The beauty of e-commerce is that you don’t have to maintain a physical storefront, vastly reducing the overhead costs and barriers to entry. And if you’ve adopted a model like dropshipping, then you don’t even have to manage inventory.
However, you also don’t have professional sales staff who can answer every question that customers have and encourage them to buy. That’s where your product descriptions come in.
A well written product description does more than just inform your customers of features and specs. It pushes them to hit that “add to cart” button and checkout. So in this post, we are going to look at 7 steps for how to write a good product description.
7 Steps To A Perfect Product Description
Looking to hire a pro to write your product descriptions for you? Check out the freelance product description writers on Legiit for top notch talent.
Otherwise, here are 7 strategies you can use to learn how to write a good product description on your own.
#1 Understand Your Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is basically like an imagined audience.
Who is going to be browsing your website? What demographics do they fit into? What are their interests, hobbies, wants, and needs?
Answering questions like these informs how your product description should speak to your customer. A twenty-something stay-at-home mom browsing for a Valentine’s Day gift in the few minutes of downtime she has while the baby naps is going to have very different needs than a soon-to-be senior citizen empty nester.
You should take a few minutes to write a few sentences that capture the gist of your ideal customer. Once you do that, you are ready to apply the following tips for how to write a good product description.
#2 Identify Your Buyer’s Pain Points
Pain points are the problems that your customers are having. Specifically, the problems that your product will help them solve.
Someone shopping online for robot vacuum, for example, is sick and tired of wasting their own time keeping the floor clean. Someone browsing for a drone may be a photographer looking for a better way to take aerial shots or just a hobbyist trying to achieve better control in harsh winds.
Pain points are going to vary greatly depending on exactly what it is you sell. And they will likely change from one product to the next. But if you can identify them, you can focus your product description around solving those pain points so that your customers feel like you are speaking directly to their needs.
#3 Highlight Benefits – NOT Features
Once you know your buyer persona and their pain points, it’s time to actually start writing those product descriptions.
You may be tempted to just put the manufacturer’s specifications in paragraph form, but this is usually a surefire way to turn customers off. The only exception is when you’re selling in a niche where the customers are likely to have a good deal of technical knowledge about the product (such as selling parts for DIY gaming computer builds).
Instead, you want to highlight the benefits. That is, the ways that the product solves your customer’s pain points.
A good strategy is to never state a feature without also tying it to the benefit that it provides the buyer. Here’s an example: “The dual coils in this mattress help prevent excess heat from being locked inside, ensuring a cool night of rest.”
Notice how the product feature (dual coils) is directly linked to it’s benefit (keeping the mattress cool).
#4 Write Naturally
You don’t need a degree in Shakespearean literature in order to write a product description. And you don’t need to be a master of technical writing either.
Remember, your product descriptions are a replacement for real live sales associates. So just write naturally, the way you would speak to a customer. Don’t affect a grandiose tone or try to fill your sales copy with big words that you don’t use in real life.
A natural voice isn’t just easier for customers to understand. It also helps build trust with them because it proves that there is a person on the other side of the screen.
#5 Avoid Fluff
Internet shoppers are notoriously distracted. They will flit from one site to the next almost mindlessly.
Which means that every word counts when it comes to your product descriptions.
Avoid what your 8th grade English teacher would call “fluff”: meaningless words that fill up space without adding any value. Phrases like this:
- “This product is excellent in quality.”
- “You will really enjoy using…”
- “You’ll have a great time with…”
These are the sort of trite phrases that can be applied to pretty much any product in one way or another. See tip #3 above for how to stay focused on benefits. And when you run out of things to say there, that’s where the next tip comes into play:
#6 Evoke the Imagination
So if you are avoiding fluff, what are you supposed to fill up that 200 word product description with?
In brick-and-mortar sales, a common tactic is to get the product in the hands of the customer, because this will make them feel like it is already theirs. Online, however, you’ve got to recreate that feeling through the power of the written word.
So you write product descriptions that tell a story or evoke imaginative thoughts in the reader. For example, rather than saying “This mattress is excellent in quality”, you say…
Remember before you were married with kids? Before you had a toddler jumping into your bed at 2 in the morning? Before your spouse’s snoring shook the room like an earthquake? Remember how you used to actually sleep the whole night through? Well, our patented No Motion Transfer mattress technology makes those dreams of old a reality again.
#7 Don’t Overlook SEO
Finally, don’t forget that in addition to speaking to your customers, your product descriptions are also speaking to search engines like Google and Bing.
While a complete treatise on SEO for product descriptions is better left for a longer post, here are some quick and easy tips you can apply:
- Put your target keyword in the product title and the meta description
- Use variations of the target keyword throughout your product description
- Use your keyword and variations as the alt tag for any images you use
- When in doubt, look at what high ranking competitors are doing and imitate them (without plagiarizing!)
Connect With Professional Product Description Writers Today
We hope this post gave you everything you need to start writing good product descriptions for your e-commerce store.
If it looks a little out of your league, or if you just have more products to write up than you can reasonably handle, consider outsourcing some or all of the work. There are talented freelance writers on Legiit who specialize in e-commerce.
Reach out today and find the best one to suit your needs.
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