The eCommerce industry has become more competitive than ever before in 2021. Due to social distancing and travel restrictions, people have been ordering goods online more than usual.
This has led to an uptick in eCommerce sales across the globe, with 27.2% of the world’s population shopping online in 2021 alone. However, 81% of customers conduct careful online research before making a purchase decision, prompting businesses to rethink their product description writing strategies.
How can you write appealing, professional, SEO-friendly product descriptions to boost your eCommerce sales despite the growing competition? Let’s find out.
Address the Customer Directly to Engage Them
The secret ingredient to eCommerce success lies in personalization. No matter how good your product is, people want to know that you care about their customer experience. To do that, you need to rethink how you write product descriptions from square one.
Start addressing the reader as “you”, and your business as “we” or “I”, depending on the type of eCommerce store you are running. Don’t rely on sales one-liners, all-cap writing, and FOMO. Instead, write as if you would address an old acquaintance – be polite, but not overly casual. You are writing product descriptions for B2C leads, not for corporate representatives. Make people comfortable on your storefront by using a heartwarming tone of voice.
Create a Writing Tool Stack
To write the best possible product descriptions for your customers, you should avoid writing them ad hoc and without specialized tools. Writing tools such as Microsoft Office will only get you so far when it comes to online content.
This is not only due to SEO but also because online content needs to be formatted differently than printed text. To that end, you can rely on UnemployedProfessors to write and edit your content whenever you feel overwhelmed with administrating your eCommerce store. Using tools such as Evernote or Grammarly in the meantime will serve you much better than any offline writing tool ever could.
Enable Skimming for Mobile Customers
Speaking of text formatting, customers who come to your website via smartphones or tablet devices might have trouble reading your product descriptions. Smaller screens require less text and shorter paragraphs for the content to remain interesting.
You can make your product descriptions much more appealing by making sure each paragraph is 2-3 sentences long. Likewise, use bullet points, numbers, and images liberally in each product description. Don’t rely on walls of text, as this approach won’t appeal to people with shorter attention spans. More text may seem like a net positive for SEO, but it is a net negative for the actual customers who will read your content.
Optimize your Product Descriptions for SEO
Search Engine Optimization is an essential part of what makes an eCommerce storefront stand out on search engines. Each description on your website should be optimized based on content trends present in your industry.
These can be discovered via Google Keyword Planner and SEM Rush as some of the more popular SEO tools. Don’t rely on manual SEO optimization, as it can often bear poor fruit. Instead, stay up to date with your customers’ search patterns and integrate these words and phrases into your writing. The result will be that many more cold leads will find your eCommerce store through organic search engine ranking pages, or SERP.
Highlight User Reviews and Testimonials
Social proof is what can make or break an eCommerce store. Imagine searching for a local retail store via Google and coming across many poor Google My Business reviews – would you still visit it? Customers inherently believe one another when it comes to product recommendations online.
This can be used to your advantage, as you can highlight glowing reviews, testimonials, and comments about your brand throughout the website. Aim for at least 3-5 reviews to be present on each product description page for good measure. You can also reach out to influencers and industry experts to review your products and offer their seal of approval for more eCommerce credibility.
Create Complementary Visuals for Each Product Description
Writing professional product descriptions for eCommerce sales is more than just about text. Each piece of media related to your product will be taken into consideration by the customer before they make a purchase decision. This means images and videos are just as important for successful sales as text optimization and using the right keywords.
Avoid using stock multimedia and try to create as much original content as possible. This means hiring a photographer or filming your photos and videos of each product in a studio. Clean, high-resolution photos representative of the actual products will always bring you a step closer to closing a sale.
Complement Each Product Description with Calls to Action
To drive customer engagement and agency, you should include calls to action throughout each product description. Calls to action can range from simple “buy now for a 10% discount” or “get it while the stocks last” to more creative sales pitches.
Including some form of CTA in your product descriptions is very important, since their omission may result in passive visits and site abandonment. Include no more than 2-3 calls to action in each product description to keep things balanced. You don’t want to appear desperate to close sales, but you also want to communicate that your goods are available for purchase right now.
Establishing a Consistent Product Description Writing Style (Conclusion)
Once you’re satisfied with how a product description turned out, you should apply the same writing and SEO principles to every product on your platform. Writing product descriptions to drive eCommerce sales is a long-term commitment, one that you will have to cultivate as time goes on.
By creating a unified customer experience and writing and formatting each description the same way, your eCommerce store will give off an aura of professionalism. In doing so, you will boost your eCommerce sales more than ever before and allow your platform to grow organically over time.
Author’s bio. Jessica Fender is a copywriter and blogger at Writeload with a background in marketing and sales. She enjoys sharing her experience with like-minded professionals who aim to provide customers with high-quality services.
