If you want to learn how to write product descriptions that convert and make you money, we’ve got good news for you.
Writing a great product description is a skill that every eCommerce merchant needs to master.
In fact, a study done by the Nielsen Norman Group revealed that a whopping 20% of customers abandon products because the description was poor.
So read on if you want to learn how to write great product descriptions to boost your sales.
Writing product descriptions that sell
We’ve been writing product descriptions for years, so we know a thing or two about it.
SPOILER: See our product description writing service.
When you want to write a product description that sells, it’s best to split your efforts into two stages, each with its steps.
Stage One: Writing a product description for humans
We start our guide by learning how to write a product description that sells to humans.
In this section, you’ll learn how to:
- Define your target audience,
- Turn features into benefits,
- Use sensory words to entice,
- Add social proof,
- Make it easy to scan.
Your product descriptions will be a 24/7, ever-friendly, online sales consultant when you follow these steps.
This ever-helpful sales consultant will help you make loads of money by selling your product to the right audience.
1. Define your target audience
Before we get down to writing the ultimate, successful product description, we need first to define our target audience.
To write the perfect product description, we need to know which excellent features would appeal to our buyers the most.
You can quickly sort this out by creating an audience persona.
If you’re familiar with marketing, you’ll know the importance of audience personas.
What is an audience persona?
A typical audience persona, also called a buyer persona, helps you to understand your customers better.
By understanding your customers, you get to tailor your advertising, content, and descriptions to meet their needs. It also helps you to address their concerns and speak their language.
For example, you may know that your target audience are movie-buffs, but do you know their specific interests and needs?
In other words, what’s the background of your ideal customer?
Grab a pen and paper. Let’s do a quick exercise to help you create a complete picture of your perfect buyer.
Answer the following questions:
- How did your customer end up on your website?
- What are their specific interests?
- Why would this customer be interested in your shop?
- How would your customer describe this product to a friend?
- What features or awesome benefits would interest them the most?
Now that you’ve answered those burning questions, you’ll start to get a clearer picture of what to write when writing your first product description.
Let’s look at a fantastic example of a product description that works. This description comes from Model Roundup.
As you can see, the buyer persona here isn’t just any random shopper.
Instead, the description talks directly to movie-buffs. It explicitly addresses movie-buffs that are also collectors of movie memorabilia and models.
The description starts by telling the visitor that they’re in the right place.
When reading the description, there’s no doubt that this is a model of Batman’s sleek super-plane, the Batwing, as seen in the popular Tim Burton movie.
Rather than focussing on the aesthetics like most product descriptions, Model Roundup focuses on the features that their audience will like the most.
By focussing on the features and benefits that the product offers their specific customer, they’ve done a great job describing their product.
Features and benefits also bring us to the next step of writing the ultimate product description.
2. Turn features into benefits
Since we write product descriptions for a living, we often get asked this question: Features or benefits, which is more important?
The simple truth is that customers don’t care about your features.
Customers care more about the benefits they’ll be getting when they buy your product. See why it’s so important to understand your ideal audience?
Since we now precisely know what they’re looking for, it’s easy to write product descriptions that highlight the benefits of every feature that our product may have.
When we show them exactly what benefits they’ll gain from buying our nifty product, we make life easy. We also get to make more money!
A company that does this excellently well is Mountaineer Brand.
While beard grooming products aren’t a new thing, the Mountaineer Brand creates the perfect product descriptions by highlighting the benefits of each of their products.
Most of their descriptions tell prospective buyers that not only do their products condition your impressive beard, but they also gets rid of that itchy feeling.
When you write a product description that sells, you need to keep the following questions in mind:
- How will your product make people happier or healthier?
- What problems and hassles can your product solve?
Remember always to list the benefits of each feature. Have you got a bigger screen than your competitors? Tell customers that your bigger screen leads to a more immersive experience.
Got a better battery life? Show customers that this means they can play with your device for longer!
Showing off benefits means you’re giving a customer an experience and not just a dull, ordinary product.
Now, it’s time to spice things up. Let’s add some flavor to that product description.
3. Use sensory words to entice
A 2009 study shows that consumers are more likely to buy a product if they can hold it in their hands.
However, we’re selling products online, so what can we do to recreate that same experience?
The answer lies in spicing up your product descriptions with sensory words.
When you do this right, it’ll be as if your customer is holding your product. They’ll buy it in no time!
Adding adjectives to your product descriptions can be tricky. However, these powerful words will stir your customer’s imagination while reading your product description.
A great sensory product description example comes from Founders Brewing Co.
They use sensory words to appeal to all of the customer’s senses.
They manage to sell so many products because they do the description right.
They describe everything, from the big dose of hop's flavors and blast of tropical fruitiness, to the sweet yet slight creaminess.
The more senses you can involve in your description, the easier it will be for a customer to imagine already owning your product. Once they do that, they’ll be more likely to buy it.
Here are some clever, sassy sensory words to include in your product descriptions:
- Velvety smooth,
- Dazzlingly bright colors,
- Fun, zesty taste,
- Rock hard construction,
- Feather-light weight,
When you use sensory words to conjure up the customers’ emotions and imagination, they’ll quickly fall in love with your product.
Another thing that people love is when social proof backs a product.
4. Add social proof
It’s happened to all of us. When we’re unsure whether to buy a particular product, we ask our friends and family for advice.
Some of us even go about researching product reviews before we dare to part with our hard-earned cash.
So, to make your product more enticing, it’s a good idea to include social proof into your product descriptions.
When you do this, customers don’t have to go away to do research. They’ve got all the proof right there, on the product page.
Seeing and hearing how your product improved the lives of others will convince your prospective customer that your product is genuine.
A visitor that trusts your product is a customer ready to give you money.
As master product description writers, our Contentellect team always tries to add credibility to a product description by including customer reviews.
A star rating and honest feedback from other people that bought your product will show potential customers that your product is popular and works as advertised.
5. Make it easy to scan
Nowadays, we’re all busy people. The same goes for your customers. Don’t bore them or drown them under thousands and thousands of words.
Research shows that most people will only ever read 16% of the words found on a webpage.
So, when you write the ultimate product description, make it easy for them to read and scan through the description.
A great product description example comes from Innocent Drinks.
With a glance, you can see all the essential information. Innocent Drinks can convey all this information because they pay attention to keeping everything ordered.
There’s a big, bold heading, followed by more minor subheadings and even smaller text. You can almost always find the essential information in the titles and subheadings.
The objective here is to give your reader as much information as possible in the least amount of time.
See our specific guide to Amazon production descriptions or Etsy product descriptions.
Stage Two: Writing product descriptions for SEO
Unfortunately, you may have the best-written product description on earth, but your product is still not selling because people don’t find it online.
So, to help visitors find your fantastic product, you need to learn how to write for computers and robots too.
In this section, you’ll learn how to:
- Add keywords to your product descriptions
- Add SEO-friendly videos and photos
- Craft the perfect title
1. Add keywords to your product descriptions
You already have some juicy keywords organically hidden in your product description if you’ve followed all the steps in stage one.
When you’ve got the right mix of keywords sprinkled throughout your product description, they’ll help bump your product pages higher up in the search engine rankings.
Wait, what’s a keyword, and how do I use it?
Simply put, a keyword is any phrase or word that people might type into a search engine, such as Google, to find something.
For example, if you want to buy the latest Batman toy, you’ll type something like “new Batman toys” into Google.
It’s essential to understand keywords when writing your product descriptions. The right keywords can take your sales from zero to hero in no time at all.
Use tools such as SEOKeyword Analyzer, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Ubersuggest, Moz or SERanking to better understand what people type when searching for your product.
Don’t worry if you don’t feel comfortable using those complicated technical apps. You can get a good idea of what keywords to use by simply doing a quick search.
For example, if you’re selling Batman toys, start typing the keyword phrase “batman toys” into Amazon’s search bar. As you type, you’ll see something like this:
As you can see, Amazon suggests phrases such as “Batman toys for five-year-old boys” or even “Batman toys for kids”.
Those are two valuable keywords that you can add naturally into your product description to make it rank higher.
It’s essential to keep in mind that you should never overdo keywords.
Search engines are clever little things, and if you slap a list of words in there that have no value to human beings, they’ll penalize you severely.
When you’re penalized by a search engine, getting visitors to find and buy your products will be tough.
While we’re on the topic of keeping search engines happy, let’s look at where we can score some brownie points.
2. Add SEO-friendly videos and photos
While product descriptions are mostly text, people and search engines love it when you include lovely photos and even videos of your product.
By adding visuals, you’ll make it much easier to convert humans to buy your product.
So, how do you make a search engine happy with visuals?
Alt-text is descriptive text that describes a photo or video to a search engine, such as Google. It would be best if you always used alt-texts to help optimize your product descriptions for SEO.
Always try to add as many visuals as possible. They will help convince customers that your product is right for them.
Plenty of visuals are also a great, crafty way of sneaking some juicy keywords onto your page, in the form of alt-texts, without search engines penalizing you.
Some clever alt-text ideas for the perfect product description are:
- Photo of the latest batman toys for boys five and older.
- A batman toy for kids.
Now that you’ve mastered the art of sprinkling keywords throughout your product descriptions let’s look at the final part of writing your product description.
3. Craft the ultimate product title
We deliberately left this part for last because it is easily the most crucial aspect of writing a convincing product description.
You can only write a great title once you:
- Understand your customer and their needs
- Know how your product appeals to your customers
- Have done keyword research and understand what’s a hot keyword for your product
Let’s use our “batman toys” as a great product description example.
Writing the perfect product title
When you look at this product’s title, there’s a couple of things that stand out. The first thing we see is that it’s a Batman toy. That’s great because it’s what we’re looking for!
The next thing we find is that this is a 12” deluxe action figure with expanding wings. That’s great because it tells us that this toy can be posed and has interactive elements.
The last thing we learn is that this toy has lights and over 20 sounds. It’s a great kids’ toy for boys.
We’ve learned all of that just from looking at the title. See how vital titles are?
So, to write a great title, at Contentellect, we follow this simple formula:
What is your product + What makes it unique + Who it’s for = Success!
If you keep that in mind, your product descriptions, and titles, will rock. Soon your products will start to sell themselves.
Why should I bother writing product descriptions that sell?
It may seem like an awful amount of work goes into writing the perfect high-converting product descriptions.
The sad truth is that your products won’t sell without this hard work, and you won’t make money.
So, to be an online success in a highly competitive environment, you need to write those excellent, inspiring product descriptions.
When you do write the perfect descriptions, you’ll find that:
- Your products sell faster.
- You make more money!
- Your shop has become more popular.
- People ask fewer questions about your products, which saves valuable time!
All you have to do is keep our two-stage process in mind. Write for humans first.
Understand their needs and wants. Please provide them with benefits. Entice them with social proof.
Only then should you add keywords and grand titles to charm those search engines.
Once you’ve done that, you can start making money.
This sounds complicated
We know how daunting it can be to write your first product description. You have so much to tell and show off with, but will your customers even care?
What if you do it wrong? Nobody will buy your products, and you’ve wasted all of that time and effort.
That’s why we suggest hiring a professional service to write product descriptions for you. Let them do all the hard work, slog through the research and buyer personas.
You can sit back, have a cup of coffee, and see how your products climb through the search engine rankings. It’s that simple.
Our final thoughts
Just like every shop needs a salesperson, so does your eCommerce store. In the online world, your salesperson is a well-written, informative and unique product description.
It’s up to the product description to inform, entertain and convince potential customers to part with their hard-earned cash.
When you do product descriptions right, you’ll make money. However, when you do those descriptions wrong, you’ll only end up making your competition richer.
So, please do the right thing, and follow our advice. You’ve got this!