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10 Copywriting Fundamentals for Your Ecommerce Store

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By Emily Nelson - January 25, 2023- in Go-Getter Blog

Are you ready to bust through the plateaus and take your ecommerce store to new levels? The answer to higher revenue could be in your copywriting. You could increase conversions, earn more, and engage customers by fine-tuning your product description and web pages. Here’s how to do it. 

1) Know Your Target Audience

Before you do anything else, it’s crucial to really know your target audience. How old are they? What kind of industries do they work in? Where do they live? What motivated them to buy your product? The more you understand your audience, the more you can drill down your content to speak specifically to them.

Start getting to know your audience by looking in your Google Analytics dashboard or seller platform tools. You should get a sense of what they’re looking for on your site and where they live. If you already have a social media following, you can also see what they’re saying on your channels or what other pages and accounts they follow. 

Beyond doing some super-sleuthing online, you should also remember your target market can be something you set yourself. Whether you want to sell to Gen Z digital nomads or Moms in their 40s, you can focus on that intention and shape your copy accordingly. In an ideal world, you’re staying focused on your target market while allowing some adjustments and tweaks depending on what you find in your analytics.

2) Build Anticipation with Emotionally Evocative Words

Writing with emotion can help drive conversions and sales, but creating evocative product descriptions can be challenging. Keep your emotional focus on your store’s origin story, email marketing, and other areas that require a longer copy. 

You can still infuse some emotionally charged sentiments in your product descriptions, but make sure it doesn’t turn into a TV novella before shoppers have a chance to hit ‘Buy Now.’

Try approaching your product descriptions with sensory words that evoke emotion. Describe how the product feels or looks and use words that convey urgency, curiosity, and inspiration. One shortcut to figuring it out is seeing how your direct competitors embrace their copy. The idea isn’t to mimic what they’re doing but to figure out the right tone and approach that resonates with your shared audience.

3) Tell a Story

Why crank out the facts about your products when you could tell a story instead? It’s true your audience needs to know the basics, like material, sizing, and color. But beyond the round-up of info and stats, they need to connect with your product to buy it. 

Your product story can be short and sweet while focusing on who it’s best for. Here’s an example: “Our hats are customized with print-on-demand technology, so you’re always representing your best self out in the world. Pull one on before your next hike and feel it transform your day from one hilltop to the next.”

There are dozens of ways to tell a good product story, so ensure it resonates with your brand and audience. Over time, you’ll figure out which ones work best to forge a connection while improving conversions.

4) Avoid Negativity

There’s copywriting wisdom out there that says to aggravate your customer’s pain points. That may be true with some products and services, but selling a T-Shirt isn’t one of them. Instead, focus on how the product improves your customers’ lives or stands out from the competition. 

Here are a few examples:

“Our customized T-shirts are true to color and resistant to fading, so your design always looks as vibrant as possible.”

“Instead of settling for average, generic designs, customize your own throw pillow to make your guests gasp, LOL, or shed a few tears of joy.”

The shopper can fill in the pieces on their own that your products are different from the rest without telling them outright that your competition sucks. It also means avoiding copywriting about how frustrating it must be to have a closet full of faded shirts. Focus on the big wins your buyer is getting instead. 

5) Focus on the Benefits

Are you prioritizing the features over the benefits of your ecommerce products? According to HubSpot, features are what the products do and how they’re different from other options on the market. Benefits are why those features matter in the first place and how they help their intended audience. 

Don’t worry; it’s the norm for even the biggest ecommerce giants on the planet to confuse or blur the lines between features and benefits. For example, the features of your customized hoodies could include your use of DIGISOFT® technology. But the benefits are all about how vibrant your hoodies are with a unique design that stands out from the crowd.

6) Keep Your Tone Consistent

Your ecommerce store’s copywriting is part of your overall brand identity. Keep your tone as consistent as possible, whether you’re talking about color-changing coffee mugs or your return policy. If your style is straightforward but lighthearted, infuse that through your copy. 

Of course, there are some exceptions. No one needs an FAQ section or privacy policy that sounds like you’re waxing poetic and never getting to the point. At the end of the day, your tone should be consistent but still valuable to the reader.

7) Surprise and Delight Your Customers

There’s nothing wrong with throwing some surprise details and phrases into your product description to ensure customers are paying attention. Start by incorporating humor into your copy to make it more memorable than those with dry details.  

Draw inspiration from the Dollar Shave Club, which takes a humorous, lighthearted tone with its DSC Traveler kit. Part of its description includes, “Doesn’t hold your emotional baggage.” Their Shave Dew trial product also consists of the phrase, “Disappears so fast, your magician friends will ask how it’s done.”

8) Keep it Natural

Despite all the best practices with ecommerce copywriting, keeping it all natural is still important. Depending on the products you sell and your audience, approach it like you’re talking to a friendly acquaintance. 

You don’t want to get so casual it strips away your business credibility, but being too stiff just doesn’t resonate. Find that middle ground and read back everything you write. If it sounds awkward to you, it probably is.

9) Keep it Short and Sweet

There’s no need to write a novel when you’re trying to describe your line of housewares. Short and sweet generally works best, even while peppering in those emotionally evocative words or humor. If you want to maximize content marketing, launch a blog for your store and develop concepts around your products to attract organic traffic.

Here are some ideas:

  • If you sell athletic apparel, write posts about how to find the best fit, which fabrics to choose based on climates or activities, or how to dress up a look for last-minute drinks.
  • If you sell tote bags, create a round-up of the best styles, use cases, and how to customize them to make them look unique. 

10) Integrate SEO Best Practices

Ecommerce copywriting is an opportunity to integrate best practices for all things SEO. Make sure you’re checking the boxes of the following:

✅Are you integrating relevant keywords (use tools like Keysearch, UberSuggest, or SEMRush)

✅Use optimized product titles, blog post headlines, and page titles

✅ Internally link to other products or content (when relevant)

Although copywriting is essential to ecommerce SEO success, it shouldn’t bring your productivity to a standstill while amplifying your stress. Instead, focus on optimizing a few of your old product pages each week while integrating best practices into new ones. The more time you spend on your copywriting, the more intuitive it gets, especially when you see the results and find the inspiration to keep going.

 

What copywriting fundamentals do you use for your ecommerce store? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

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