You’ve developed a great product, built a fantastic website, and prepared your online store. But there’s one more crucial step in setting up your ecommerce business: writing engaging, informative, and persuasive product descriptions.
Product descriptions are critical in guiding potential customers in their buying decisions. If done correctly, they increase sales, lower return rates, and improve your store’s search engine ranking.
Need help? We’ve compiled ten tips on how to write compelling product descriptions, along with a handy product description template you can use.
What Is a Product Description?
Product descriptions are the copy on your website that describes what your product is and why it’s worth purchasing. The objective of a product description is to convince customers to buy with important information about features and benefits.
Most users will navigate away from a product page if the description is poorly written, unclear, or unhelpful.
For example, if a beauty product doesn’t include the ingredients, size, or intended benefits, customers may purchase a competitor’s product instead.
While the tips below can guide you in crafting persuasive product descriptions, sometimes you need a little extra help.
Ecommerce Booster App by Semrush can save time, optimize descriptions, and more:
- Amp up sales with AI-generated product descriptions.
- Improve product images in seconds: enhance image quality, remove backgrounds, generate alt texts.
- Increase Your ROI and conversions with a Ready-To-Implement action Plan based on the audit of your store.
How to Write a Product Description
If you’re not a professional copywriter, writing product descriptions can be a challenging task. Here are some steps to guide you:
Know Your Audience
The most critical step in crafting your product description doesn’t have any writing involved. It’s understanding who your audience is. Identifying your target market will significantly influence how you express your product’s features and benefits.
- What are their interests, needs, and concerns?
- What motivates your customers to buy?
- Do they prioritize quality, price, convenience, or functionality?
- What’s their lifestyle like?
The more precisely you answer these questions, the better you can tailor your product descriptions to speak directly to prospective buyers.
For example, if your target audience is environmentally conscious young adults, you might highlight your product’s sustainable materials and ethical production processes. Learning about your audience will help you to use the vocabulary, tone, and style that resonate with them and inspire them to buy.
Highlight the Product’s Features
Once you fully understand your target audience, the next step is to showcase the product’s features. Product features refer to specific details or attributes, such as:
- Size
- Color
- Material
- Ingredients
- Technological components
- Design
When listing out your product’s features, be clear and precise. Avoid any industry jargon that your customers might not understand. Instead, aim to provide a straightforward explanation of what makes your product unique.
As you describe these features, imagine your potential customer holding the product, using it, experiencing it. How might they interact with these features in their day-to-day life?
For example, if you’re selling a smartphone and targeting new parents, don’t just mention that it has a “12MP camera.” Expand on this by saying, “Capture special moments in high-definition detail with our 12MP camera.”
Remember, your goal here is to give your buyers enough details to feel like they’ve held the product, even if they can’t see it in person. The result is that your potential customers will be more likely to buy, assured of the quality and benefits they’ll receive.
List the Product’s Benefits
While product features give customers specifications, benefits explain what those features mean to a customer’s life. Benefits answer the question, “So what? How does this feature impact me?”
Fundamentally, customers want to know how buying your product will enhance their lives. They want to understand what problems it solves, what difficulties it eases, and what joys it brings.
Whether it’s saving time, improving health, providing entertainment, or boosting their status, every product or service can offer compelling benefits. To identify your product’s benefits, reflect on each feature listed and ask yourself:
- Why is this feature useful?
- Why does a customer need it?
- How does it make their life better?
When writing about benefits, use persuasive language. People purchase based on emotion and justify them with logic afterward. Positive emotional triggers like joy, relief, comfort, and prestige can increase the desire for your product.
Always lead with the benefits when writing your product description. Immediately tell the customer how they stand to gain from the product.
Create a Unique Selling Point (USP)
The only way to win against your competitors is to identify and highlight the unique elements your product has, which is your Unique Selling Point (USP). Your USP sets your product apart from the crowd and gives customers a reason to pick it.
Maybe your product boasts superior quality, uses cutting-edge technology, offers exceptional value, provides a unique function, or simply caters to a niche market that others don’t.
Once you’ve figured that out, emphasize your USP in your product description. Don’t just claim your USP—prove it. Offer specifics to help your audience understand and appreciate what makes your product unique.
For instance, instead of vaguely saying your product is “high-quality,” explain that it is handmade or uses top-grade materials. Instead of eco-friendly, specify the sustainable manufacturing methods or the biodegradability.
By communicating your USP effectively, you’re giving your audience compelling reasons that justify why they should choose your product over others.
Use Descriptive and Sensory Language
An effective product description lets customers imagine the experience of owning or using the product. One way to achieve this is to use descriptive and sensory language.
Descriptive language allows you to paint a more detailed and vivid picture of what you’re selling, making it more real and enticing in the minds of your customers.
Instead of saying, “Our coffee tastes good,” describe how “our rich, full-bodied coffee, with notes of caramel and chocolate, delivers a smooth, robust flavor that dances on your palate.”
Sensory language focuses on engaging the customer’s five senses:
- Sight
- Sound
- Smell
- Touch
- Taste
When you describe how something looks, sounds, smells, feels, or tastes, you’re helping customers visualize the product, which makes it more real for them and prompts a stronger emotional connection.
By using this type of language in your product descriptions, you create a more immersive, sensory shopping experience that can drive customers toward a purchase. This strategy is more important than ever, as online shopping cannot provide the same sensory experience as physical stores.
Avoid Jargon
While it’s important to be knowledgeable and detailed in your product descriptions, avoid using industry jargon, complex technical terminology, or obscure acronyms that your average customer might not understand.
Always remember to write for your audience, not for experts.
The key to effective product descriptions is simplicity and clarity. Make your descriptions easy to read and comprehend, conversational, and relatable. If a term or feature needs explanation, provide it in an easily digestible manner.
For instance, instead of saying, “Our headphones utilize ANC technology,” state, “Our headphones include Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) technology that blocks out unwanted sounds, so you can lose yourself in the music.”
After writing your description, it’s always a good practice to have someone unfamiliar with your industry read it. If they can understand and appreciate your product based on the description, you’ve achieved your goal.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While writing for customers is crucial, it’s equally important to write descriptions that are friendly to search engines.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is meant to strategically improve your website’s visibility in search engines. Higher ranks in search results help drive more traffic to your product page and increase your chances of making a sale.
Here are a few tips for writing SEO-friendly descriptions.
- Keyword Research: Before writing your description, identify the search terms potential customers might use when looking for your product.
- Keyword Integration: Weave these keywords into your product descriptions naturally. Remember, the primary purpose of your content is to appeal to your audience, not just search engines. So avoid keyword stuffing!
- Unique Descriptions: Avoid duplicating content. Search engines, especially Google, penalize duplicate content. Ensure that each product has a unique description, which gives it the best chance to rank highly in search engine results.
- Meta Descriptions: Although not visible directly on the product page, meta descriptions are a crucial SEO element. They are the short summaries that appear under website URLs on a search engine results page.
- Image Alt Text: Search engines can’t see images, but they can read text. By providing alt text (a description of an image), you’re not only assisting visually impaired customers but also giving yourself another opportunity to include your keywords.
For instance, if you’re selling vegan leather bags, some potential keywords could be “vegan leather bags,” “cruelty-free bags,” “sustainable leather bags,” etc. Smoothly integrate these keywords in your descriptions, like:
“Our stylish and durable vegan leather bags are the perfect choice for those seeking a cruelty-free and eco-friendly fashion statement.”
By implementing SEO tactics in your product descriptions, you’ll ensure greater product visibility, leading to higher web traffic and more sales.
Show Reviews and Ratings
Social proof is a powerful tool to influence buying decisions. We inherently trust other customers more than marketing material. According to one study, 82% of consumers read product reviews before making shopping choices.
Make sure reviews and ratings are visible, genuine, and easy to navigate. If your product attracts a high rating, highlight it. Positive customer reviews that emphasize the product benefits can add a fantastic real-life appeal to your product.
Encourage your customers to leave reviews, photos, and ratings by making the review process easy, or even incentivize it with discounts or loyalty points. These reviews are an excellent asset to your product page as they provide credibility and foster trust in your potential customers.
By showcasing reviews and ratings in the product description itself, you provide your customers with the reassurance of the quality and value of your product from those who have already purchased it.
The transparency of including both positive and negative reviews also adds to the credibility and authenticity of your brand. Be proactive in responding to negative reviews and resolving issues, demonstrating that you value customer feedback and satisfaction.
Include a Call To Action (CTA)
Another component of compelling product descriptions is a strong Call To Action (CTA). After you’ve highlighted the features, benefits, and unique selling points of your product, you want to guide your customers toward completing the purchase.
A CTA is an instruction that prompts your customers to take immediate action. In the context of a product description, your CTA could be things like:
- Elevate your style
- Join the revolution
- Don’t miss out
Don’t be afraid to get creative. Use compelling CTA language that aligns with your brand and makes it stand out. It could be a brightly colored button or a hyperlinked text with a catchy font. It should draw the customer’s eyes and encourage them to click on it.
The more directly your CTA leads your customers to conversion (a purchase), the more likely they are to follow it. By creating an effective, persuasive CTA, you’re not only conveying what action you want your customers to take but also increasing the likelihood they’ll take that action.
Proofread
Regardless of how compelling your product description is, errors and mistakes can be a major turn-off for potential customers. They can make your brand look unprofessional and careless, resulting in prospective buyers losing trust.
After writing your product description, proofread, proofread, proofread. Check for typos, grammatical mistakes, and improper sentence construction. Ensure everything is accurate, including the facts and claims about your product and any numbers or specifications.
Even if it’s grammatically correct, you don’t want to confuse your customers with convoluted sentences or excessive vocabulary. Think about whether the tone and style of writing match your brand voice.
Reading your description out loud can often help you spot any awkward phrasing or long sentences. Alternatively, you can use online tools like Grammarly or Hemingway to check for errors or run it through a readability test tool.
It’s also a good idea to have a second pair of eyes go over your copy. Different people catch different things. Getting someone else to proofread can help identify any errors or unclear elements you may have missed.
A well-proofread, error-free description not only demonstrates your commitment to quality but also enhances the customer’s trust in your brand.
AI Product Description Generator
While the tips above can guide you in crafting persuasive product descriptions, sometimes you need a little extra help.
Tools like the Ecommerce Booster App from Semrush can save time, optimize descriptions, and more. Here’s a quick look at what it can do:
Amp Up Sales with AI-Generated Product Descriptions
Through artificial intelligence, the app creates compelling, unique descriptions to boost sales and increase conversions.
The generator bases its descriptions on your specific product details and its extensive database of high-selling product phrases. It also conducts keyword analysis to ensure your descriptions are SEO-optimized and generates meta descriptions with just a few clicks.
Improve Product Images in Seconds
Quality product images are essential for driving sales in an ecommerce business.
The app evaluates the current state of your product photos and suggests areas for improvement. Things like:
- Automatically generate SEO-friendly alt text
- Remove backgrounds from product images
- Enhance image quality or optimize for page loading speed
By elevating the look of your product images, you can ensure they stand out and grab customers’ attention.
Increase Your ROI with a Ready-To-Implement Plan
The app does more than stick a band-aid on your existing ecommerce product description writing woes. It conducts an expert-level audit of your product pages, identifying key areas to improve for boosted performance.
Following the audit, the app provides a customized, ready-to-implement action plan designed to optimize your product pages, increase conversions, and ultimately deliver a higher return on investment (ROI).
Product Description Template
Having a template to work from can help you scale your store or quickly add a new product that customers are asking for. Here are three product description templates that differ in tone. Feel free to mix and match!
1. Casual/Informal Tone
Meet our [Product name], your new best friend. With its [mention features – e.g., sleek design, compact size, etc.], this bad boy will fit right into your day-to-day routine. Need some convincing? Check out these benefits:
- [Benefit 1: e.g., Saves you tons of time]
- [Benefit 2: e.g., No more headaches or hassle]
- [Benefit 3: e.g., Makes you the talk of the town]
So, what are you waiting for? Click ‘Add to Cart’ and say hello to an easier life!
2. Professional/Formal Tone
Introducing our [Product name], an example of functionality meeting innovation. Designed with [mention features – e.g., advanced technology, high-quality materials], this product offers top-tier performance and dependability for individuals with discerning tastes. You’ll experience:
- [Benefit 1: e.g., High-efficiency performance]
- [Benefit 2: e.g., Long-lasting durability]
- [Benefit 3: e.g., Enhances productivity and quality]
Invest in [Product name] today to experience a superior level of sophistication.
3. Playful/Fun Tone
Say hello to [Product name] – cute as a button, smart as a whip! This little gem comes packed with [mention features – e.g., fun colors, whimsical design] that can’t help but bring a smile to your face. Just watch it work its magic:
- [Benefit 1: e.g., Sprinkles a dose of joy in your day]
- [Benefit 2: e.g., Makes chores a game]
- [Benefit 3: e.g., Turns heads everywhere]
Get the [Product name] and let the good times roll
FAQ
How do you write a product description step by step?
- Research your target audience
- Highlight the product’s features and benefits
- Create a Unique Selling Point (USP)
- Use descriptive and sensory language while avoiding jargon
- Employ SEO techniques
- Provide social proof where possible
- Include a Call to Action (CTA)
- Proofread
How do you write a product description example?
Here’s an example of a successful product description:
Experience style and sustainability with our Vegan Tote Bag. Crafted from top-quality faux leather, this bag offers a spacious interior and a sturdy handle. It’s more than just attractive—our bags are eco-friendly and cruelty-free. Perfect for fashion-conscious, mindful buyers. Make a style statement that matters.
What should be included in product information?
Include the product’s features, benefits, USP, price, available colors/sizes/variations, materials used, warranty information, care instructions, and any customer reviews or ratings.
How long should a product description be?
Product descriptions should be between 100 to 200 words. However, the length can vary depending on the product complexity and customer needs.
How do you describe the quality of a product?
To describe the quality of a product, mention the durability, materials, performance, craftsmanship, or any certifications that attest to its high standard. Ensure to substantiate quality claims with specific, tangible details.
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