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Attract, Inform, Convert: How To Write Ecommerce Product Pages That Sell
By Rodney Laws | Ecommerce
By Rodney Laws | Ecommerce
Picture the scene.
You’ve invested significant resources and a lot of hard work into reaching your target audience. You check your website traffic and you’re pleased to see it’s paying off. Your customers are flocking to your ecommerce site.
Now all you need to do is show them what life would be like as the proud owner of your product. They’d be mad not to buy from you, right?
But are your product pages up to the challenge?
20% of purchase failures are potentially a result of missing or unclear product information. If your product pages don’t convert, the traffic you’ve worked so hard to capture will be wasted.
No one wants to fall at the last hurdle. So, if you want to improve your conversion rates and sell more of your products, try these actionable tips for writing ecommerce product pages that sell.
Whatever you’re selling, your customers are the cornerstone of your business.
So the best place to start when you’re writing product pages is to understand the people who buy from you.
Whether you’re selling state-of-the-art camera accessories, colorful leggings for kids or the latest eco-friendly, planet-saving bar of soap, knowing your audience means you can establish the features and benefits that are most important to them.
This will help you position your product as the answer to their question. It will also help you to make sure that the features and benefits that are most important to your customers are front and center in your product description.
If you want your ecommerce product page to sell, you need to include information about your product’s features and benefits.
How you choose which features and benefits to include will depend entirely on the needs of your audience.
If your audience is professional photographers and you’re selling the latest camera lens, a list of technical features is entirely appropriate. Your customers will know exactly what they’re looking for and don’t need to be sold on the benefits. It’s also likely that they’ll be searching for a new lens by specific features, so having the features clearly stated upfront lets them know your product does what they need and will help your product get found in search results.
However, generally speaking, the best way to write product descriptions that sell is to list, in order of importance to your customer, the features that provide the biggest benefit to them. As you list the features in order of importance to your customer make sure you explain the benefit of each feature as well.
This way your customers know exactly what your product does and how it will make their life easier, in order of what makes the biggest impact on them.
You work hard to make sure people find your website and your product pages have an important role to play.
To optimize for SEO, make sure you use specific product names and long-tail keywords that match what your customers are likely to be searching for.
This will make it even easier for your customers to find you and your products. It will also give them confidence, once they reach your website, that they’re in the right place.
To make the most of optimizing your page add relevant keywords to your page title, meta descriptions, image tags, and product descriptions. Your H1 and H2 tags should also describe your products using keywords.
Your page title and meta description are arguably the most important things to get right, as these are what your customers will see and click on from search engine results pages. Make sure your meta description includes what your product is, the benefits, your keywords and why your customers should buy it.
Your customers want to quickly find out whether your product is what they’re looking for. That’s why it’s important to make your product description easily scannable.
You can do this by making sure the key benefits of your product are listed upfront and the information your buyer is looking for is easy to find.
Use short paragraphs, include bullet points and don’t be afraid of white space to make key information easy to find at a glance.
Written information that’s difficult to process generates a negative emotion in the brain. Your brain then attributes that emotion to what you’re reading. That’s why it’s so important to make your written content easily scannable and easy to understand – so your customers don’t get a negative impression of your brand and products from your writing!
A good place to start is by using normal, simple language. Again this will depend on your audience, but a general rule of thumb is not to use long, complicated words and make simple, clear statements. If you wouldn’t say what you’re writing in casual conversation, chances are your product description will be less effective.
Once you’ve simplified your writing add in some good descriptive words so your customers can get a clearer sense of your product. Words that describe how your product looks, feels, smells, sounds, and tastes will help your customers to imagine owning and using it. Imagining buying your product is half the battle.
A more subtle way to use words is by choosing words that describe the product and the buyer. Words like sporty, elegant and clever can apply to your product and your customer, tapping into how your customer views themselves or how they’d like to be viewed by owning or using your product.
If you follow these five tips you’ll improve your product description writing and increase conversions on your product pages. Ask yourself the best question for assessing your ecommerce product page: does it give your customers what they need to know? If you apply these five tips chances are it will, and you will have written an ecommerce product page that sells.
