How many times has it happened that the description of a product has lured you into buying something you have been thinking of purchasing for a long time? Well, that is the power of a strong product description. For e-store owners it can quickly scale up sales funnel and help you get rid of cart abandonment, which is a major concern many e-commerce companies face.

A product description is the marketing copy that explains everything about the product. It is the most important aspect of selling online. A bad product description can shadow a customer’s mind and even if the product is great, it wouldn’t convince the customer enough to give it a try. This brings us to today’s topic: How do you write good product descriptions that sell?

7 effective ways to write good product descriptions that sell

A good product description doesn’t necessarily mean long explainers. The major goal of any product description should be to be able to give all possible details that would be beneficial to the customer purchasing it. Here are some effective ways to do that:

1. Understand what your customers want

The Holy Grail to achieving a profitable ecommerce business is understanding what your customers want.  And as mentioned above, the description need not be lengthy. Take an example of this women’s thermals sold by Kosha, a brand that specialises in winter travel clothing for men, women and kids.

The description is a one liner that clearly explains the product.  Further when you take a look at the product feature and specialisation, you can see the crisp detailing that has been done as shown below:

This company knows its target audience and their personality and has clearly adopted a direct and to-the-point product description approach without going overboard with flowery words, because the intent of the e-store is to sell great quality travel products and not party dresses and apparels.

Hence, before you start writing down product descriptions, ask yourself the following questions:

• Which category of audience are you marketing your products to?
• What would the customer like to see in your product description?
• What are the features that would interest them the most?
• How would the customer refer your products to h/her friends?
  
  

Also read: Post sales: 5 points to remember

2. Product benefits

The next important aspect is product benefits. Many a time, a customer is interested in the benefits a product provides rather than getting into the dreary details. For example, a person looking to buy a health/beauty product would be more interested in knowing the benefits of the product rather than its packaging or dimensions. Take a look at this herbal soap by Fuschia, a brand that boasts of natural handmade skincare products.

The product description clearly elucidates the health benefits of using wheat germ oil in the soap. From softening and moisturizing the skin to fighting skin problems like psoriasis and eczema, this versatile soap bar covers everything a buyer could ask for in an herbal soap. An additional star point can be given to the ‘Caution’ sentence which clearly states that the soap should be avoided by people allergic to gluten.

Another example is how BigBasket writes its product descriptions. Take for example this strawberry conserve that it sells.

Starting from the ingredients used in making the conserve to a tiny manual on how to use it has been clearly stated point wise. The point wise product description makes it easy to read.  They have also added a banner of ‘Similar products’ making it easy for the user to browse through any other flavor they might want to try, on the same page. Clever, isn’t it?

3. Customers love details

A strong product description should be a wholesome package that describes the product, tells you its benefits and packs an emotional punch as well. Afterall, customers need to be emotionally motivated to purchase a product.

As you can see above, the description is a powerful narrative of the health benefits of strawberry, the ways it can be consumed, its nutritional values, the special method Happy Chef uses to handpick each strawberry before cleaning, testing and processing it further and most important- the highly affordable pricing it comes at, is enough to propel any customer even slightly interested in the product to immediately make a purchase.

Also read: Remarketing: Benefits for small businesses & the different tools you can use

4. Connect with your language

Companies spend thousands and crores building up their customer care team just to give their customers a seamless shopping experience. Imagine being pleasantly greeted by a store representative who very lovingly explains the features and benefits of a product to you. Sounds amazing right? It makes the task of choosing a product so much easier. How about you create the same magic on your e-commerce platform? How can you do that? Writing product descriptions in a language apt for your users, a language that captivates, a language that makes the buyer sitting miles away feel a deeper humanly connection with your product.

Etsy, an online shopping site selling vintage apparels and products has nailed its product description.

As you can see, the language is lucid and the description has been supported with great images from users who have already used and loved the product.

5. Improvise using power words

The saying, “words are mightier than pen” seems to fit in perfectly here. In a virtual world where the product description can literally make or break your business, using words to attract users into purchasing is product is a great idea.

Neil Patel summarises the most influencial power words by David Ogilvy as follows:

• Suddenly
• Now
• Announcing
• Introducing
• Amazing
• Sensational
• Revolutionary
• Miracle
• Magic
• Quick
• Hurry
  
  

Use a combination of these words to frame your product description and watch your customers convert.

6. Optimise your description for SEO

As important it is to lure your customers with your product description, it is equally crucial to keep the SEO relevant. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it helps you gain traffic for the organic content you put up on the internet. How it works is very interesting. Google or any other search engine you are using has a crawler that collects all the information from the internet and then an algorithm is used to rank all the search results accordingly.

Lets understand using the following example:

When I type the words, ‘women wrap dress’ on Google, the above search pages appear.  A great way to understand which keywords Google is favouring at the moment and those you should use while framing your product description is checking out the words marked in bold.

Using keywords in product titles is also a great way to get Google to rank you.

7. Test your product description

Last but not the least; test your product descriptions before rolling them online. Make sure you have followed all the above points and have created a format for all your product descriptions. Once that is done, put it on pilot mode and check if you get the desired traffic. 

Every business and every product is different and you can try out various hit and trial methods before deciding on the one that suits your venture and satisfies your customers.

Let us know in the comments section below if you liked reading this article.

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