So here you are, congratulating yourself on work well done. Your product has finally launched, and your lead funnel monitor has just informed you that a website visitor has just made it to your product page!
They are at the last step before the significant conversion stage: just one last checkout button, and you’d record your first successful conversion.
You feel happy, euphoric even. And who wouldn’t? However, there’s still one big question– will they click the purchase button?
This might seem like a moot point, considering the potential customer has gotten this down the sales funnel—however, every step of the sales journey matters, including the content of your product page.
According to a recent study, 87% of consumers rated product content as either extremely or very important when making a purchase decision.
Conversely, 20% of purchase failures have been attributed to insufficient or unclear product information. This places product description on almost the same level as product price, which is usually the first factor a consumer considers before purchasing.
So, how do you create an effective product description?
This article goes into detail about how you can do that. However, before we go further, let’s take a closer look at what product description entails.
What Is a Product Description?
A product description is a copy that informs a customer of a product’s features and benefits. The product description aims to provide the customer with enough information to compel them to purchase the product immediately.
Visitors to your website should understand why and how your product meets their needs. Customers these days can easily and quickly compare products online, so you must stand out. Your product description is where you persuade customers to choose you.
Not only does a strong product description persuades customers to add an item to their shopping cart, it also helps to develop your brand’s message.
What Makes a Great Product Description?
Lots of factors contribute to the creation of an excellent product description. A great product description must be informative, exhaustive, and, most importantly, enticing.
Include information about the product that gives the customer a clear understanding of its nature and potential benefits.
Be sufficiently descriptive for the customer to visualize themselves using the product and feel like they have already purchased it.
Consider including the following when composing a description:
- The product title
- What the key benefits are
- Why it is necessary
- The product attributes
- The product size
How To Create a Product Description That Sells
Know Your Ideal Customer
Excellent product descriptions always take the target audience into account. To know which aspects to highlight, you must first understand your customer and what product features will appeal to them.
If you haven’t already, creating a buyer persona is a great idea, and numerous templates are available online to assist you.
A buyer persona is a research-based depiction of a perfect customer. Buyer personas describe your ideal customers’ daily routines, challenges, and decision-making processes.
After you’ve created your persona, tailor your description to their linguistic style. What language do they use? Do they use slang? What are the most likely questions they will have? Would they appreciate a little fun?
Typical factors such as age, location, gender, level of education, and so on will influence the language you use. With this persona in mind, respond to these questions on your product page.
Write Down Your Product’s Unique Selling Point (USP)
Even if your products are popular, highlight their unique selling point (USP) to make them stand out from the rest.
Use what you know about your customers’ personas, problems, and needs to write a USP that will sell. Make sure it tells people why they should buy your product instead of another one on the market.
For instance, let’s take a look at the following product description for a puppy toy at PetSmart:
This product description did a great job of pointing out what makes this product stand out. Not only did they include them, but they did it in a way that solves each problem a potential buyer might have been looking for a solution to.
When you write the features of your product, ensure they immediately solve the problem your customers are having. Buying is sometimes based more on how the buyer feels while reading about your product, so you want to make sure you appeal to their emotions.
Avoid Generic Languages
Avoid saying generic statements like “great quality” in your product description. The buyer expects this regardless, and it’s something that every business would say about their product. Since the quality of the product is not in question, there is no need to talk about it.
The buyer is only interested in your product’s main features and benefits. Google will like your page more if the features are as detailed as possible.
The more product benefits you can discuss or list, the higher your website will rank in search results. Search engines want informative and interesting pages, so your product descriptions should reflect this.
Use Storytelling to Entice
When you tell a story, you keep people interested. The exciting story behind your business or product can help you connect with a buyer. It gives the product a personality, which is especially helpful when trying to sell something your audience has never seen, smelled, or touched.
If your product doesn’t have an interesting backstory, you can use a hypothetical or made-up one instead. Let your customers daydream. The story you tell could be about the product, the company, or the people and steps involved in making the product.
To tell a story about your product, you might want to include the following:
- Information about where the materials that went into making the product came from.
- An interesting story about how the product got started.
- Who helped design and make it, and where did the idea come from?
- Any unique ways that the product was made.
Grab Readers’ Attention With Bullet Points
Nobody enjoys reading a lengthy, boring block of text. Therefore, it’s crucial to divide your product descriptions into easily readable sections using bullet points and headers.
You can be sure to get your customers’ little attention by using bullet points. The majority of visitors will only scan through; therefore, employing bullet points will immediately grab their attention. You can also use bullet points to create stories; they don’t have to be brief and only include a few words.
For instance, let’s take a look at how Michael Kors lists the features of a satchel;
It would have been challenging for many prospective consumers to understand what was being conveyed if they had combined all the bullet points into one lengthy statement. However, the features were easy to understand because of the bullet points.
Be Descriptive
Using words that help people visualize your product when describing it is essential. This is particularly important if you are selling a physical item. Use sensory language that appeals to multiple senses to convey your message (taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound).
For instance, if you sell a piece of jewelry, you could discuss the various gemstones used to create it. You could also use the terms “sparkling” or “glimmering” to describe the appearance of the jewelry when worn.
Similarly, if you are selling a piece of furniture, you could describe its composition and texture.
The more you describe your product, the easier it will be for your reader to envision themselves using it and the greater the likelihood they will purchase it. One of the primary reasons people buy an item is because they can imagine themselves using it daily.
Benefits Trumps Features
Focusing on the features of a product instead of what it accomplishes for the user is a common mistake. It’s important to list the features of your product, but it’s even more crucial to demonstrate how they can improve the customer’s life.
While your product’s capabilities are its features, its benefits are what your customers stand to gain from using it. A laptop, for instance, can store up to 1 GB of MP3s, but saying it can store 1000 songs sounds more intriguing.
Benefits explain “What’s in it for the user?” Instead of saying it has “low calories,” you could say that this Greek yogurt will aid in weight loss.
People desire and purchase items because of what they can provide for them, not because of what they are capable of. Therefore, always focus on what your product can do for your customers. This will enable you to engage with them more deeply. Additionally, it will demonstrate that you are aware of their needs and are prepared to go above and beyond to meet them.
If you’re unsure what to put in the benefits option, try listing your product’s features and the advantages of each feature. An example is the Nike product description below;
Great Product Images
67% of shoppers say that a high-quality image of the product they’re considering is “very important” to their decision. A high-quality product image is essential for a detailed description.
Adding high-quality images to your product description can significantly enhance it. Customers can have a favorable impression of a product simply because they find it aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes all it takes to sell a product is a stunning photo of that product.
To make an informed purchase, a user needs to see a clear and accurate representation of the product. A fantastic product page results from careful visual and text coordination.
Adding a product video can also help with the product description. Whatever you’re showing off, a demo or reel, it needs to do its job and show off your product in a way that makes it easy for the viewer to understand what they’re getting.
Optimize for SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) attracts visitors to your eCommerce products by targeting potential customers. Ensure that your product pages contain the keywords for your product and other terms that people typically use to search for your product.
Keywords are concise phrases and words that describe your product in the target audience’s language. For instance, if you’re selling Hosting Software, you should discuss its benefits and tell an engaging story, but don’t forget to refer to it as “Hosting software” in the product description.
You should not list or force these words into your writing; instead, they should appear naturally. Keep in mind that Google favors unique and useful content and that its algorithm is constantly learning.
Set KPIs To Track Your Progress
After you’ve finished writing product descriptions, the next step is to set goals to determine if they were successful. Even after your product has been released, you might need to make some changes to how you describe it.
Some of the most important things to keep an eye on are the conversion rate, the rate at which people abandon their shopping carts, the rate at which people send back products, and the search rankings. If performance on these metrics is bad or doesn’t improve after rewriting a product description, make changes to the text and keep an eye on the data.
You can do this with the help of split testing. If you have a good e-commerce tool, you can send different versions of the content for the product description to different groups of people. This will help you figure out which versions of the text work and which don’t.
Avoid Unnecessary Copies
The purpose of product descriptions is to convey information about a product to potential customers. Consequently, you should omit any additional information unrelated to your product or not worth reading.
Think like a customer when writing a product description. Avoid using filler words and obvious information you do not wish to read or do not have the time to read. For instance, stating that a clock displays accurate time is irrelevant.
Remember that communicating the product’s benefits is always preferable. If you find yourself writing meaningless filler cliches, take a step back and consider the features and benefits to regain focus.
Include Social Proof
A potent tool is to include social proof in a product’s description. Any indication that customers have purchased, used, and approved of the product is referred to as social proof. Excellent reviews, mentions of locations where your product is used, and “as seen in” blurbs all demonstrate how well-liked and practical your product is.
93% of consumers claim that online reviews influenced their purchase decisions.
Include a Call-to-Action (CTA)
A call-to-action is a sentence intended to prompt a prompt response from a potential customer. A compelling call to action must be present in your product descriptions to increase conversion rates.
CTAs should be conversational while also being unambiguous. It is wise to keep them brief; you want your readers to take action, not just read a wordy, convoluted statement.
You want your reader to be able to see your CTA at all times throughout your description; you don’t want them to miss it or have to scroll. Strong font colors and large, daring designs will make your call to action stand out.
Product Description Benefits
In addition to being a useful resource for your clients, product descriptions are advantageous to your business. They assist in enhancing revenue, but they also perform additional functions. Other benefits of writing an efficient product description include:
Stand Out From the Competition
Unless you manufacture your own products, multiple retailers typically sell the same product as you. Several businesses use the standard manufacturer’s description on their websites. Unfortunately, many businesses do not anticipate customers’ sophisticated web search skills.
As purchasers navigate from page to page to compare prices and other attributes of product descriptions, they become bored with the repetition of information. They are interested in items that capture their attention and demonstrate how the product or service will enhance their lives.
Consider the impact a unique and high-quality product description could have on this process. This could be the key to increased traffic and revenue for e-commerce stores if utilized correctly.
Build Emotional Connection
Using descriptive language is only one part of the equation describing a product. The other half is emotionally connecting with consumers and making them need or want something.
It’s not enough to just say what a pair of heels looks like. Marketers need to go a step further and give a potential buyer a linguistic adventure that describes how the heels might make them feel.
A pair of heels by itself isn’t always exciting, but imagining what it would be like to wear them to a fancy event, for example, can be the missing piece of the puzzle that gets a shopper to click “Add to Cart.”
According to psychology, emotional connections are the most important way to get people to buy something. Because of this, connecting with shoppers is a very important part of content marketing.
SEO Benefits
Every search engine also works as a directory of websites. It ranks them by keeping an eye on thousands of websites that have something to do with a search keyword.
The search engine algorithms look at how original, relevant, and unique a web page is. Unique and SEO-relevant product descriptions will help you rank higher in search results.
If you want your online store to be at the top of search engine results pages, make sure your product descriptions are clear, helpful, unique, and original.
Organic Website Traffic
One of the most significant benefits of product descriptions is that they increase your website’s organic traffic. SEO keywords boost your likelihood of getting discovered via search engines.
Customers are more likely to have confidence in your brand if they click on your product and see an accurate list of its attributes.
However, do not stuff keywords. Search engines rank websites according to the relevance of their content. If clients visit your page and find nothing of interest, they will likely ignore it in the future, reducing your exposure.
Provide Customers With Important Information
Another benefit of good product descriptions is that users will know precisely what they get when they buy something.
For example, the product specification may list the size and weight of the item, which could be a deciding factor for a potential customer.
The quality of the product description can make it less likely that customers will misunderstand or give negative feedback. It can also help get good reviews from customers.
Product Description Template
Remember that no one template will work for every product because every business and target audience is different. Follow the following few simple steps when you’re ready to describe a product.
- Bring up your personas and brand voice guidelines so you can use them.
- List a few basic features of the product and ask yourself why they are the most important. This will help you write about how the buyer will benefit from those features.
- Think about your product’s story and how it fits into the customer’s life.
- Write a first draft of how you will describe your product.
- Look over your writing and change weak or common words with more descriptive ones.
- Look over your copy again and add text formatting or other small visual aids to make the content more exciting and easy to read.
- Make sure that the product description uses a keyword that is good for SEO and describes the product the way the buyer would.
Once you have a clear idea of how you want to write your product descriptions, you can also make your own template.
In Conclusion
Writing search engine optimization-friendly product descriptions is an ongoing process that needs to be changed often. But since it is your primary sales content, it is essential to get it right.
Before you write your product description, ensure you have the right buyer persona. Review it again and get a clear picture of who you want to reach so you can write a description that speaks to them in particular.
A product description is an important part of what makes your business unique and helps customers decide what to buy. Creating an exciting description and meeting your client’s needs can help your business build trust and increase conversions.
You’ll always get results from a good product description and know when you’ve found the right one.