The Essential Guide to Writing Product Descriptions

It is no surprise that the eCommerce industry continues to dominate the marketplace. In the United States alone, the online shopping marketplace is expected to reach nearly $375 million in sales this year. So there has never been a better time to hop on the eCommerce bandwagon and build out your products with better product descriptions. 

But to successfully do that, you’ll need something to sell and also the knowledge of HOW to sell it. It isn’t enough anymore to just put up a basic product title, its dimensions, and include a photo. This approach will consistently underperform and cause your potential customers to seek their products on competitor websites. 

The key to becoming the next Amazon or Wayfair is to craft product descriptions that truly resonate with your audience. While these product description templates are a good place to start, you’ll need to become familiar with the process that goes into weaving together effective content. 

That’s what this handy guide is here for! After reading through this detailed article, you’ll know everything about how to write a product description.

You Need to Understand Your Buyer Personas

Before beginning your product descriptions, you need to sit down and flush out the details of your buyer personas. Unless you know who you’re selling to, then you’re never going to know the best way to achieve your goal. 

An ideal buyer persona should include aspects like demographics, behavioral traits, interests, pain points, goals, and buying patterns. A good place to start collecting this information is your social media accounts. Your followers can hopefully provide trends in age ranges, geographics, or other key areas. This information should be noted, along with an analysis of your Google Analytics. 

You should then look deeper into the various data in order to determine other important issues. This includes information like the barriers that your customers face, what stage of life they are in, what goals they are trying to achieve with your products, and other details. Once you have this relevant data, you need to clean it up and put it together so it reads clearly. Then you’ll have a buyer persona that will be your guiding star as you’re writing your product descriptions.

Sprinkle the Appropriate Keywords Throughout the Text

Having an expertly-crafted product description is what will get visitors to click on that “add to cart” button. But first, you need to find a way to get visitors on your product pages. 

Unfortunately, there are over 24 million eCommerce sites competing for a limited customer base, so it’s easier said than done. But your best friend in this task is going to be the use of keywords. 

There are plenty of keyword research tools that can help find a list of the best keywords to use. To do this, you’ll just need to come up with a core keyword that is relevant to the specific product. 

Here’s an example of doing exactly that with an imaginary product:

In this case, the product you’d be trying to sell is a mouse pad. By using keyword tools like Keywords Generator, you are presented with a generated list of related keywords. This’ll show you how popular the keywords are and how difficult they would be to incorporate into your product description. 

So with a mouse pad, you’d probably want to try and work in keywords like “gaming mouse pad”, “best mouse pad”, and “big mouse pad” into your product details. This will allow search engines to grab your product page and present it to anyone who searches these keywords. This will solve the dilemma of how to get people to visit your product page in the first place.

Remember to Keep Product Descriptions Short and Easily Digestible

Once you have your buyer personas and keywords prepared, you’ll be ready to advance to the next step. This is where you will actually be writing content. During this stage, it’s important to recognize that the key to a good description is keeping it short and sweet.

With only 16 percent of readers actually taking in every word on a page, you need to make sure that your product descriptions are short enough to not lose customers with increasingly short attention spans. While there is no exact word count that you need to be following, it is generally recommended that you stick to less than 500 words so you don’t overwhelm your readers. 

But keeping your product descriptions short isn’t enough. You also need to make sure that the content is easily digestible as well. This can be accomplished through a scannable arrangement. This typically involves a lot of bullet points, the frequent use of subheadings, a significant amount of white space, and a large font that is easily read on a screen of any size. By practicing these strategies, you’ll create product descriptions that are inviting and encourage customers to hang on every word.

Everyone Loves a Good Story

The human race has a long history of storytellers entertaining the populous with tales woven from past events. This is a skill that should be embraced when you’re creating product descriptions. If something feels too salesy, then it is bound to be off-putting to the majority of customers. So if you can cut through this sales copy with an engaging mini-story, then this can be a very effective technique. 

One of the reasons why including short narratives with your product descriptions is so effective is due to the fact that stories help to evoke emotion within the reader. And with 95 percent of purchases being made based on subconscious emotional responses, the more that you can get your readers to feel something, the higher your sales should be. 

Therefore, if there is an interesting or unique element to your brand story, then make sure to include this in the product description. It will be a breath of fresh air amongst the sales copy and will help to stimulate the emotional areas in the brain. 

Save Time and Use Product Description Generators

In some cases, there is not always enough time to sit down and type out product descriptions, especially when there are dozens or even hundreds of them that need to be done. But the last thing you should do is try to rush them and risk producing substandard product descriptions that consistently deliver underwhelming results. Instead, rely on a team of professionals to come up with some engaging product descriptions that are ready to help win over your audience. 

One method is the use of product description generators, which are quite common nowadays. These can produce descriptions extremely quickly but often lack the uniqueness and integration of keywords that are needed to deliver optimal results. 

You’ll likely be better off going with professional copywriting services instead since they are able to add those finer details (or the “human element”) that help to produce descriptions that have the power to win over your audience. Plus, they’ll already have all of the SEO work done for you, which means that all you need to do is throw in some engaging product photos and upload them to your site. 

Make Sure to Pick the Right KPIs to Help Measure Success

How are you truly going to know if what you are currently doing with your product details is actually delivering positive results if you’re not measuring the right things? It’s simple, you’re not! 

That’s why you need to take the time to decide on which key performance indicators (KPIs) you are going to use in order to detect the success levels of your product descriptions. When dealing with these descriptions, here are several good KPIs that you could and should be using:

1. Lower Cart Abandonment Rate
2. Decrease In Product Return Rate
3. Higher Conversion Rate
4. Better Organic Search Rankings

The reason why there are so many KPIs on this list is that it allows you to get a full picture of how a certain description is performing. If you just relied on one or two of these KPIs, then you wouldn’t get the same in-depth look at its performance. 

For example, if you simply looked at the rise in people converting to buying customers and saw a significant boost with a certain set of product descriptions that use a similar formula, then you might think that you’ve found a winning solution. However, if these descriptions are also showing a higher rate of product returns, then it’s clear that the product details are not portraying the product accurately enough and that the description needs to be slightly reworked. So make sure to apply these KPIs to your product descriptions in order to keep an eye on how they are performing and if any changes are needed. 

Conclusion

The key to a great description is following each of these tips in order to create a well-rounded product description that is able to provide an incredible performance. And if you’re ever looking for more help creating astonishing product descriptions, then don’t hesitate to contact us at Article Writing.