Write Great Product Descriptions for your Store
A product description is a version of marketing text or copy that explains what your product is and why it’s worth buying. The reason for product descriptions is to give customers enough vital information about the features of the product so they buy from your store.
When it comes to listing your product on an existing marketplace, product descriptions are accurate summaries of your product that a customer can read at a glance while still catching their interest.
No matter where your product is listed, eCommerce owners often fall victim to common mistakes when crafting product descriptions. Even professional writers make this mistake – that is, writing product descriptions that only describe your products.
Why is this a mistake? Excellent product descriptions need to support your product pages by selling your products to actual people, not just being a dumping ground for every bit of information available.
Let’s discover some new ways to write better product descriptions for your eCommerce store.
Know your audience
Before you can start writing your product descriptions, you need to know who your customers are. Doing this helps so you can include features that your potential buyers will enjoy.
What are the characteristics or your target audience?
As you start writing your product descriptions, keep these vital questions top of mind:
- How did this person arrive at your page/store?
- What are his or her general interests?
- Why is this person specifically interested in your Shopify store?
- How would this person describe your product to a friend?
- What features or benefits would interest this person the most?
Write about product benefits
When selling your products, you should be excited about individual product features and specs. We naturally embody our company, website, and products as eCommerce owners.
The problem we face is that often, our prospective buyers are not always as interested in arbitrary features and specs as we are.
Simply put, customers want to know how your product will address their greatest pain points and impact their lives positively. That’s why you should highlight the benefits of each product feature.
Focus on writing a description that makes customers feel happier, healthier, or more productive. Which problems does your product help solve, and how can you convey this through text?
Consider the format and tone of your text
Ultimately, writing only bullet points isn’t going to be the best way to explain your product honestly. It could be smart to incorporate a few different formats within one product description.
Bullet points should generally be used for technical specifications such as dimensions, or short phrases to highlight features. The benefit of bullet points is that they are quick and straightforward.
Crank it up a notch and add a paragraph or a couple of sentences together with your bullet points, and now you’re telling a story. Be creative and establish a voice/personality for your brand.
How would you tell an acquaintance about your product? Keep this in mind when choosing an acceptable format and natural tone. You don’t want to sound like a robot or machine when describing your products!
Don’t forget that by adding an ’emotional’ or story-telling element, your audience will be able to better relate to your products.
By using a consistent tone that matches your brand, you can build trust with your customers, and your brand will be much more memorable than thousands of other eCommerce merchants.
Keep it short and sweet
You don’t need to write an essay to sell a product. By sticking to crucial elements, you should be able to craft a simple product description that doesn’t skimp on the details.
You may also decide to incorporate ‘power words’ that elicit an emotional response when read by the viewer.
Some examples of power words include amazing, blissful, courage, delight, fearless, jubilant, miracle, sensational, stunning, uplifting, wondrous and more!
Your text should be easy to scan through quickly without sifting through too much information.
Let images speak for you
A solid strategy for crafting product descriptions includes knowing when the show and not tell. Your images should always be of high quality to display your product at its best.
If you think you are using too many words, it’s time to start including more images of your product. Maybe your product can be used in different contexts – nothing can show this better than a simple picture added to your listing.
Customers are more likely yo remember images. If you can, show off your product with a visual that explains what it does and what problems it can alleviate.
Similarly, you may consider using videos, graphs, infographics or a mix of these to appeal to customers. There’s no reason that you can’t do this, too!
SEO is your friend
In everything you do on your eCommerce store, you should be optimizing your content for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the easiest free ways to get new customers to your store.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) begins with keywords, which are typically the search terms that buyers will use to find the product they want to buy.
By doing some keyword research, you can quickly figure out which keywords are best for your eCommerce store.
For good measure, we recommend placing your keyword in your
- Page titles
- Meta descriptions
- Image tags (called ALT tags)
- Product descriptions
For a better idea of which keywords you should use, run your keyword through LSIGraph to create a list of related keywords.
LSIGraph is a tool which crawls the internet to find which pages are ranking the highest on search engines for your selected keyword. This tool will then list the most commonly used keywords on those specific pages.
This exercise will give you an indication of what is currently performing well on search engines and what you can use in your product titles or descriptions.
Conclusion
There are many things to consider when writing a product description. While it may seem like a difficult task, your product descriptions will undoubtedly improve over time.
Some things to take away include considering your buyer, keeping it short, using a natural tone, telling a story, using images, spending time on SEO and adapting the format to suit your product listings.
Need help with your store? Chat to ShoppingFeeder today!
