The prospect has entered your website and is now on a product page that fits his/her requirements.
The next step would be to convince him or her to buy your product.
How can you do it?
Simple, with an excellent Product description.
Around 87% of customers consider Product Descriptions as an important facet for conversion while buying online.
Source:https://thegood.com/insights/product-descriptions/
Despite the fact that Product descriptions carry such huge power, it can be a hard task to write one that converts.
This article provides you a step by step approach that you can use to create Product descriptions that sell and drive your conversions in the correct direction.
1. Understand your Customers/ Discover the “Buyer Persona”
The most important thing to understand while writing product descriptions is that “Everyone” is not your customer.
Start defining a Buyer Persona to understand who can be your potential customer.
If you understand your customer and have an idea about what is important to them, it will help you in understanding features that are more important to them.
Keep the following question in mind while writing Product Descriptions:
- How did the person arrive at your product page?
- What can be his/her interests?
- Why would be the person specifically interested in your store?
- What features of the product will interest this person most?
- How will this person describe the product to his colleagues or friends?
- Why should they buy this product instead of competitors
Buyer persona is an ideal representation of a general customer. By creating a fictional character around your ideal customer it becomes easy to prepare a suitable message that catches the attention of your audience.
Have a look at below description for a Salt Lamp from The Salt Lady:
Source:https://saltlady.com/
Here the buyer persona is not interested in just any lamp but a lamp with natural remedies for home against the allergies.
Therefore a potential buyer will be more interested in reading about these natural remedies rather than decorative features of the lamp.
2. Focus on providing solutions rather than highlighting features
As a business owner you must be excited to share all the features of your products with your customers.
But do understand one thing that your customers are not interested in mundane features of your products rather they are interested in knowing what they can really achieve with your product.
Providing all the specifications of the product in description is fine and is also sometimes necessary but product descriptions which are extraordinary speak of real benefits that help solve customers problems.
Keep in mind the following things while writing product descriptions:
- Help the customers imagine how they can benefit with your product
- Try to highlight a problem before you sell the product
- Try to make customers understand how they will feel while using the product by using sensory language
- Focus on latent needs of your customers
For example Welly does a fantastic job in conveying the latent needs of its customers. Instead of saying that “Bandages should be stored in a metal tin” they try to convey to its customers why tin solves the problem of a messy cabinet of medicine.
Source:https://www.getwelly.com/
3. Identify Relevant keywords and add them strategically into the content
It’s really important to optimize your product description for Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a simple method to bring new customers to your website and this can be considered as the first step in making customers buy your product.
Optimization generally starts with selecting the keywords, these are typically the phrases or words that probable customers will use to search for your product.
Search for specific keywords targeted at the products that you are selling.
The best tool of doing keyword research is Ahrefs. It crawls the search engines and organises keywords data in a concise and accessible way.
This will help you in identifying most relevant keywords that are currently performing well on search engines related to your products and which can be easily used in your Product titles as well as Product descriptions.
For better results, we will recommend you to place your keywords in:
- Page Titles
- Images ALT Tags
- Meta Description
- Product Descriptions
4. Making Use of Correct Tone for User Engagement (Tell a Story)
One important thing that you should keep in mind while writing Product Descriptions is that customers are no longer interested in descriptions which are written in a research oriented style.
The most effective content style to write a Product Description is storytelling.
A good story elicits a positive response from the customers.
The story could be around why the customer needs your product to solve a problem or a story about product benefits.
If the story is great enough it might make the customer to share the product page to his friends and family.
A mini-story helps you to connect with your potential customers on an emotional level rather than transactional level. This can be a key thing that helps turn potential customers into actual customers.
Try to answer below questions in order to tell story in your product descriptions:
- Who inspired you to make this product?
- What was this product’s journey?
- How will this product look in buyer’s day to day life
Setting the tone like this will help your customer understand your product that only specifications and features cannot do. This will help in establishing an emotional connection with your customer and making them forget that they are sold to.
For example, the company Innocent Drinks is a master at writing product descriptions in a storytelling format.
As you can see in the example below, they try to convince it’s customers through a provoking, relatable and appealing story.
Source: https://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/
5. Write in a Scannable Format
A typical human being has a very short attention plan and they typically can read only about 16% of what is actually present on the page.
It is really important that you capture that coveted 16% effectively through your product descriptions.
This can be easily done by making Product Descriptions which are scannable.
This means only including those information that are relevant to potential customers should be included in the Product Descriptions rather than wasting their time with other useless information.
You can make them easy to scan by making use of bullet points, small paragraphs with just 1-2 sentences each, including white spaces and fonts of different sizes.
You can easily write specifications into bullet points and stories can be easily placed in small paragraphs. The title of the product can be easily put into a heading.
You are less likely to lose a potential customer if your descriptions are easier to read and grab customers attention.
For example, Health Warrior does a fantastic job in writing scannable content for their chia seeds chocolate bar.
Source:https://www.healthwarrior.com/
They perfectly included bullet points, short paragraphs and different font sizes to convey product benefits.
6. Make use of Power words that sell
As we all know Power words play an important role in email as well as social media marketing.
Lucky for Ecommerce Store owners these also work for Product Descriptions.
By using these words in a correct manner you can easily convince probable customers to take the next step and buy your product.
Try to use descriptive adjectives while writing the descriptions. For example, rather than using just “nice and “good”, try to use words like “sensational” and “stunning”.
By using such power words in your descriptions you can convince buyers that your product is worth the purchase.
Below list of words can be used as reference for Power Words that can be in Product Descriptions:
Source: https://smartblogger.com/power-words
Conclusion
It will require a great amount of testing as well as creativity in order to master product descriptions. This article provides you 6 steps or tips that will help you in writing product descriptions.
If you stick to the above steps you will find it easy to write a description that sells.
Product Descriptions can be a great start if you are seeking to add more value to your Ecommerce site.
References:
- Word-of-Mouth and Referral Marketing Blog. 2020. 8 Easy Rules To Write Product Descriptions That Sell. [online] Available at: <https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/product-descriptions-that-sell/> [Accessed 7 August 2020].
- Nelson, K., 2020. 9 Tips For Writing E-Commerce Product Descriptions That Sell. [online] Izooto.com. Available at: <https://www.izooto.com/blog/product-descriptions-that-sell> [Accessed 7 August 2020].
- Visiture. 2020. 10 Tips To Help You Write Product Descriptions That Sell – Visiture. [online] Available at: <https://www.visiture.com/blog/10-tips-help-write-product-descriptions-sell/> [Accessed 7 August 2020].