How to Write a Good Description

It’s funny that you did a search for how to write a good description because, that, my friend, is exactly what we do.

I’d like to start with a graphic:

But even on the product page, the product photos, and the reviews, while valuable, and the most important elements. That honor singularly rests with the mighty product description.

How to Write a Good Description

Put the last 13 years we have been conducting marketing experiments with the most innovative online retailers in the world. Most of those experiments have been around the product description. To get to the heart of how to write a good description we need to get into the mind of the shopper we are trying to connect with, convince, and convert.

One Shot

If you look at your Google Analytics data you will see a sobering statistic: 85% of your site visitors are new to the site. This means that if we cannot convert them in this visit there is a very high likelihood we will not see them again.

The secret to writing a good description that massively improves conversions is to present a product story.

A product story is a special type of story that’s designed to connect with visitors and make them fall in love with your creation. The job of the product story is to educate and convert new visitors.

In the Further Reading section (bottom of this article) you’ll see a link to an article that not only tells you how to craft a product story but also how to use your product story to maximize conversion rates.

When the user first lands they don’t really know all the details about our product and what it does. To complicate things, different visitors have different awareness levels. Some may be quite familiar with the problem your product solves, some may have an existing product (and are looking to find a better replacement), but there might also be visitors who have just started their search.

The List

Your product story is designed to satisfy the four stages of buying:

1— Awareness: here we are educating our cold traffic on the wonderful things that our product is able to do.

2— Interest: next, we need to construct a story such that it slows the user down and gets them interested in what we have to say. When the visitor first visits they have multiple browser tabs open. Each of these tabs has competing products. Therefore as a conversion copywriter, my job is to construct a story in a way so that this visitor ignores those other open tabs. Those tabs are my enemy.

3— Desire: you take a user from being interested to pulling out their credit card we need to significantly increase their level of desire. And in order to amplify desire, we must first understand the psychology of the buyer we are dealing with. This is where our 9-point buyer psychology conversion copywriting framework comes into play.

4— Action: telling a compelling product story isn’t enough if we don’t give the buyer clear instructions on how they can go from having discovered as to actually enjoying the benefits of what our product is able to give. Just having a BUY NOW button isn’t enough.

Interested in a secret that almost no one knows about?

Revealing It All

We hope you liked this article about how to write a good description.

We have so much more to share with you.

Why Listen to Us?

We’ve spent the last 14 years in our marketing lab 🧑‍🔬 🧪, experimenting on online shoppers. We’ve learned a crap ton and are ready to share those learning.

We want more marketers and CEOs to know about it.

Eventually, we’ll make this into a book. If you want an unfair advantage over competitors now is the time to steal our ideas because once they are published the cat will be out of the bag.

Each chapter in our forthcoming book will feed into the next. Click the link that best describes where you want to start the story:

Chapter 1: is all about conversation rate optimization (CRO). It talks about the history of CRO, statistics of CRO, and describes how most agencies do CRO. We need to describe how most are doing it before revealing our process (that’s the topic of Chapter 4.)

Chapter 2: For every 1,000 product pitches encountered the shopper buys 1️⃣ item (and we’re being generous). If the goal is to have the consumer choose your product we need to understand their selection criteria– we need to understand their buyer psychology. Marketers who nail this will always outrun their peers.

Chapter 3: Conversion optimization work typically focuses on design and layout changes. We don’t limit ourselves to design and layout. Through extensive experimentation, we realized that the thing that moves the conversion needle 🧭 are the words and ideas expressed on the page. Conversion copywriting is where it’s at.

Chapter 4: Marketers make a fatal mistake. They focus on optimizing the whole site. We focus on the tip of the spear. The most important page on your entire site is your product page. To understand why this is, read this post: Product Page Optimization.