Product descriptions play a critical role in defining the success of any e-commerce store. Product content or descriptions hold significant weight in purchasing decisions, with 87% of customers rating them as extremely or very important. Moreover, 50% of buyers have returned items purchased online due to discrepancies with the product description.
Combining your creativity with optimization can improve your marketing copy and boost your conversion rate.
Apart from strengthening your sales strategy, they offer your customers important information about your products, allow you to build your brand voice, reduce cart abandonment, and convince existing and potential buyers to make a purchase. However, many marketers struggle to write effective descriptions while creating online stores.
To make it easier for you, let's explore the importance of product descriptions in more detail, along with proven strategies to help you write compelling yet informative product descriptions.
Understanding Product Description
A product description is a marketing tool for a brand to communicate information about an item effectively. It highlights the product's key features and unique value proposition while addressing the specific issues it can resolve for the customers.
A well-written product description lets you make a good first impression on your audience by enticing them at first glance. Good product descriptions consist of several important elements:
Name of the product
Key features of the product, such as weight, color, dimensions, and durability
Headline
Keyword enrichment
Product benefits
Brand voice
The Importance of A Product Description
Product descriptions play an important role in increasing conversion because they can influence customers in many ways.
Here are some of the key benefits of well-written product descriptions that often help organizations boost profit:
A good product description offers concise and accurate product-related information, leaving no room for interpretation or confusion.
Product descriptions written using the right keywords can help you improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), making you rank higher for customer search queries. The best way to optimize your product description is to use tools like SEO extensions on your store. What you need to make sure of here is to use keywords that are relevant to your product.
Apart from bringing you more website visitors, it brings you more conversions as well.
Tips To Write Compelling Product Descriptions
A good product description should offer users all relevant details and convince them of its key benefits. If you are not going to outsource content writing to copywriting services, here are some other ways you can improve your product descriptions-
1. Understand your target audience
The most compelling product descriptions address the target audience directly and personally. To better understand your current customer base and preferences, examine your sales history and analyze the types of customers currently purchasing from you.
Look into their geographical locations, referral sources, and other relevant data from their interactions with your site. Additionally, researching your competitors' target demographics can help narrow your target market.
Answering the below questions can also help you write enticing descriptions for your products:
What kind of tone does your target audience prefer?
What are the most common questions your customers are asking?
How do they prefer to interact when you are selling products in-store? Can you have a similar conversation online?
2. Highlight product benefits
While you may want to show your product's best features and unique specs to your customers, the buyer is not necessarily interested in the regular or mundane features of the product.
The content of your product description should therefore be written to convince potential buyers of how it will improve their lives in obvious and measurable ways.
Before you begin writing your product descriptions, one of the best practices is to make a proper outline of the features and benefits of your product. Consider how the product solves a pain point or benefits the consumer directly.
To come up with product benefits, your product selection on what to sell needs to be on point. Use e-commerce product research tools like SaleHoo Labs to find in-demand, profitable products for your store.
3. Use appropriate and eye-catching words
When writing product descriptions, one way to catch your reader's attention is by using bullet points with eye-catching, descriptive words. For instance, you can use words such as 'best,' 'easy,' 'guarantee,' etc., to attract customers.
Apart from this, ensure your product description is simple yet to the point to help customers clearly understand what they are buying.
Refrain from adding too much or too little information, as it can confuse customers, making them move away from what you are offering.
4. Offer social proof through reviews and testimonials
Many customers prefer to go through detailed reviews and testimonials before finalizing a purchase. A product review or testimonial from a previous customer has the potential to make or break the purchase.
The more positive the reviews are for a product, the more the chances of customers buying it. To get creative, you can add testimonials from previous buyers to your product description. Some stores go the extra mile and use video testimonials using a teleprompter and a video platform like BIGVU.
Reading use cases and testimonials can help your customers relate to existing product users and make faster purchase decisions.
5. Convey urgency and FOMO to users
Another strategy for writing good product descriptions is to use specific words that induce the fear of missing out (FOMO) among users, like "limited" or "now."
Incorporating such words into your product descriptions can create urgency among users and greatly influence their purchase decisions. If you are already running a promotional campaign, make sure to include it in your product descriptions for the same reason.
6. Perform A/B testing and iteration for your product pages
Regardless of how perfect your product descriptions look at first glance, it is always a best practice to split-test them for different factors.
Also known as A/B testing, split testing enables you to easily compare two variants of the same thing to determine which performs better.
The best way to approach A/B testing is to test your product descriptions for different formats, lengths, fonts, sizes, and more, then analyze metrics and user feedback to improve the copy.
This information will allow you to better iterate/optimize your product pages based on performance data and boost e-commerce conversions.
In Conclusion
In today's competitive e-commerce ecosystem, product descriptions are no longer the simple block of text that marketers must include in their product range.
Businesses must write compelling product descriptions that sell and entice their customers. It is, therefore, important to be creative by including anecdotes, stories, experiences, benefits, questions, insights, or any other unique element you can think of while describing your product.
When writing a product description for your e-commerce store, think from the audience’s point of view and structure your copy accordingly.
The end goal should be utilizing product descriptions to communicate brand ideas, foster client engagement, and ultimately establish a trustworthy relationship with your audience.
If you are an online merchant looking to build a successful online store with a great product description, OpenCart offers a free open source e-commerce platform, to begin with.
Contact us to know more.
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