Unlock the Potential of Your Products: Rewrite Your Descriptions
Too often retailers are lazy with their product descriptions. They either copy and paste in boring ones from their manufacturers, or they just list a bunch of features that make your eyes glaze over.
Your product descriptions are where you make the pitch. You explain to the customer exactly why they need to buy the product right now!
Think of it like a conversation. When you sell something to someone face to face, or on a phone call, you don’t just rattle off a bunch of features or a script, do you?
In The Wolf Of Wall Street, Leonardo Di Caprio asks a friend to sell him a pen. Jordan Belfort, who Leo portrays in the movie, explains that the answer is not to describe the pen, aka list features. Instead, it’s about selling the benefits behind using the pen, the feeling and emotions that are associated with it.
If you find that your product pages get a lot off traffic, but not too many people are purchasing, it might be a sign that your product descriptions aren’t working. If they aren’t drawing consumers in and they’re not making them go, “I want this so bad!” you need a rewrite.
In this post, we’ll look at a few ways to transform your product descriptions and massively increase conversion rates.
Understand Your Customers
You can’t sell something to someone without understanding who that person is and what they want. Like Belfort says, it’s not about the pen, it’s about the person who’s going to use the pen.
Talk to your customers on the phone, or send them emails, trying to find out more about them. Here are a few things you can ask –
- Why did they buy your product?
- What problems did it solve for them?
- How does owning the product make them feel?
- What questions did they have before or during the purchase?
- What triggered the purchase for them?
- How would they describe the product?
You also want to gather demographic data, like age, gender, location and so on, to form a detailed picture of your ideal customer. This is helpful not only for improving product copy but also your marketing and overall positioning.
When you figure out what pains or needs your customers have, you can write copy that specifically addresses that. For example, if customers say that your shoe feels more natural, that’s something you should include in your copy so that other similar customers will be more inclined to buy.
You can also pre-empt any objections future customers might have by learning what objections past customers had and solving them in your copy. So if customers were wondering if your jeans were comfortable, that’s something you want to talk about in the description. A great way to get this kind of real-time feedback is to use a tool like Qualaroo.
Use The Right Tone
The tone is something that if you get wrong can ruin sales for you. A certain tone might work for one audience, but not for the others. For example, swear words might work well with a younger audience, but it might turn off older audiences.
Have a look at Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s to see how tone changes with audience. Both stores sell shaving blades, and both have positioned themselves as affordable shaving options. Yet they target very different audiences, and so the language they use in their product descriptions is different.
Here’s what the product copy on Dollar Shave Club looks like. It’s funny, light-hearted and clearly speaks to a certain type of audience.
On the other hand, Harry’s is more formal, catering to an older crowd that is perhaps looking for something closer to the old-school style of shaving.
Same products, different audiences, hence different copy. After doing your customer research, analyze the responses you get and see if you can find patterns in the language your ideal customers use. That should serve as a starting point for what tone to go for in your product descriptions.
Talk About Benefits
Going back to the Jordan Belfort example, you can talk all day about the pen and what amazing features it has, but if you can’t emotionally connect with the customer, you’ve lost them.
When you look at an Apple ad for, say, the iPad, you’ll notice that it has nothing to do with the features. The ad focuses on how people use it, showing them making music, shooting videos, editing photos and playing games. It would have been easier and cheaper to rattle off a list of the impressive features the iPad has, but that wouldn’t have emotionally connected with anyone.
That doesn’t mean you completely ignore features. A good mix of features and the benefits of those features make for good copy. If all you have is a list of features right now, try to come up with corresponding benefits by asking why customers should care about the feature.
Look at the Harry’s screenshot above. The feature they call out is the ‘Gothic arch’ blade angle. Sounds cool, but on its own no one cares about it because it doesn’t mean anything. However, when combined with the benefit of a comfortable and crisp shave, it makes total sense.
Also, notice how the benefits tie into the core problem that Harry’s customers have. When they visit the site, they’re looking for a quality razor blade that doesn’t leave them with cuts or stubbles. The copy basically speaks to them when it describes how the blade spreads pressure evenly to maximize ease and comfort.
Keep It Simple
It’s natural to feel like you need to go on and on about how amazing your product is and the wonders it can do for customers, but no one has time for that. People have shorter attention spans these days, and they want to finish up their purchase as soon as possible. Here are some tips to make your copy readable.
Use Shorter Sentences
Short and simple works best when it comes to online product descriptions. Longer sentences are just harder to read, meaning people will start to glaze over.
Additionally, don’t try to use long words and impress visitors with your vocabulary. You want them reaching for their wallets, not a dictionary.
Break It Into Sections
To improve the flow of text on your product page, break up your copy into paragraphs and sections. Without paragraphs, it just looks like a wall of text and that’s intimidating.
If possible, use descriptive headers for each section so that people who scan through can get the big picture. Go back to the Harry’s example and see how well they do it.
Use Bullet Points
Bullet points also allow for easy scanning. If you’ve got a number of feature-benefits that would be too long to explain in sentences, list them as bullet points. See how Dollar Shave Club does it.
Design It Well
Design plays a really important role when it comes to readability. In fact, design is all about making visitors take the right action, which in your case is reading your product descriptions and adding to cart.
Things like font type, font size, and font color all play a part in enabling visitors to actually read your copy. Too small and they’ll need to strain their eyes. Too little contrast and they won’t be able to read it.
On the flip side, the space between words matters too. Line heights, the space between bullet points and paragraphs, and whitespace isolate different pieces of text, making it much easier to consume. Again, Harry’s does it pretty well.
Start Rewriting
Clearly you need to put some more effort into your product descriptions, but the resulting increase in conversions will make it totally worth it. Besides, going through the whole process of understanding your customer and identifying the benefits of your product will help you position your business better.
