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An ecommerce website, boiled down to its dry essence, is a virtual salesman at best and a slow-to-deliver electronic vending machine at worst. Consciously or not, online stores are conceived, designed, and created to sell products while making as little personal contact with a customer as possible. And as such, well-written product descriptions can have a significant impact on a store’s success.
Put Yourself in the Customer’s Shoes
It’s a useful exercise to try to view your listings as your potential customer. In marketing, we do audience analysis to understand the needs, wants, and fears of those who might want to purchase our product. Before you create your listing, ask yourself these questions such as who might want to buy my product? Why do they want to buy it?
Know Your Audience, and Imagine Who is Speaking and Who is Listening
Before publishing everything into page, know to whom you are writing for. You should know the audience, and imagine who is speaking and who is listening. Imagine your best customers when you write and acknowledge that you will be speaking to multiple audiences at once.
Get Your Customer’s Attention
If a reader is not paying attention, even the most facile and persuasive writing becomes a blunt speech. Good product descriptions must quickly capture a shopper’s attention. It is best that you are able to grab attention very quickly. You can achieve this if you are willing to use strong words and questions. If you do, you are likely to achieve results in the end. Examples of attention-grabbing phrases are the following:
- “A Peppermint flavored lollipop, which contains real farm raised ants!” From Edible.com, this opening gets my attention without straying far from the product.
- “Walk into a room and make an impression.” From Pierotucci.
- “Meet Darth Talon, Sith Vixen.” Got noticed at Entertainment Earth.
Communicate, Persuade, Tell a Story
Once you have the shopper’s attention, communicate with them. Tell them a product story that first appeals to their emotions — human nature— and second, if need, offers logical support for the warm buying feelings they are experiencing.
“Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take hopes, dreams, fears, and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already-existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copywriter’s task: not to create this mass desire — but to channel and direct it,” explained Eugene Schwartz, author of the book Breakthrough Advertising.
When you tap into universal desires, try to:
Tell a story;
Use extremely specific examples;
Appeal to emotions first;
Use engaging, descriptive language.
Know your audience, get its attention, and communicate. Those are the keys to writing product descriptions that sell, in my view. We’ve focused on written words, but, of course, images, sounds, and video can also serve as compelling product descriptions.
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