Everyone knows that the better a product sounds, the more likely it will convince a customer to follow through with their purchase. Depending on the product itself or the inventory available online, you may be looking at a lot of work to add a description for each individual item.
It needs to be done though. A product description can either make or break the decision your customer has before they buy. With that in mind, here are some tips on how to create great product descriptions for your business’s ecommerce website.
1: Know Who’s Shopping at Your Site
Much like the rest of your website, it should be obvious to customers who exactly you’re trying to reach out to in order to sell your products. What kind of lifestyle do they have? What are their interests? What kind of language do they use? What kind of tone? Knowing this can help out describing the product in order to entice the customer.
It may also help to think about how you would speak to these customers face to face, and then use that sort of tone and voice when creating the descriptions. This can make your copy sound very personable and approachable, instead of technical and alien—the way you normally sound when talking to your customers in real life! Using that conversational tone can also help entice customers more to buy something—even if it’s just a pair of shoes.
2: Focus on the Benefits
Features and benefits are the heart of every single one of your products’ descriptions. There’s a big difference between the two! Features are the facts about your product that you really need to include on each product’s page. Benefits, on the other hand, are explanations of what the features can do for your customer. For example, let’s say your product is a 2020 calendar. Its features are the paper used for printing, the theme of the calendar, and maybe it comes with stickers included. Benefits would be that this calendar is funny/cool/beautiful etc. so it’s pleasing to the eyes, it makes a great gift idea if it’s themed, and it improves your ability to schedule and plan.
Whatever types of products you sell, you need to know exactly who may benefit from using the item as well as how it may improve the customer’s lifestyle. Focus on these every time you look at your products’ descriptions. Even if the products are very similar to one another, that doesn’t mean each one will suit every single customer’s needs. Differentials are worth mentioning as well as the features and benefits. That way your customers know better what they’re shopping for, whether it’s the size of clothing, measurements for household purposes such as height or depth, etc. These are very basic things that surprisingly a lot of ecommerce sites seem to forget about!
3: Tell a Story
You don’t have to tell an overly long tale that’s as old as time in your descriptions, but giving people a broader idea about how this item could become useful to their lives helps when you tell a short story. Painting a picture of the people using your product in everyday situations can actually give them an even better idea as to how to use it.
For example, maybe you’re selling glass jars. Why not paint a picture of a toolshed filled with glass jars that can hold all the little bits and pieces cluttering the place? Or use the jars in a canning scenario in the kitchen, as a parent and their child bond over homemade jams and salsa? Even a pair of socks can be sold if you sell it with a little bit of a story attached. Whatever you decide, make sure it’s a simple story and not overly long.
4: Know What to Omit, Not Just Include
By this we mean you don’t have to put every single thing into your product description. Like we said, it’s good to tell a story but if it’s more than a single paragraph long, then it’s too long. It’s best that you cut that copy down and then leave room for more important things to feature on the page, such as a comment section for reviews and a bullet list of the features included.
Certain words can either make or break a product description as well. For example, calling something excellent or incredible really doesn’t say anything about the product. Boasting is a highly saturated aspect of ecommerce websites nowadays, so expanding on your sales vocabulary and thinking of more tactile words may be enough to improve them.
5: Never Repeat the Descriptions
This is a bad idea for a lot of reasons! For one, using the same product description even if the selection is very similar won’t help the customer’s decision any. They won’t be able to tell the real difference between one item and the other, so they may not buy the product at all out of frustration. If there aren’t images to help, that adds to the confusion and indecisiveness!
Another reason it’s bad to repeat the description is because Google won’t be able to tell the difference, either. Or it may consider your copy to be less worth ranking high up on its search engine page results (SERPs). Either way, repeated descriptions are bad in the eyes of both search engines and humans, because not only will they confuse everyone, it’ll make you seem lazy and inattentive to what you’re selling…and nowadays, not caring is something that can really drive customers away.
6: Optimize Each Description
Google Adwords may be a perk if you have a few popular products you want to advertise online, but even with that not everyone will click on an ad. That’s why every product page you feature needs to have organic search engine optimization, or SEO. Use keywords in addition to power words (words that entice or intrigue a customer, as opposed to boasting generically) when writing the description down.
Other ways of adding organic SEO is to write unique title tags and description tags for each product, as well as optimize the images with alt and title text. In addition, the product description itself needs to be written for your target audience and not for the robots crawling through your website via search engines. Google is smart enough to recognize when something is written to appeal to bots more than human beings now; why try and convince them when you can attract real customers instead?
7: Hire a Proper Website Company
We’re adding this tip because while a product description helps these types of websites for sure, you will absolutely get no leads or make any sales if your ecommerce website:
- Is not secure (i.e. it doesn’t contain an HTTPS)
- Is hard to navigate
- Leads to dead ends constantly
- Isn’t user-friendly (no one can leave reviews, call or e-mail your company for customer service or support, use a search bar, etc.)
- Consists of a design that’s over 10 years old (ancient history in Internet time!)
- Has no images to accompany your products, or the shots were poorly taken or show up as broken
- Has no SEO, or the copy was written as if for search engines instead of humans
- Has descriptions read as if rushed by your staff or someone who had no time to focus on the task as hand (odds are, they probably were!)
If this sounds like what you’re dealing with, then you’re going to need a professional website company to help your business out before you tackle the product descriptions. Give us a calland we can build you an ecommerce website that not only has great descriptions, but also will encourage customers to return time and again.