Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce Copywriting you should Know

Content marketing is the backbone of digital marketing. Every business needs to develop a content marketing strategy. For eCommerce businesses, content marketing plays a crucial role to attract, engage, and nurture potential leads to help them convert into a sale and most importantly, retain them to improve the customer lifetime value.

Copywriting is the most essential component of content writing. Copywriting is a form of writing in which you focus on preparing content that can convert your audience to take action. It involves the use of persuasive and straightforward words that your audience can easily relate to.

If you run an online store, you already understand the importance of marketing your business on social media and other platforms to improve your online visibility through copywriting.

When you opt to use sales letters, social media posts, blog posts, and adverts, you should equip yourself with some useful eCommerce copywriting tips.

In this article, I will discuss the importance of eCommerce copywriting and share some of the top copywriting tips to improve your sales.

What is eCommerce copywriting?

eCommerce copywriting refers to preparing content for an online store. An eCommerce copywriter prepares several types of content like:

• Product descriptions
• Ad copies
• Category pages
• Email newsletters
• Ebooks
• Product guides
• Landing pages

The job of an eCommerce copywriter is to convince the customers to try the products.

Ecommerce copywriting process

You should follow a process for eCommerce copywriting so that you can generate the best copies that grab the attention of the users and pull them towards a sale. Check the list below to ensure your content is being created the right way.

1. Understand your product

The secret to writing top-notch and compelling sales copies is to understand all the details about the product you are offering. Copywriting in marketing is staying true to the identity of your brand or product.

You should establish your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) so that your prospects know exactly what you are offering. The USP should provide answers to:

• Why your prospects should buy the product.
• How will the product solve the problems your customers have?
• What makes you stand out from the rest of your competitors?

2. Know your target audience

Just like in marketing, you must first determine your target audience. This way, you can personalize your adverts or sales copies based on the audience’s unique preferences. Find out what the target audience prefers, where they come from, and their pain points.

The simplest way of understanding your target audience is by researching more about your customers. You can use online surveys to learn more about your frequent customers. For example, you can carry out a survey that targets 30-100 active buyers on your online store.

Include incentives like a free subscription to your product or a gift package to entice customers and make them participate in the survey. You can also use social media contests to learn more about your prospects.

Set a buyer persona for all customers and collect some useful insights to use in your copywriting. When you understand more about your target audience, you can write copies that seek to solve their problems.

Most of your readers will not know they have a problem until you make them understand. Therefore, your objective in copywriting is to inform, educate, inspire, persuade, and entertain your audience.

In doing this, you should only use phrases that seek to inform your audience about the problems your product can solve.

3. Craft Catchy Headlines

According to Copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people only read the headlines. The content headline is the first sentence that your target audience read on any sales copy you write. Therefore, you should make it catchy, simple, and informative. This way, your target audience can make up their mind to click on your content depending on the headline you create.

You can write a fantastic article body, but your conversions might fall with a bad headline. If your headline is not captivating, surfers will keep scrolling and won’t read your content.

Here are some tips to craft your headline and improve your click-through rate:

• Know who you are writing for.
• Create an advert first before writing the headline.
• Create more than three headlines, read them aloud, and choose one that fits your subject line and audience.
• Identify one significant benefit and include it on the headline.
• Specify the problem in the headline. This way, your target customers can know if they are interested in what you are offering.
• Convey some sense of urgency on the headline to enable people to take actions.
• The headline should be unique – don’t copy what your competitors are writing. Try to be more creative and original to show your prospects how you are different from other competitors.

Test your headlines and change them if you realize low conversion over time.

When creating your headlines, you should make them simple. Don’t confuse your audience from the start so that they develop an interest in your content.

Here are some examples of headlines you can try in your eCommerce copywriting.

• The classic headline: The classic headline is where you use questions in your headline. Note that the question should be obvious to the target audience. Example: Are You Ready To Cut Weight in Three Simple Steps?
• Benefit headline:  Say Goodbye to Insomnia In Just A Day
• Offer headline: Buy two books for a price of one
• Guarantee headline: If your roof develops any leaks one year after installing it, we can install a new roof for free and compensate you for the damages.
• Shocking headline: A 90-year-old man lifts 200 pounds. Here is what he’s been eating to remain healthy and strong.

4. Apply the AIDA formula

The AIDA formula is one of the best methods you can apply when writing your sales content. With this method, you can easily move your customer from the awareness stage to conversion and make them buy your product.

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. When using this formula, you must first research more about your audience’s passion and problems to understand what they love most.

Let me break it down for you:

• Attention: Create headlines that capture your audience’s attention. To ensure your audience keeps reading, you should target addressing the problems in the content’s first lines. Alternatively, start by asking a question in the first paragraph to jog the reader’s mind.
• Interest: Give your prospects a reason to continue reading your piece. For example, you can inform the audience that their problems affect their lives in many ways. This way, they will be more willing to listen to the solutions your product is offering. It is a simple way of making prospects listen and create interest in your content.
• Desire: Your objective is to prove to the audience how your product or service can solve their problems at the desired stage. You should specify the features and key benefits of the product or service you offer at this point in writing. The key benefits should clearly illustrate how the product can solve the prospect’s problems.
• Action: When you are done creating a desire for your product, you can now focus on converting the reader. That is to make the prospect take immediate action like signing for your newspaper, contacting your customer care team for more information, or simply placing an order for your product.

At the action stage, you should ask the prospect to buy by creating some sense of urgency. For example, you can state that they should buy while stocks last. You can include a CTA button on your landing page or product page to help your prospects place their orders faster.

5. Focus on the FAQ page

Whenever clients visit your page, they always have a lot of questions in mind. You can address most of the common questions that customers can have about your product by creating a FAQ page on your website.

Creating a useful FAQ page on your site informs your customers about your brand and reduces the number of phone calls that your support desk receives every day.

The FAQ page’s ultimate goal is to answer all the questions that prospects have and convert them to buyers. When done correctly, FAQ can improve your website ranking on search engines like Google. Here are some tips for creating the best FAQ:

• Be specific, concise, and simple – You should not write long paragraphs when answering the questions. Ensure you are brief and clear to help your customers absorb the answers instantly. If the same questions are asked multiple times, you can also reparagraph some parts of your answers
• Start by most asked questions – the questions your customers ask may change from time to time. When preparing the FAQ, you must place the most asked questions at the top.
• Keep updating the page – your FAQ page should be accurate and updated. For example, if you recently changed your pricing or return policy, you should update that on the page.
• Classify the questions – if you have more than ten questions to answer, you can categorize them into different sections and provide concise and definite answers.

6. Be a storyteller

Copywriting is all about using your writing skills and language command to persuade your prospects to act. If you are a good storyteller, you should use simple words that any reader can understand. To spark more creativity, consider using an AI story generator to craft captivating narratives that match your content’s theme.

Use the Grammarly app to avoid simple grammar mistakes that can make your business look unprofessional online. Similarly, use the paraphrasing app to improve the readability of your business write-ups. Other than that, you can follow these tips when writing your content:

• Make your sentences short – if you want to improve readability for your blog posts, you should avoid long sentences. Your sentences should have 14-20 words. Remove all superfluous descriptions, independent clauses, and repeated modifiers in your content.
• Don’t write in passive voice – when you write in the passive voice, it is not easy for your readers to understand you. Therefore, always ensure the noun comes first when writing to make your sentences easy to understand.
• Maintain the tone – you should strive to keep a uniform writing tone from start to finish. Assign one person the writing task to ensure all your category pages have a uniform tone.
• Ensure relevancy – when creating your content, you should write based on the headline. Your audience should find answers to the problem you’ve mentioned on your headline.
• Create short sales copy – you can aim for 1000 words and below. If you must create long sales copies, ensure they are entertaining. Break the content into different sub-headlines or include a table of content to help your readers skim or ‘jump’ to what they want.
• Write for the audience – when creating a sales copy, you should focus on the audience. That means you can use ‘you’ in your writing. Ensure the copy speaks to the target audience directly so that they relate to your content. Use AI tools to write a copy that your target audience will love.

Final thoughts

The road to preparing persuasive eCommerce copies is not easy. However, if you stick to the basic tips that I have shared in this article, you can always succeed in your eCommerce copywriting efforts.

Before you start writing, you should understand the needs of your audience. Know what your customers expect to hear from you and always give them a reason to read your sales copy till the last line. Copywriting leads to actions and actions lead to conversions. Happy eCommerce copywriting!