Your products may bring your customers to your e-commerce store, but the e-commerce copy will make them trust you enough to buy your products. Ecommerce copy is any text created for any element of your website, from headlines, blog posts, products, logins, promotions and landing pages.
Your ecommerce copy needs to communicate effectively enough because your customers can’t touch, feel or see the actual product. However, you also need to understand and create a fine balance between what speaks to your audience, your organizational values, and search engine ranking factors.
This can be quite difficult to achieve unless you have refined copywriting skills or a team of competent ecommerce copywriters.
Want to expand your e-commerce copywriting skills? Read on for eight key copywriting tips to boost your ecommerce sales.
1. Study your audience
This should be your first step because you can’t understand what to write if you don’t know who you’re writing for. However, once you understand your audience, you can easily settle on the right messaging and eCommerce tools to best communicate with your audience.
You can study your audience in different ways. One is to analyze your current brand market research and traffic data in tools like Google Analytics. You will get such important details like target audience pain points, top interests, gender, location, etc.
You can also conduct customer surveys and polls and gather data about your ideal customers. Use incentives like giveaways, discounts, and free shipping to encourage your target audience to participate.
In addition, analyze customer feedback by browsing reviews and following online discussions on social networks such as Quora, Reddit and Facebook groups. This way you will find the pain points you need to address.
Once you’ve gathered enough audience data, create a customer persona for each audience group based on their interests, opinions, and demographics as outlined above. Then use these profiles to create personalized copy that will resonate with your ideal customers and drive online sales. We’ll talk more about that later.
2. Focus on the benefits
People are less interested in the qualities of your product and want to know how your product(s) improves their life or solves their pain. This is why you need to focus on the primary benefits in your copy.
From the research you did in step one, determine the primary benefits of advertising your customers on your copy. Revisit customer pain points.
One of the easiest ways to keep your copy focused on the benefits is to link the benefits to your product features, as this example from Infiniti shows.
You can either integrate the benefits into your unique point of sale copy, as in the example above, or list them in bullet points depending on your website layout and space availability. But when you use bullet points, use a hierarchical format with the most important benefits at the top of the list to easily grab your audience’s attention. We’ll talk more about that later.
Finally, add customer testimonials and positive reviews to support your benefits. This social proof will significantly increase customer conversions and expand your sales funnel.
3. Tell your story
A great story will turn customers into leads and website visitors because people easily connect emotionally with stories. This is why your ecommerce copywriting should tell a story from the headline and other elements on your ecommerce website.
Here is an example of a great story from Hiut Denim about the inspiration behind the brand.
Although “About” and “Our Story” pages are the usual pages that can tell your brand story, you can use storytelling on product pages as well.
For example, you can tell the story of a customer who is looking for the perfect skin care products for their skin type and how they keep using the wrong products. That is, until they found your products and finally got healthy skin that made them feel confident enough to go makeup free.
You can use customer testimonials and product features as motivation to tell your stories in your copy. This will add a human touch. Plus, it’s easy to do because you’re not making up a random story.
Here is another short example of well-executed storytelling from Chubbies that appeals to the human imagination.
Keep your stories simple and concise. Think outside the box to get your audience’s attention. For example, having unique stories about how you source raw materials or ingredients could also make for a great product page story to engage your audience.
While it’s good to think outside the box, avoid outright lies about your products that will eventually catch up with you and tarnish your products. For example, avoid labeling your product as “cruelty-free” if you are unsure.
4. Add keywords to your copy
While the main focus of your eCommerce copywriting is your target customers, you can’t ignore the search engine’s ability to drive organic traffic to your site and increase sales. In order for your e-commerce website pages to appear on the top pages of search results, you need to add relevant keywords to your copy.
You can use tools like Ahrefs, Keyword Planner and Keyword Surfer for keyword research. You can use the People Also Search feature and Google Search’s relevant search features to find a better selection of keywords to copy. This can help you fulfill the user intent of your audience.
Use your primary keywords at least twice in your product and category page copy. Also include them in image alt text and e-commerce site URLs to make them easy for search engine crawlers to understand.
However, it’s important to note that while keywords are important, you shouldn’t sacrifice readability by stuffing keywords or placing them inorganically. This will only make your eCommerce copy read as unnatural or incorrect. Google will penalize you for this with a low ranking. The solution is to develop a content strategy. Create multiple pieces of content to boost your SEO efforts and drive or retain traffic.
Also, make sure you are using the best WooCommerce hosting platform. It doesn’t matter if you have the best story to tell if your page doesn’t load quickly. Your visitors will simply leave your website and may even go to a competitor.
5. Focus on scannable content
As people’s attention spans shorten with the advancement of technology, you only have a few seconds to get your message across. This is why scannable content is an essential element of eCommerce copywriting.
One of the easiest ways to make ecommerce copy easy to scan is to use bullet points instead of continuous sets of paragraphs. The latter can be daunting for online shoppers who just want to know if your product is right.
Bullets are especially useful if you have a long list of details you want to show off. Bullets help you summarize your text and avoid redundancy.
For example, if the Wayfair product description below contained only text, it might have been too tedious for the user to read. However, bulleted key features make it easier for shoppers to research them and decide if this particular fireplace is a good choice for them.
Bullets also add more white space to eCommerce pages, making them visually appealing. They also take up less space than blocks of text and provide a better user experience for online shoppers using mobile devices.
In addition to bullet points, experiment with different font sizes for different parts of your eCommerce site. Use appropriate headings and subheadings to highlight the content discussed in each section.
Stick to short paragraphs – at least three lines or less. This makes it easy for shoppers to go through the content and focus on the points of interest.
Finally, highlight or bold the key points, phrases, and sentences you want users to pay attention to.