases. All of them protect phones against damage from drops and dings. All of them provide cutouts to give users easy access to ports, lenses, and buttons.
That’s all well and good.
But what makes each phone case unique? Why would a customer buy the bright red phone case with a superhero on it? Or the bedazzled phone case that sparkles in the light? Or the case with the subtle design that shades smoothly from black to gray?
Capturing the appeal of each phone case in your product copy is the way you capture your next customer. And writing unique product copy (rather than cutting-and-pasting between products) also boosts your SEO and searchability.
3. Write Using Words That Demand Attention
When writing product copy, you need to use words that evoke powerful emotions and grab the attention of your readers.
Audacious. Crazy. Fearless. Defying. Mind-blowing. Legendary. Triumphant. Uplifting.
These are all examples of powerful, emotional words. You might use them only rarely in conversation, but they're dynamite when you include them in product copy.
Pay special attention to the verbs you use. Many experts in product copy insist that each product description should begin with a powerful verb.
Bite into luxury... (when you're selling chocolates)
Play hard and long... (for an ATV or dirt bike)
Dazzle the room... (for a cocktail dress)
You get the idea. Choose your words carefully and strategically to keep readers engaged.
For more inspiration, check out CoSchedule’s list of Power Words.
4. Tell a Story
Some products seem to demand stories. And since human beings are naturally captivated by storytelling, this can work well in your product copy.
Does your product have a unique backstory? Maybe your dog's illness led you to create a radical new kind of organic dog food. Perhaps your wines tell the story of your family history, or each varietal has a name with a fascinating history of its own.
Perhaps the story is related to your company—think about how Toms Shoes donates shoes to charity (and makes sure customers know it). Or maybe the story is related to the ethical practices your company follows in sourcing its free trade coffee.
Your product copy may only take a sentence or two to allude to the story behind your products, but that single sentence can make a powerful emotional connection that draws readers in.
5. Format Your Product Copy So It's Easy to Read
No one wants to read a big block of text online.
Maybe your fifth sentence in that long, long paragraph is absolutely gold, a sentence that'll persuade any reader to click the Buy button. But none of that matters if your customer has stopped reading at sentence #2.
- Leave plenty of white space on the page.
- Keep paragraphs short. (Especially important if your customers will access your site via mobile.)
- Keep sentences short and simple.
- Use bulleted lists to draw readers' eyes to important features.
- Include images so readers aren't facing a wall of text.
For more ideas on how to properly format your product pages, check out HubSpot’s list of well designed product pages.
There's a direct line between great product copy and conversion rates. When you commit to following these five tips for writing for eCommerce, you'll amp up the quality of your product copy and can expect to see more conversions.
Eric Hoppe is an experienced marketer who has worked in the technology space for over a decade. His areas of interest lie in eCommerce and SEO, and his work in the content creation space has allowed him to work with industry leaders in both spaces.
