By Elise Dobson
Introduction
Selling products online is challenging. Potential customers cannot touch, smell, or see the product in a tangible way. Instead, they rely on the text written by marketers to describe the product’s features, the problems it solves, and how it makes buyers feel – all in an effort to boost sales.
COPYWRITING is a skill that most e-commerce business owners have not spent much time developing. You have other masks to wear, right?
However, strong copywriting skills have the power to persuade more readers to click on links, sign up, or make purchases. Compelling copy helps potential customers visualize how they will feel owning the product. They can picture it in their hands, solving a problem or making their lives easier.
So, what does good copy look like? And how do you write with potential customers in mind? This guide shares with you the copywriting process you will need when crafting any text for your online brand.
Objective: Write words that reward you.
What is E-commerce Copywriting?
E-commerce copywriting is the process of crafting text that persuades a target audience to take a specific action. For example, you might persuade your audience to visit your e-commerce site, join your email list, or purchase a specific product. It is often referred to as direct response writing or ad copy for this reason.
What are the benefits of e-commerce copywriting?
Strong, straightforward copy is key to increasing sales without investing more in acquisition, which is why crafting compelling copy across every touchpoint is one of the most effective ways to move potential customers or buyers through the sales funnel.
“Archer and Olive, an online bullet journal store, helped increase its profits from $72,000 to $1.9 million in the first year of writing copy for its website,” says Kayla Hollatz, a freelance copywriter.
“We adjusted the headline to highlight the eco-friendly nature of their products. We reminded visitors of the brand’s features on the product pages. Although this growth cannot be solely attributed to copywriting, it played a significant role in their success.”
Where is Copy Applied?
No matter where you place this text, copy is a critical component of your entire digital marketing strategy. This includes:
Homepage
You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. The strong copy should quickly and clearly convey what you’re selling and why it’s different so that users don’t bounce.
Product Descriptions
Why should people buy the product you’re selling? Help the potential customer visualize owning, touching, or using it through your product description copy.
Category Pages
Sometimes, site visitors wander to your site hoping to solve a problem but are uncertain about which product will help them do that. Explain the grouping of products on the page and provide guiding snippets about individual products.
About Page
Site visitors want to see information about the company behind the site they’re viewing. Make people fall in love with the brand behind the site through your copy on the About page.
Meta Titles and Descriptions
Search engines pull these snippets from your copy and display them on the search results page. Copy is the only medium here – there are no images or videos to influence the decision. Engaging copy for optimizing organic search snippets can be the difference between clicks on your site or a competitor’s.
Every type of email marketing campaign, including promotional offers, abandoned cart campaigns, and purchase confirmations, should be written with the customer in mind. Email text takes the customer out of their inbox and directs them to your site with a call to action.
Posts
Social Media
The average person spends about 2.5 hours browsing social media each day. By focusing on the text in your social media posts, you can push them away from social media and towards your online business.
Direct Mail
Write newsletters and postcards that attract customers in your local area to visit your physical store.
Advertising
Whether it’s an ad on Google, a campaign on Facebook, or a billboard, advertising is really about the intersection of text and creativity. Combine eye-catching images with advertising copy that makes your target audience stay long enough to make a sales impact.
An example of a product description from Bison Coolers uses strong copywriting to make a mundane product (cooler) seem more exciting.
7 Proven Tips for Writing E-commerce Copy
Mirror the Customer’s Tone
What’s the point of your research in copywriting if you don’t use it to write your copy? Go back to your research table and extract the terms that your customers used in reviews, interviews, or surveys. It’s likely that each demographic or persona has its own specific vocabulary. Incorporating the same vocabulary into your e-commerce site builds trust. Customers land there and think, “This brand understands me.”
Sell Benefits, Not Features
It’s hard not to fall into the trap of shouting about how great your product features are. While you might think it’s showcasing your products in the best light, the truth is that most purchases are driven by emotions. The fact that your comforter has 400 threads doesn’t evoke those emotions of “I need to buy this!” A luxurious and cozy comforter that makes you fall asleep instantly? That’s the deal.
Your copy and user experience should work together. There are many ways to summarize the quick facts that customers care about – using icons, badges, or bullet points – without boring people with detailed specifications. So, every time you tout a feature, follow it up with a benefit.
Sprinkle Copy Without Bias
Imagine you’re browsing two sites, and a copywriter writes about how great a product is. The second site does the same thing, but some of the text is written by happy customers who can testify to what the copywriter is saying.
Which one are you more likely to engage with? It’s likely the second site. It uses social proof – testimonials from other happy customers – to make you trust the product more.
Social proof is a type of content that makes the copy seem less biased. Testimonials, reviews, and user-generated content are your best marketing assets, proving to increase conversion rates on sales pages by 34%.
Avoid Empty Phrases
Words like “market leader” and “innovative” are used so frequently that they’ve lost much of their impact. They’ve now become mere fillers – taking up space without adding meaning.
Put yourself in the critic’s position and question every sentence and every word. Ask yourself: what does this mean? If you can’t provide a specific answer instantly, cut it or rephrase it until your copy becomes clear and meaningful.
Example:
Empty Phrase: Innovative office chairs from a market-leading company.
Better Experience: Office chairs with back support used in over 150,000 offices in the United States.
Empty phrases distract the reader and make them feel bored. In contrast, facts and figures enhance your credibility. Whenever possible, include numbers and write them as numerals (7) instead of words (seven) because numbers catch wandering eyes.
Restrict Adjective Use
Adjectives help us describe what our products look like (appearance), what they do (features), and how they make our buyers feel (benefits).
In moderation, adjectives are helpful. They assist customers in visualizing what the product looks like – often a unique selling point of your product. But over-reliance on adjectives creates a headache for readers, as it makes the content hard to read.
Example:
Copy
Empty: A beautiful and romantic kitchenware set.
Better experience: A romantic cooking utensil set that fits most kitchen styles.
When using adjectives, follow these basic practices:
- Use only one adjective before the noun. Instead of “a beautiful and romantic kitchen set,” choose “a romantic kitchen set.”
- Do not use adjectives to mention obvious things. Do not describe the appearance of the product if you are showcasing it in a picture.
- Choose sensory or emotional words. Words that evoke senses or emotions make the reader feel something. Words like “good” or “effective” are relatively dull. Instead, choose “pleasurable” or “stunning” or “appetizing.”
Storytelling, not facts
When potential buyers read stories, they forget that they are being sold something. Any pre-existing barriers to your sales messages drop, and your content becomes more attractive and persuasive.
Facts increase the credibility of your product description, but facts alone do not make your content persuasive. Facts are cold. Facts lack the soul or personality of a brand.
The most compelling product descriptions include both the story and the facts. They engage our minds to think about stories. That’s why helping customers visualize the product in their lives is the hidden essence in crafting direct response copy that drives them towards a sale.
The story can be very short. Imagine you are selling an office chair with back support. You could tell a simple story about a customer who tried many chairs and continued to feel back pain.
A simple story can help prospects visualize the benefits of your products—especially if they are complex. But stories also add personality. You can tell stories about the product’s development, testing, or sourcing to increase curiosity or enhance the impression of high quality.
So, how can you incorporate these little stories into your online store? Here are three quick tips:
- Learn from investigative journalists. Dive into the interesting details. Talk to suppliers and current customers. The more you listen and learn, the more stories you will have to tell.
- Keep your stories brief and focused. Center your story around just one simple idea.
- Avoid the obvious. Tell unexpected stories to engage, entertain, and sell.
For example, Meow Meow Tweet offers its new subscribers a short story about the brand in their welcome message.
Sometimes, certain things need to be mentioned on a product page in an e-commerce store due to legal requirements or compliance. A study conducted by Harvard University in 1978 found that using the word “because” increased compliance from 60% to 94%. So when listing facts that need to be known, tell people why they are important. For example, “This type of adhesive is great because it is legally required.”
Embrace a strong viewpoint
Many large e-commerce sites seem to be exactly that: big companies without a soul. They do not communicate, do not share, and do not sell the value of the products they offer. They simply provide bread, butter, beer, and toothpaste.
But no one enjoys talking to a faceless company. No one likes to call a soulless customer service center. So why write copy that sounds like a boring company?
Great copy can often change how people think about a particular idea or problem, alongside the role your product plays in the solution.
To connect with your readers, you need a touch of personality on your e-commerce site. Think about the brand voice—if your site were a real person speaking to a customer, how would you want their voice to sound? What stories would they want to tell? What jokes would they want to make? What words would they want to use?
Remember
imagining a single buyer and writing as if you’re speaking to them in real life. Get rid of corporate language; instead, use text that feels more realistic and conversational.
GREATS uses phrases that ideal customers are familiar with, including “friends with benefits” and “drop us a line” and “get prioritized first.”
Intensive Course in E-commerce Copy Research
Writing copy is like a crossword puzzle where the key to the answers is the words your customers use to describe their problems. To write effective copy, you need to research – you need to know your customers’ motivations and obstacles.
This is quite different from how many merchants view copywriting, which often relies on the belief that the most creative copy wins.
There’s a four-step process that professional copywriters use to craft strong copy and increase conversion rates – you can steal it and use it yourself. For simplicity’s sake, let’s imagine you’re trying to understand how to increase initial purchases on your site for the rest of this article.
Step 1: Identify Target Audience and Segments
Strong copy meets the right person, with the right message, in the right place, at the right time. There’s a big difference between converting a new user on the homepage versus re-engaging someone who added a product and left it in their cart.
Here are some common segments you might want to explore and survey or interview:
- Abandoned Carts. Identify the friction points before conversion (anxiety, fear, frustration, etc.) that are preventing visitors from buying. Remember, abandoning a cart isn’t normal; it’s just common. People don’t leave filled carts for no reason.
- New Customers. You’ll identify more friction points before conversion. What nearly stopped them from buying? Why did they choose you over competitors? What was frustrating during checkout? Additionally, you’ll learn about product quality and understand how well you’re delivering on your promised value.
- Repeat Customers. Understand which items pair well together, the length of the buying cycle, and the appearance of the customer lifecycle.
- Inactive Customers. Learn about the lifetime added value (which can help in planning paid ads) and retention. How many purchases have they made overall? Why did they stop buying from you? What could you do better?
These are general segments that could apply to any store. However, you may want to get more specific. For example, isolating customers based on product categories or new customers who bought from you twice in six months.
Step 2: Conduct Qualitative Research
Once you know what you want to find out and the segments that can help you find the answers, you’re ready to start qualitative research.
Joi Klitke of Business Casual Copywriting and Case Study Buddy explains why: “If there’s one thing most companies are missing, overlooking, or ignoring, it’s that every e-commerce purchase is the result of a conversation the potential customer is having with your copy.
“With qualitative research, you have the opportunity to look at the answers before you try testing by asking the questions you know your customers are asking when they come to your site. You can take their answers and then translate it directly into your copy, in your customers’ own language.
“I don’t know of another factor that makes a bigger difference in your copy’s performance than the quality and depth of the research you do.”
So, what types of qualitative data should you collect? This type of copy research can be conducted using four methods:
Internal Interviews
Before you talk to visitors and customers, it helps to know the channels they’re already using. Speak with your sales and support team (if you have one) and gather existing data from internal sources like your customer relationship management system.
From
Among the most popular channels used:
- Live chat
- Social media
- Text messaging
Getting direct contact with people through their preferred channels – whether it’s email, chat, or phone – means you’re starting things off on the right foot.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What questions are commonly asked by visitors?
- What frustrations do visitors frequently express?
- What problems do visitors come to your site to solve?
- What benefits do visitors come to your site to gain?
- What purchase objections do visitors face?
- How can I successfully handle these questions and objections when I encounter them?
During these internal interviews, James Turner, founder of SNAP Copy, advises to “let customers speak for a long time, to move from the ‘best business answer’ phase to the ‘but really, this is how it is
Source: https://shopify.com/blog/ecommerce-copywriting-research
Leave a Reply