Learn how to Write Words That Sell (2024)

Selling products online is hard. Potential customers can’t touch, smell, or see the item within the flesh. As a substitute, they depend on images and replica—the text marketers write to explain a product’s features, the issues it solves, and the way it might probably make buyers feel. 

Ecommerce copywriting is a skill most business owners haven’t hung out refining. Nevertheless, strong copywriting skills have the ability to persuade more readers to click, enroll, or buy. 

Great copy can also change the way in which people take into consideration a particular problem, and tell them what role a product can play in the answer.

So, what does good ecommerce writing appear to be? And the way do you write along with your potential customer in mind? This guide shares the method for copywriting text for ecommerce stores. 

What’s ecommerce copywriting?

Ecommerce copywriting is the strategy of crafting text that convinces your audience to take an motion. For instance, you could possibly persuade your audience to go to your ecommerce store, join your email list, or purchase a product. It’s sometimes called direct response copywriting or sales copy because of this.

Advantages of ecommerce copywriting

Persuasive, fluff-free ecommerce copy is the important thing to boosting sales without investing more in acquisition, hence why having good copywriting across every touchpoint is one of the effective ways to maneuver prospects or buyers through the sales funnel.

“I helped Archer and Olive, a bullet-planner-style ecommerce shop, grow its profits from $72,000 to $1.9 million in the primary yr of our website copywriting being live,” says Kayla Hollatz, freelance copywriter.

“We tweaked the headline to focus on the eco-friendliness of [the brand’s] products. We reminded visitors of the brand’s differentiators on product pages. While this growth can’t only be attributed to copywriting, it played a big role of their growth.”

Where is ecommerce copywriting used?

No matter where you’re placing this text, ecommerce copy is a critical ingredient to your entire digital marketing strategy.

Ecommerce web sites

You never get a second likelihood to make a primary impression. Strong copy in your homepage will communicate quickly and clearly what you sell and why it’s different, so users don’t bounce.

Similarly, website visitors need to see information concerning the company behind the location they’re viewing. Make people fall in love with the brand behind the web site through the copy in your About page.

Landing pages

Really great brands make every word matter, even on something like their shipping policy page.

“Any time I need to guage how seriously a brand takes their customer experience, I check the pages of their footer,” says freelance copywriter Samar Owais. “FAQ, Contact Us, Shipping and Returns—these are the pages customers who’re super all for your brand will try.

“Most brands treat these pages as an afterthought. Yes, only a few website visitors will visit them, however the ones that do can have a much higher likelihood of becoming a long-term customer or a brand evangelist.” 

The underside line? For those who’re losing ideal customers in your website’s landing pages, it won’t matter if you have got probably the most amazing ecommerce copy on product pages.

Category pages

Sometimes website visitors hop in your site hoping to resolve an issue, but are unsure which product will help them achieve this. They’ll visit category pages or collections to filter products that fit what they’re on the lookout for. 

On these category pages, explain the grouping of products and offer guiding snippets about individual products. 

Product pages

Why should people buy the product you’re selling? Help your ideal customer base visualize owning, touching, or using it through your product descriptions. Bison Coolers’ product description, for instance, uses persuasive copywriting to make a boring product (a cooling box) seem more exciting. 

Social media content

The common person spends about 2.5 hours browsing social media each day. By specializing in the copy in your social media posts, you’ll be able to drive them away from social media and toward your online business.

Other marketing materials

It’s not only your website that needs top-notch copy. Every interaction you have got with potential customers ought to be optimized. Oftentimes, that starts long before they visit your online store. Listed here are another areas to deal with:

• Meta titles and descriptions. Search engines like google and yahoo pull these snippets of copy and show them on the search page. Copy is the one medium here—there are not any images or videos to influence a choice. Intriguing search engine marketing copywriting, which sprinkles in related keywords, may very well be the difference between a possible customer clicking your website or on a competitor’s.
• Unsolicited mail. Write leaflets and postcards that get customers in your local area to go to your brick-and-mortar store. 
• Promoting. Be it a Google ad, a Facebook campaign, or a billboard, promoting is actually concerning the intersection of copy and inventive. Pair eye-catching visuals with ad copy that makes your audience stick around long enough to influence a sale.
• Emails. Every sort of email marketing campaign (including promotions, abandoned cart campaigns, and buy confirmations) have to be written with the shopper in mind. Reflecting their language in your email copywriting takes them out of their inbox and onto your site through a call to motion (CTA). 

7 proven ecommerce copywriting suggestions

1. Replicate your customer’s tone of voice

What good is your copywriting research should you don’t use it to jot down your copy? 

Head back to your research spreadsheet and pull terminology your customers have utilized in reviews, interviews, or surveys. You’ll likely find each demographic or persona has a particular vocabulary. Including that very same vocabulary in your online store builds rapport. Customers land there pondering, “This brand gets me.”

Harper Wilde is an ideal example of this. Throughout its ecommerce website, you’ll find sentences its audience likely use (or are a minimum of accustomed to)—like the concept that its bra is so comfortable “we will’t consider it’s not butter.”

2. Sell the advantages, not the features

While you might think it showcases your products of their best light, the reality is that most purchases are emotionally driven. 

The very fact your duvet linen has a 400 thread count doesn’t spark those “I would like to buy this!” emotions. An expensive, comfortable duvet cover that makes you go to sleep immediately? That does.

Every time you list a feature, follow it with a profit. That leaves you more room to make use of precious real estate, particularly a catchy headline and product descriptions, to sell reasonably than tell. 

Copy and user experience should work together. There are such a lot of ways to distill quick facts that customers care about—using icons, badges, or bullet points—without boring individuals with product specs. 

There are various advantages to tug on in your copywriting; each is determined by the rationale why customers are buying the product. Does it solve an issue? Increase pleasure and happiness? Make people feel like they’re a part of a community? 

For instance, your oven might need a quick preheat system. This feature makes you more relaxed about getting dinner ready on time. The profit is a rise in pleasure (feeling more relaxed), and it makes cooking less stressful (taking away the pain of stress). These feelings of joy and anticipation are proven to extend performance on ecommerce landing pages. 

3. Sprinkle unbiased copy 

Imagine you’re browsing two web sites. The primary is written by a copywriter who raves about how great a product is. The second website does the identical, only a few of the text is written by comfortable customers who can vouch for what the web site says. 

Which one are you more likely to interact with? Chances are high, it’s the second. It uses social proof—reviews from other comfortable customers—to make you trust the product more. 

Social proof is a sort of content that makes copy feel less biased. Testimonials, reviews, and user-generated content are your most influential ecommerce marketing assets, proven to extend sales page conversion rates by 34%.

For instance, Surely creates social proof with its “Over 20,000+ Wine Loving Customers” headline above a carousel of positive customer reviews.

4. Avoid meaningless drivel

Top-shelf words like “world class,” “market-leading,” and “progressive” are used so steadily they’ve lost much of their impact. Now they’re just filler—taking on space without adding meaning.

Placed on your devil’s advocate hat and, for every word, ask yourself: What does this mean? For those who can’t provide you with a particular answer immediately, cut or rephrase until your text is concrete and meaningful.

❌ Meaningless drivel: Progressive office chairs from a world-leading manufacturer.

✅ Try as a substitute: Office chairs with lumbar support utilized in greater than 150,000 offices within the US.

Meaningless drivel distracts and wears your reader down. In contrast, facts and figures increase your credibility. Where possible, include numbers and write them as digits (7) reasonably than words (seven) because numerals stop wandering eyes.

5. Limit adjectives

Adjectives help us to clarify what our products appear to be (appearance), what they do (features), and the way they make our buyers feel (advantages). 

Moderately, adjectives are useful. They assist customers visualize what a product looks, feels, or smells like—most frequently your unique selling point. But an overdose gives your reader a headache, since it makes your content hard to read. Take this sentence for instance:

The issue with so many adjectives is that it slows your reader down and confuses them. What about simply saying:

When using adjectives, follow these essential best practices:

• Use just one adjective before a noun. Moderately than “relaxed, romantic collection,” go for “romantic collection.”
• Don’t use adjectives to state the plain. Don’t describe what a product looks like should you’re showing it in an image.
• Select sensory or emotional words. They make your reader feel something. Words like “nice,” “good,” or “effective” are reasonably bland. Go for delightful, dazzling, or tantalizing as a substitute.

6. Tell stories, not facts

Facts increase the credibility of your product description, but facts on their very own don’t make your content persuasive. Facts are cold. Facts don’t have soul or brand personality.

Essentially the most persuasive product descriptions include each story and fact. Stories engage your reader, while facts help justify their purchase. Our brains are wired to think in stories. It’s why helping a customer visualize the product of their life is the hidden gem in crafting direct response copywriting that nudges them toward a sale. 

An easy story can assist potential buyers visualize the advantages of your products—especially in the event that they’re complicated; but stories also add brand personality. You may tell stories concerning the development, testing, or sourcing of your products to make them more fascinating or to extend the perception of top quality. 

Imagine you’re selling an office chair with lumbar support. You may tell an easy story a few customer who tries different chairs and continues to suffer from back pain—until they bought yours.

So, how do you inject these mini-stories into your online store? Listed here are three quick suggestions:

• Learn from investigative journalists. Dig deeper to uncover fascinating product details. Discuss with your suppliers and existing customers. The more you listen and learn, the more stories you have got to inform in your product descriptions and landing pages.
• Keep your stories concise and concrete. Focus your story on only one easy idea.
• Avoid the plain. Tell unexpected stories to interact, entertain, and sell.

When potential buyers read stories, they forget they’re being sold something. Any pre-existing barriers to your sales messages go down, and your content becomes more engaging and persuasive. 

Meow Meow Tweet, for instance, gives latest subscribers a temporary backstory of the brand in its welcome email. It doesn’t come across as overly salesly, nevertheless it still helps latest subscribers connect with the brand. 

Sometimes, things have to be mentioned on an ecommerce product page to satisfy laws or compliance. In a 1978 Harvard study, researchers found that using the word “because” increases compliance from 60% to 94%. So, when listing need-to-know facts, tell people why they’re necessary. For instance, “This adhesive type is great since it’s required by law.”

7. Have a specialty of view

Many big-box ecommerce sites sound like what they’re: big corporations and not using a soul. They don’t connect; they don’t engage; they hardly sell the worth of the products they provide. They simply provide bread, butter, beer, and toothpaste.

But no one likes chatting with a faceless company. No person likes ringing a soulless call center. So why create text that feels like a dull corporation?

To attach along with your readers, you would like a splash of personality in your ecommerce site. Take into consideration your brand voice—in case your website was an actual salesperson talking to a customer, how would you want them to sound? What stories would they tell? What jokes would they crack? Which words would they select?

Remember to visualise one buyer and write as you’d consult with them in real life. Ditch the company jargon in favor of copy that sounds more like a conversation.

The footer of GREATS’ product page uses phrases its ideal customer knows, including “Friends with advantages,” “Drop us a line,” and “Get first dibs.”

Common ecommerce copywriting mistakes

Lack of variation in sentence structure

Copy can get monotonous when readers know what to anticipate. Mixing longer sentences with shorter ones creates variety. 

Interrupting patterns work wonders in ecommerce copywriting. If you have got just a few long sentences in a row, people fall into the rhythm. But should you follow that up with a brief one-liner, it throws people off from what they’d expect to read. This may reclaim a visitor’s attention and make them laser focused on the words you’re saying because they will’t preempt it. 

Appealing to everyone

Great copywriting is sort of a crossword puzzle where the reply key consists of the words your ideal customers use to explain their problem. With a view to write performant copy, you would like research—it’s good to know your paying customers’ motivations and hurdles.

That’s a far cry from how most ecommerce business owners and online retailers view copywriting, which frequently is built on the assumption that probably the most creative copy wins.

“Essentially the most powerful research tool I exploit to jot down conversion copy, a.k.a. sales emails and landing pages, is as basic as a 20-minute phone interview,” says Kira Hug, cofounder of The Copywriter Club.

“While I find numerous value in surveys—because you’ll be able to collect a ton of knowledge from a whole lot (and even 1000’s) of individuals—I find nothing beats two people chatting.”

“Typically, I follow every survey with a minimum of eight to 10 customer interviews. This provides me a likelihood to go deeper into a person’s story, challenges, desires, goals, objections, and more. It’s amazing what a stranger will share with you in just 20 minutes if you ask the fitting questions.”

Never refreshing your website copy

Markets are continually changing—as is your ideal customer. The phrases they utilized in 2015 wouldn’t be relevant now, which proves that your website copy needs refreshing usually. 

Set a reminder to dive through ecommerce reviews, customer interviews, and support tickets. Add the data to your user research repository, corresponding to your Google Sheet template, to identify emerging themes. 

This doesn’t just help your website copy connect along with your goal market because it evolves; it can also function a competitive advantage. For those who’ve got your finger on the heartbeat and know exactly what your customers need to listen to before buying something online, you’ll beat your competitors and help potential customers think, “This brand knows exactly what I would like.” 

Going for quantity over quality

Word count isn’t the one most vital factor when writing ecommerce copy. A few of the handiest landing pages and product descriptions have just just a few sentences—but those sentences pack a punch. 

The less words, the higher. Punchy sentences are easier to read and show a way of confidence, so cut any fluff and make a direct impact with the copy in your site.

Learn how to conduct ecommerce copywriting research

There’s a four-step process that skilled ecommerce copywriters use to jot down copy and increase conversions—one that you may steal and use for yourself. For the sake of simplicity, for the rest of this text we’re going to assume you’re trying to know how you’ll be able to increase initial purchases in your site. 

1. Define your audience and segments

High-converting copy meets the fitting person, with the fitting message, in the fitting place, at the fitting time. There’s an enormous difference between converting a brand new user in your homepage versus reengaging someone who added a product and abandoned their cart.

Listed here are some common segments it is advisable to explore: 

• Abandoned carts. Discover pre-conversion friction (anxieties, fears, frustrations, etc.) that prevent visitors from buying. Remember, cart abandonment isn’t normal, just normalized. People don’t leave full carts for no reason.
• Latest customers. You’ll discover more of that pre-conversion friction. What almost prevented them from buying? Why did they select you over competitors? What was frustrating during checkout? You’ll study product quality and understand how well you deliver in your value proposition by answering these questions.
• Repeat customers. Get to the center of what products pair well together, how long the buying cycle is, and what the shopper lifecycle looks like.
• Inactive customers. Calculate your lifetime value (which can assist with paid ad spend planning) and retention. What number of purchases did they make in total? Why did they stop purchasing from you? What could you have got done higher?

These are general segments that would apply to any store. Nevertheless, it is advisable to get more specific. For instance, isolate customers based on product categories or latest customers who purchased from you twice in six months.

💡 PRO TOOL: Organize your copywriting research with this free template.

2. Research who you’re writing for 

When you understand what you need to know and the segments that may show you how to discover, you’re ready to start out diving into qualitative research. 

“If there’s one thing most corporations miss, overlook, or ignore, it’s that each single ecommerce conversion is the results of a conversation your lead is having along with your copy,” says Joel Klettke of Business Casual Copywriting and Case Study Buddy.

“I do know of no other factor that makes an even bigger difference to the outcomes of your copy than the standard and depth of research you conduct.”

Any such copywriting research will be done using these 4 methods:

• Internal interviews. Discuss with sales and support staff (if you have got them) and gather existing data from internal sources, like your CRM. Go over the logs from the past three to 6 months. Highlight recurring questions, pains, advantages, objections, and frustrations. 
• Customer interviews. Stay inside the segments you’ve chosen and screen for specifics (e.g., purchases, purchase frequency, demographic). Reach out to those individuals with an easy email that politely asks for his or her time in exchange for something. This may very well be anything from a $20 voucher or free product to behind-the-scenes HQ visits for die-hard fans.
• Surveys. There are two kinds of surveys you should use to uncover which copywriting styles your audience best responds to: on-site and customer surveys. Each can show you how to higher understand that initial purchase decision.
• Review mining. Third-party sites are stuffed with customer testimonials, reviews, complaints, etc., that you may tap into. They’re normally less biased than in the event that they were solicited. But even on sites where only comfortable customers post reviews, it’s useful to see which things people continually mentioned as the rationale they loved a product a lot.

3. Discover patterns

By this point, you’ve collected your audience research. Next, you’ll must dive into the info and start identifying patterns. At this stage you’re on the lookout for:

• Words and phrases that stand out to you, that were particularly memorable, or that were often repeated
• Objections, products, advantages, questions, pain points, points of friction on the location, etc., that were often repeated

In fact, you’re also trying to understand the language your segment uses, together with the words and phrases they use. It will show you how to write the way in which the audience speaks.

It could actually be helpful to take data from the spreadsheet and organize it based on the precise page you’re writing copy for. Here’s what that may appear to be for a product page:

4. Define the messaging hierarchy and wireframe

You’re now higher equipped to jot down data-informed, customer-driven copy that converts. Next, we’d like to show the info into solutions.

Depend on a messaging hierarchy for this—a graph that helps visualize the importance of every message. The more steadily a pain point, profit, or query comes up during your research, the upper it ought to be in your messaging hierarchy.

Once you have got that high-level concept, you’ll be able to start constructing a wireframe using tools like Figma or Sketch. That is one other graph that shows the design of the page, including spaces available for copy. 

“I audit any of my client’s current messaging and determine what’s working and what’s not,” says freelance copywriter Kayla Hollatz. “From there, I create easy wireframes, with formatting and layout in mind, but without the design, so I’m in a position to craft a copywriting strategy that’s easy for visual thinkers to process.”

Do that even should you have already got your design nailed. Chances are high, you may see certain elements that may very well be moved around in your website, depending on the advantages and features you’re communicating. 

Ecommerce copy could make or break your online store

Good ecommerce copywriting is comparatively easy to learn, but hard to master. Great copywriters test and measure their copy to make sure it’s driving results. 

Outstanding copywriting involves great research and great editing—more so than clever writing. So, ditch the assumptions and get your hands dirty with the research process. Survey potential customers, interview existing ones and mine competitor reviews. 

It’s only if you reflect existing customer stories and provoke emotions in your copy that you simply create words that do their job: Sell.