How to Write Effective Product Descriptions That Drive Sales

In the grand scheme of conversion rate optimization, product description seems to be a small part of the website for many e-commerce stores, so many brands just brush it aside. But for companies that get it right, writing an attractive and effective product description is a great way to spread brand personality where most people don't expect it.

Therefore, it’s important to have a good product description in your online stores just like having great graphics or a technically perfect website for your brand. Not only does it help to provide a positive customer experience, but also improve the credibility of your store. Besides these, it can promote your online store to rank higher in the search result of the search engines and improve the conversion rate of site visitors.

Quick look at the post:

What Is Product Description

A product description is a marketing copy that illustrates and explains the benefits of a product. In other words, it provides all the information and details about your products on your e-commerce site.

These product details can be one sentence, a short paragraph, or a bullet point list. They can be serious, funny, or quirky. They can be located next to or below the product title and product image.

The product descriptions should be fast to read and focus on selling points to lure the consumers to add the products to the shopping cart.

The product description is one of the parts of the product list that can deliver the information about what the product is and what it does to customers. If the product description is written in a way that encourages site visitors to buy it, then it's well written.

Have you ever noticed that the products that sell best are those with detailed product descriptions? That's because a detailed product description can thoroughly explain the product functions and how it helps potential customers.

If the product description successfully explains the product and how it can benefit the life of the customers, then they are likely to buy it.

A Basic Product Description Template

What should the anatomy of the product description look like? Please note that this order should not be strictly followed. Modify it to fit your style.

1. Product title.

2. Brand name.

3. Functions. What does the product do?

4. Physical metrics (length, weight, color, material, etc.).

5. Features & Solutions. How will it solve customer problems?

6. CA (Competitive advantage). What's your distinctive niche?

7. Benefits & Life improvement. What will it help achieve?

8. Product updates. How has the product improved since the last version?

9. When, why, and how does the customer use the product?

10. CTA (Call-to-action).

Benefits of Writing Product Descriptions

There is no doubt that product description is an important weapon for the success of e-commerce stores. If you do a good job of conducting compelling and creative product descriptions for your online store, you'll be able to grab buyers' attention and make a lot of sales.

Build Trust with Shoppers

What actually happens when shoppers read your product description, look at a product picture, and are completely satisfied? They come to believe that the product is the best. People make buying decisions based on trust. They will make a purchase when they trust the brand and product description. To this extent, product descriptions must not be deceptive.

People know it when you're lying. Product descriptions must be truthful, but contain persuasive words that appeal to the customer. You need to ensure that your product descriptions are clear, accurate, and honest enough so as to build trust in a shopper's purchasing decisions.

Professional Online Store

Everyone wants to do business with great and professional businesses. If you want to become a best seller for your product, then you must have better and creative product descriptions. When shoppers click on your online store link and log on to your website, they want to see that you know what you're doing.

Web design should be professional and product images stand out. More importantly, you must provide high-quality, grammatically free product descriptions to convince consumers that you are elegant and professional. With a good product description, potential customers will know what you're good at.

Enhance Competitiveness

If you are selling the same products that other retailers/wholesalers are selling online, you better have the best product description. You need great graphics and compelling descriptions to make your product stand out from the crowd.

Some people simply use the manufacturer's product description. Well, that doesn't work because buyers of your particular product may have unique reasons and concerns for buying that product. You must write a new product description that is customized to meet their unique needs.

Improve Site SEO

Each product description must have a unique keyword that buyers can use when searching online. You need to write each product description using relevant keywords. This helps improve your e-commerce SEO (search engine optimization). Each product description should be ranked with at least one relevant keyword.

Detailed product descriptions also help Google get the full picture of the products on your site. It not only notifies shoppers but also helps Google rank your products when shoppers make search queries in the search bar.

While you shouldn't stuff a product description with so many keywords that don’t correspond the reality, you should make sure that each product description has the right keywords to rank high on Google.

Imagine that all products in your online store are optimized for great product descriptions using relevant keywords? This will help a lot with the organic search traffic to your online store.

4 Critical Ways to Write Product Descriptions

It is important that your product description includes honest and transparent information. Saying your product is of the highest quality is not going to entice people to like your product when you have countless complaints about its quality.

Well-crafted product descriptions do more than simply describe your product features that customers can get from a glimpse. If done well, your descriptions can convey your unique voice, excite people, and improve conversion rate.

Know Your Target Audience

The first thing to write a product description is to get to know your target audience. You want to be able to define the features that potential consumers will be most interested in.

This starts with understanding your buyer persona, which is a segmentation of the characteristics of the potential customer. Your buyer role will help you understand which features are most valuable to your customers.

Keep the following questions in mind when writing product descriptions:

▪ How did this person get to your page?

▪ What are his or her usual interests?

▪ Why would this person be particularly interested in your Shopify store?

▪ How will the shopper describe the product to his/her friend?

▪ What are the characteristics or benefits that this person is most interested in?

By keeping these issues in mind when writing product copies, you will be better able to write product descriptions for sale.

Knowing your audience is important to create a good product description. If you haven't already created the buyer persona, you really should. When it comes to product descriptions, it helps you understand what's really important to them.

For example, if you sell high-end professional headphones, your target audience may not be the same as the people who buy fashion designer headphones. This will definitely affect how you write your product copy. If you work in a niche market, you already know how important it is to focus on your core audience and "speak their language."

Focus on Features & Benefits

One of the most common marketing tips is to focus on benefits rather than features when describing the products you sell. The person who made this suggestion made a good point. It's really more effective to tell shoppers how certain features of the product will benefit them, rather than just give them a long list of features or functions.

But that doesn't mean you should completely ignore functionality when describing a product. After all, your customers still need to know what the product does. Your product description should strike the right balance between features and benefits. They should describe your project and clearly show its specifications while clarifying the deeper benefits each feature brings.

As a business owner, it is understandable that you are happy to share all the qualities of your products. You want to show that your product has the best features and the most unique specifications.

A good product description should focus on the features and benefits of the product. Obviously, the features are clear-cut, while the benefits will require more creativity and knowledge of the target audience.

However, buyers are not necessarily interested in the mundane features of the product. Instead, they want to know how it benefits them. A product feature is a factual statement about a product that provides technical information.

Product benefits, on the other hand, describe how the product improves the life of the buyer. But both features and benefits allow for creative writing. Be sure to use positive adjectives to highlight them.

Make It Easy to Scan

In general, an extremely long product description is not required. In most cases, you need to make product descriptions shorter and easier to read. Bullet points can really help solve this problem.

People have short attention spans and only read about some of the content on the page. Therefore, your product description needs to capture that coveted content in an effective way.

You can achieve this by making your descriptions really easy to go through. The buyer is able to find exactly what he or she is looking for and won't waste time sifting through other information.

Here are some things that can help shoppers scan your copy easily:

Short paragraphs: Walls of text make your copy look long, which is often annoying. You need to keep paragraphs short (that is, 4 lines or less) and concise.

Title: People on mobile phones or computers tend to scan product descriptions to find information relevant to them. Help them do this by using headings that divide your content into sections.

Bullet points: Lists and bullet points make the text easier to read, especially when you communicate product specifications and features.

Make your product description easy to navigate by including bullet points, short paragraphs of only a few sentences each, lots of white space, and fonts of varying sizes. Keep in mind that sometimes your users will skip the rest of the description and just skim the main points. Therefore, it's important to highlight the unique and outstanding features and benefits.

Leverage on Social Proof

You probably already use social proof such as reviews and ratings on your e-commerce sites. But have you considered using these reviews to make your product description more attractive? Look through all your positive and negative reviews, and use them to directly address the fears and unexpected benefits of product descriptions.

Social proof is key when it comes to improving conversion optimization. Here, we are talking about writing transformable product descriptions, so social proof must be added.

This may include:

▪ Product reviews on your website, Google, or in the marketplace.

▪ Shout-outs on social media.

▪ Video reviews on YouTube or social media.

When you add such social proof, you provide honest comments about how people perceive your product. This has a psychological impact on the visitor at the moment he or she wants to make a purchase decision.

Don’t underestimate the importance of social proof (ratings and reviews, customer photos and endorsements) in product descriptions. Social proof is critical to conducting compelling descriptions, so this is why you should incorporate them into your product pages whenever possible.

Final Word

Buyers are more likely to buy your product when their expectations and requirements are met. Keep this in mind as you use the above tips to write more compelling, transformable product descriptions.

Think, design and write your product description for the potential target market. Then optimize them for search, and there's nothing stopping you from attracting, persuading, and turning more visitors into your customers.