How to Write Effective Product Descriptions to Capture More Sales

Understanding Your Sales Model

For all the talk about the best ways to shift traditional sales models and techniques to the online world, there’s one important aspect you always need to keep in mind. In contrast to a traditional brick and mortar store, an online customer can’t really look at the product you’re selling – they can see pictures of it, but they can’t actually pick it up in their hands and look at it directly.

This is why it’s absolutely essential that you effectively tell them about what you’re selling. You accomplish this by writing solid product descriptions for every item you sell on your website. Here are some tips for writing the most effective product descriptions possible.

Your Product Must Be Good For the Buyer.

Don’t waste your prospect’s attention span talking about why your product is so good, or why it’s better than anything else on the marketplace. Isn’t this exactly the same as what your competitors would say about their own products? Instead, explain to your prospect why the product or service you’re selling is the best solution for them. A potential customer isn’t looking for the product that’s the best in an abstract sense; they’re interested in buying what’s going to be best for their individual situation.

You Need to Identify Your Customers.

Of course, in order to explain why your product is the best for a particular person, you need to understand more about that person. This includes not only identifying your ideal customer in terms of their general demographics, but also making sure to measure everything you can about the actual individuals who come to your product page. There are various ways to accomplish this, including Google Analytics, and customer signup where you ask them for key bits of information about themselves.

Write For Your Customer.

Chances are you take SEO considerations into account when you write your blog posts and other information on your business website (and if you don’t then you probably should be). After all, if a prospect never finds your site, there’s no chance they’ll ever become a customer. But scale back your SEO practices when it comes to your product descriptions. You want your descriptions to do the best job possible in connecting with a prospect, even if the text of the description doesn’t boost your SEO ranking.

Quantify and Evaluate Your Product Descriptions.

How do you know if your written product descriptions are doing the job? You can’t necessarily assume that they’re as good as possible just by the fact that you’re actually making sales. After all, maybe your sales figures would be even higher if your descriptions were better.

The best way to evaluate the effectiveness of your product descriptions is to quantify them. Track your sales figures (both in terms of absolute numbers of sales as well as your conversion percentages), then tweak your product descriptions to see what types of descriptions lead to more sales.

Presentation Matters.

Finally, it’s important to understand that it’s not just the text of the product description that matters – how you present it to a prospect matters as well. Would a different font or font size lead to more sales? Should the text be placed in a different position on your product page? What about the colors you’re using on other parts of that product page?

Again, you can only be confident that you’re providing the most effective sales pitch to your prospects when you measure your sales figures and test against other options.