How To Write a Good Product Description For Your eCommerce Products
How many times have spent a good amount of time (and money) to get prospective customers to your website and have them view your products– only for them to end up leaving and going to a competitor’s website instead?
When asking yourself what went wrong, you will do well to remember this bit of age-old fishing wisdom, “If you fish with the wrong bait, you catch zilch” (the bait here being your product description). Likewise, if your product description isn’t appealing enough to entice your audience to hit that “add to cart” button, they won’t bite and all your efforts up till that point will be in vain.
The thing with eCommerce stores is that customers can’t see the actual product— your product images and descriptions are all they have to base their purchase decisions on. So it makes sense that they’d place a great deal of importance on your product descriptions.
But as important as they are in determining your conversion rates and sales, writing a product description that hits all the right spots is no easy task. The good news though? With a little bit of practice and some really solid tips, anyone can write a description that sells.
Read on to find out more about how to write a copy that sells.
Know who you’re selling to:
You can’t write the perfect pitch if you don’t know the audience your pitch is directed to. That’s why the first step to writing a product description that sells is defining your target audience. Do this by creating a comprehensive buyer persona of your ideal customer with data collected from market research.
Know who your audience is, their interests, and what product features would most interest them. Know what irks them and reassure them that you understand their frustrations. Follow up with how your product and its brilliant features will help alleviate their pain points and help them realize their goals.
Once you’ve clearly identified your prospective audience, you’ll be better equipped to craft a product description that is entirely centered on the needs of the targeted buyer. And ta- da, you’ll have struck gold.
Don’t be shy with information:
As any frequent online shopper would attest to, there’s nothing more annoying than a website that just skims over the product details, barely giving out any real helpful information.
Never be frugal when it comes to giving out product related information. As an online store owner, it’s your responsibility to give your prospects all the necessary information that they’d require to make an informed purchase decision.
For small online businesses especially, it’s crucial that you include detailed product descriptions. As opposed to a well- established, popular brand, you’re at a disadvantage in the sense that people might be more hesitant to buy from you. After all, they don’t know anything about you or your products. In these cases, an informative product description can instil in them the confidence needed to make the purchase.
Shake things up with a story:
Humans have been hooked on to stories since the beginning of time itself. Who can resist the appeal of a good, ol’ story, right? There’s just something so innately magical about them that creates this unique sense of connection and cultivates emotion.
Great marketers are well aware of the effect that stories tend to have on people, and tap into their power to build conversions and sales. Instead of plainly relaying all product details, be creative, and spark your customers’ imaginations with storytelling. You could use a story detailing how the customer needs the product or how the product would benefit the customer. Or better yet, you can think out- of- the box and come up with any entertaining story revolving around the product—something to hook the customer in.
Ain’t nobody got time for that— make descriptions scannable
You don’t need me to tell you that people have short attention spans. You need only look around (and probably at) yourself to find out.
So how do you convey the necessary information to an audience that only reads about 16% of what’s written on a page? You do so by making your text scannable.
A scannable product description is one that doesn’t waste the reader’s time by forcing them to labor through lengthy paragraphs in order to extract the relevant information. Rather, a scannable description includes bullet points, short, easy to read paragraphs and preferably, different font sizes and tons of empty space. With a neat and clear format, customers are better able to absorb the relevant details with a quick glance.
Optimize for best results
At the risk of stating the obvious, I’d like to reiterate how, in order to get people to read your product descriptions, you need to first get them to your page. Now, how do you do that? Through organic searches of course but why stop there? Why not amp up our chances of getting traffic to your website? This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.
The key to SEO is including the right keywords in your description. These keywords are the most frequent search terms that buyers use to find the product they’re looking for. Using a tool like On Page SEO Checker, you can quickly discover keywords that are relevant to your store. Remember, SEO can be your ticket to landing a spot on the first Google page, so use it wisely.
Watch your words
When writing your product description, remember that nobody wants to read a description that sounds more like a passage from an English textbook than a text meant to educate them about a product. Don’t go overboard with fancy words and adjectives in hopes of impressing your audience. All you’ll manage to do is put them off.
Instead, use a tone that’s natural and in tune with the overall tone of your brand. Read the description aloud to yourself. Does it sound natural? If it sounds like you’re having a real life conversation with a friend, your customers are more likely to connect with you, and therefore, buy from you.
Now that we’re done with all that, only one question remains— are you ready to snag prospects and increase conversions?
Best Headline Analyzers To Write Amazing Headings
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”-– David Ogilvy
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the headlines of your articles are the single most important element in determining your conversion rates. The actual article itself could be worthy of a Pulitzer, but still, nobody would care. Why? Because they wouldn’t even get that far, since headline just wasn’t engaging enough to grab their attention.
And with the amount of content being pumped onto the internet these days, it’s more important than ever to give your content, strategic, gripping headlines. But unfortunately, crafting such headlines is a mix of talent and skill that not everyone has. This is where headline analyzers come in.
These tools boil headline writing down to an exact science. A headline analyzer works to help you create and improve your article headlines by taking into account multiple variables like readability ratings, SEO analysis, niche, and data-based metrics, among others.
Let’s take a look at the five best headline analyzers available right now!
1- Sharethrough Headline Analyzer
One of the more sophisticated analyzers on the market, Sharethrough offers a clean, no hassles interface and provides users comprehensive feedback on their submitted headlines. On submitting, Sharethrough displays a headline quality score rating that quantifies how effective your proposed title is.
According to their website, this headline quality score rating is calculated using a complex algorithm that takes into account more than a whopping 300 variables and is based on principles of the Behavior Model theory as well as Sharethrough’s neuroscience and advertising research. That’s pretty darn impressive for a free tool, don’t you think?
It doesn’t stop there though— Sharethrough also gives you engagement and impression scores. These allow you to get an idea about what you’re doing right and what needs improvement, along with suggestions on how to improve your score. (e.g. use more alert/ context words).
The suggestions are based on metrics like passive language usage, headline length, use of alert/context words, etc. Another cool feature is that your headline testing history is stored so you can see how your overall scores have changed over time.
2- CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
While it is free to use, you do have to submit some basic personal information like name and email address before you can start using this tool.
Upon entering your headline, you will be provided with a total headline score that identifies and breaks down your heading into the following four categories:
- Emotional words
- Common words
- Uncommon words
- Power words
The aim here is to strike the right balance between all four— in order to achieve a high conversion rate; your headline should be powerful enough to evoke strong emotions in your reader, while still coming off as unique enough to differentiate itself from the myriad of click baits flooding the web.
You’ll be provided further extensive analysis through a visual representation that conveys to the users the pros and cons of their title by taking into account factors like sentence structure, grammar and readability, keyword usage and length. You’re also be provided with tips on how to further improve your total headline score.
Like Sharethrough, it also saves your headline history from monitoring how much your headlines improve over time. Moreover, with CoSchedule, you also get a little preview of how your headline would appear as a Google search result and on social media networks.
3- Advanced Marketing Institute – Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer
Every good marketer knows (and capitalizes on the fact) that emotions drive actions. The best headlines are those that tug at your reader’s emotions and compels them to read through your article/blog. But how do you know if your headline packs the right amount of emotional punch?
That’s where the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer comes in. Based on the research of Dr. Hakim Chishti, this free tool works by analyzing your headlines and assigning an emotional marketing value (EMV) to them in relation to their word count. The rationale behind such a score is that the basic sound tones of language are capable of arousing powerful reactions on an emotional level. Therefore, the higher the EMV score, the better.
Depending on your score, you might consider tweaking your headline a little (or a lot!). Not only that, but the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer also allows you to see what “type of appeal” your headline holds for your audience—intellectual, empathetic or spiritual.
4- BlogAbout by Impact
Specially designed for blog headlines, the BlogAbout analyzer asks you to fill out what the subject of your blog would be. And if you’re going through a creative rut and can’t think of any, you can simply choose from a list of options on the website.
Once your blog’s main theme is decided, the analyzer provides you with headlines that are formatted with blank spaces for you to fill in with your keywords. And don’t worry if you’re not satisfied with your results—you can simply hit the redo button and the analyzer will yield new and unique headlines, all of which will have blanks for you to insert your keywords in.
You also get the option of saving generated headlines for future viewing.
5- Answer the public
One of the most unique analyzers on this list, Answer the public isn’t your conventional headline analyzer tool. Unlike other analyzers and generators that provide results based on multivariate algorithms, Answer the public provides you raw data related to how your keyword is being used in search engines.
All of the data is broken up into categories like questions (when, why, where, etc.), comparisons (or, like, vs, etc.), and prepositions (can, with, to, etc.).
It’s easy to be intimidated at first by the sheer magnitude of the data–hundreds of headlines from popular search results on typing just a single keyword! But as you become used to it, you’ll learn just what parts to focus on, and you’ll see just how useful its results can be in crafting the perfect headline.