Convincing product descriptions can take you a long way. If a person wants to buy something just by reading the description of what you’re selling, you’re on the right track. This means that you’ve not only burst their imagination by using fluff words like “extraordinary”, you’ve also managed to give the right amount of the boring yet necessary information on the item.
It’s a bit like making children want to eat broccoli or other “healthies” as much as they crave to have cake or junk food just by serving the dish in an appealing and delicious way. But how in the world do you do that? Luckily there are some tips and tricks!
In this guide, we give a detailed explanation and recommendations on how to create outstanding product descriptions that’ll help to boost your conversions. We’ll also gladly give you examples of how well-known brands create product descriptions.
10 Tips for Making Killer Product Descriptions
There are many factors that can define whether your text is persuasive and selling or not. For starters, it’ll help to follow the common rules that can make your texts stand out. Importantly, based on the advice of Magento eCommerce consulting, your online store must be fast and easy to use. Let’s take a closer look!
Rule 1: Who is your target audience?
First of all, prior to writing even a single word, you have to understand who your buyers are. What is their age group? What do they like? How do they talk? Which things are meaningful to them?
You need to answer these questions not only to develop your product lines. This vital point defines a lot of the communication that’ll be happening between you and your prospects on every level: your website, your social media content, your email language, to name a few.
Regardless of the demographics and peculiarities of your target audience, it is crucial to use the “You” approach in your descriptions. This way, you create a dialog that connects to the specific reader. Texts that are personalized are more likely to trigger the person who’s browsing the product page.
The same applies to the tone and wording that you choose both for your titles and descriptions. Some brands focus on a more sophisticated approach, others make an accent on technical specifics, some prefer to relate to their buyers by putting together texts that seem like they’re talking to a friend, others keep things casual. This really depends on who your target buyers are, thus, the more you know about them, the easier it’ll be for you to put together a good message.
To give a clear example of what a product description that’s well-aimed at the target audience is, here’s a description of the Chuck Taylor All Star shoes from the official Converse website. The language relates straight to the target audience, there’s a great “You” approach, there’s a reference to the influencers of the TA, and all the key data on the product is stated and organized neatly.
Rule 2: What value does the product bring?
Of course, you can start off by listing about a dozen qualities of the product, mixing it up with some fancy adjectives, but will this really have value? No, most likely it won’t.
The thing is that every product should have at least that one little feature that makes it differ from its analogs, that unique selling point or peculiarity making it better than other products. And it must be stated somewhere in the text, period. Therefore, when writing your product description, try answering the questions of “what makes this thing so special” and “how can the customer benefit from buying it”.
Take a look at the description of the Nude Matte Eyeshadow on the official NYX Cosmetics website. Among the highlights of the text are the strong points that include the number of shades to select from, that the product is easy to blend, and that it has plenty of pigment.
Rule 3: Is your text catchy?
There’s no denying that texts should ideally be able to catch the reader’s attention. According to CopywriteMatters, there are more than 60 power words that can help you sell. Some of these include “imagine”, “because”, “proven”, and “only”.
Wordplay also plays a special role in the matter. Here’s how the official Mothercare website in the sweetest way describes children’s pajamas with a lion print to parents who are shopping for clothes for their kids. They use such wordplay as “Your little cub”, “ROARsome styles”, and “comfort for every safari dream”.
Rule 4: Are you writing too much?
There has to be a balance of some kind here. Excessive weighty descriptions might not be needed if the item is more or less self-explanatory. Similarly, if the product that’s on sale is non-standard, then it makes sense to give a little extra information about it (what it is, how it’s used, etc).
Long texts have another downside: ask yourself:
- How many of your clients will actually read the entire lengthy description till the end?
- Can you narrow it down to the key points? Leave out what’s unnecessary.
- Do all of your sentences carry a point? If they don’t, cross them out.
For instance, this is a product description of a charm for a bracelet on the official Pandora website. Given the type of product that’s on sale, this text volume is more than enough and covers all the main points.
Rule 5: Is your information well-organized?
Having all the data and product details positioned appropriately is another point not to overlook. Too much information crammed in a single place only makes perception more difficult. Therefore, it’s great to split the information into separate mini-tabs, sections, blocks, etc.
Let’s take the product page of Clubmaster Metal sunglasses on the official Ray-Ban website as an example. The colors the glasses come in are right below the gallery, information on the sizes and dimensions is placed in a mini-tab next to the short description, frame and lens details are also separated, moreover, the benefits of using the product are split into a different section below, showcasing the actual difference of what a person may see when wearing the glasses.
Rule 6: Can you prove what you wrote?
Backing up your descriptions and promises is another highly vital point. If you’re claiming that the product is high quality or loved by customers (for instance, using a star rating), prove it!
Some ways to do that include providing data on the materials, their origin, studies, research, certificates. Another favored tactic is displaying customer reviews and feedback below the description right on the product page. As such, here’s how the client reviews on the product are shown on the official Forever21 website, customers who’ve already purchased the item share their opinion.
Rule 7: How powerful is your CTA?
A good call to action triggers emotion, it should push the person browsing the page to get the item. According to Daily Egg, highlighting urgency is a very important matter. Therefore, using such words as “Now”, “Last Chance” or “Limited” in your call to action is a great way to urge your customer to add a product to their cart.
For instance, the screenshot of a product page on the Abercrombie & Fitch official website uses the urgency tactic to accelerate their customers to buy the skirt.
Rule 8: A good image is worth 1000 words
Showing what you’re describing is a perfect way to enforce your product description. As of late, many online retail websites tend to use large images of the product and as many of them as possible to present every aspect of the item at its best. Product zooms, videos, and 3D rotations are just some of the trends to be mentioned.
Although high-quality pictures matter a lot, make sure all the images that you’re using are optimized in terms of size and weight. You won’t want to be slowing the page load time because of them!
The product page of the official Stradivarius website can help illustrate the point. Although the description of the item is quite small, the picture of the product basically speaks for itself. The page allows you to scroll the gallery that’s placed in the central part, the images range from the overall 360-degree look to close-ups of specific elements.
Rule 9: Did you optimize your texts in terms of SEO?
Your product description is yet one more chance to optimize your website for search engines. By using proper SEO keywords and tagging, you give the search engine the opportunity to find the product a person is looking for based on the input words.
As such, include keywords in your titles of products and their descriptions, place such information in bullet points, add star ratings. Moreover, don’t forget about your image Alts and meta descriptions. All of this can be pulled out by the search engine, sometimes even into snippets with image galleries.
Rule 10: Have you ever run A/B tests?
Which of the two button texts work better for your specific online store: “Buy Now” or “Add to Bag”? Although both are considered best-practice word combinations, the good news is that you don’t need to guess.
Here’s the call to action button text that’s used by the official Yves Saint Laurent website:
By running A/B tests you can experiment with which of the options performs better. That said, you may show half of your audience one button text, and a different one to the other half. Such experiments make it possible to observe which button gets clicked on more and to then make conclusions about which text option to use on your website. And it’s not just the button texts and calls to action, you can test practically anything.
An A/B testing tool that you may find handy is VWO Visual Website Optimizer. Among the strong points of this tool is that it allows you to actually view the page as you build your test variations of different elements, i.e. buttons, their shape and positioning, CTA texts, headings, etc. Moreover, you can make hypotheses and track the behavior of users.
Some Tips on What NOT to Write in Product Descriptions
Now, in order to safeguard you from making unnecessary mistakes, here’s a list of things that aren’t recommended doing when writing your product descriptions.
#1 DO NOT copy-paste
It is often very tempting to just re-use the exact same description text on multiple items that you’re selling, especially if they’re very alike or differ slightly. Yet duplicate content won’t do you good. Matching content is very bad in terms of SEO and you won’t be helping your potential buyer to understand the difference between the items that are alike. So, avoid copy-pasting by all means.
#2 DO NOT write generic texts
If your descriptions are mere space fillers, then what’s the point in them? There are many cases when the text has no semantic charge, no logical meaning. If you’re overusing words like “top-notch” or “the best that’s out there”, you’re not really giving your customers the message that they need to receive (which is why this product is a great fit, something they need or were looking for, what are you offering them).
#3 DO NOT lie
No matter how much you’d want to put a twist on your product to sell it, lying about the features it has is taboo. You’ll only harm your business if clients will “fall for” bad products that didn’t live up to expectations. Cleaning up a mess of bad feedback and accusations of fraud will be much harder than just not saying what is untrue.
Wrapping up, writing a selling product description is not as easy as it looks at first. Yet with some effort and a clear idea of who you’re writing them for, you can really reap the results that you’ll gain from in the long run. We hope that these tips were helpful and that you’ll take your product descriptions to the next level!
