eCommerce Copywriting (Advanced Guide + Step-By-Step Case Study)

What is the first thing that enters your mind when you hear about ecommerce copywriting? I am guessing that you’re thinking about onpage optimization and product descriptions. But ecommerce copywriting is so much more than that.

Copywriting is done for one goal – to sell. So any activity in your value chain that is geared towards selling and has written content can benefit from copywriting.

In fact, it can help you sell better. You’ll know this when your new copy manage to get you more sales and conversions. With it, you can have some expectations on your income with each traffic you direct to your online store.

Today, you’ll learn about 4 copywriting strategies that can help you sell more products in your online store.

Copywriting Strategy #1: Audience Reflection

Creating an effective copy starts with knowing what to write. The best source of information is your audience – or more commonly known as your customers.

There are many ways to get to know your audience. You can do this in three ways.

Creating a Persona

The first step to audience reflection is creating a buyer persona. A persona is simply an imagined person that represents your ideal buyer. This should contain specific details such as the person’s age, sex, location, hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes and others. On top of all of these, you should also know the specific problems that your product or online store is solving. This should be reflected as a problem of your buyer persona.

Tracking Customer Behavior

Once you have a persona in mind, it is time to investigate. You can do this by tracking customer behavior. In your online store, you can do this by looking at how your customers are acting. Are they leaving their carts? Are they buying over and over again? Does the likelihood of them buying increase when you introduce a promo code? You should take note of all of these behaviors for these can help you in the next strategies.

Conducting Qualitative Research

If mere observation is not enough, you can resort to using some qualitative research methods. This includes interviews, focus group discussions and case studies. With these methods, you get to talk to your customers in a face-to-face manner so that you can address and understand their needs.

Audience reflection is necessary for you to understand who you are talking to. The information that you have gathered here can then fuel the next strategies.

Copywriting Strategy #2: Benefit Harvest

Now that you have a clear idea on who your audience is, it is time to think of the benefits that can match their needs. In this section, I’ll show you how to do that.

Use Qualitative Data

In the previous strategy, I told you that you can conduct interviews, focus groups and case studies on your target market. Once you manage to collect data, it is time to use what you have discovered to create a set of benefits. These will be based on the needs of your target market. So if they need a fast way to order online, you give them a shorter delivery time. If safety is an issue for them, you can have some delivery insurance. This is where you brainstorm on how you can meet the needs of your target audience.

Convert Features into Benefits

Aside from your audience, you can also look at your products instead. In this approach, you simply list the features of your products. This is what most technology companies are doing. They list all the things that their product can do and they give you an idea on how you can use it in real life. This ‘real-life’ application pertains to the benefits or how the product can change the customer’s life. Be sure to differentiate between features and benefits. Features describe the product while benefits meet the needs of the consumers.

Ask Your Audience

If you are finding it hard to work out your benefits through observation and feature inspection, you may want to ask your audience about this. Here’s what you’ll do. You’ll still brainstorm some ideas using feature inspection and observation. However, you will now ask your audience if the benefits that you have come up with directly spoke to them and their needs. This is where you’ll weigh if the benefit is good or bad. If it’s good, then you should put it on your product description. If not, you should just forget about it.

Copywriting Strategy #3: Powerful Headlines

We cannot talk about copywriting without headlines. The headline is the teaser in content. It can pull readers in or push them out. The more enticing a headline is, the higher the likelihood that users will click through a link. It is with this reason that ecommerce website owners should also learn about copywriting. It is not just about selling but enticing people to visit a website. You need to get people into the website first if you want them to buy.

Today, I’ll show you three headline strategies that worked for me.

Include Numbers

Did you know that numbers have an effect on the readers? Just look at some of the most popular headlines and you’ll see that they include numbers.

There is something about numbers that makes them believable. For example, if a person tells you that they have 10,234 traffic in their website, wouldn’t you believe them more than the person who tells you that they have thousands of traffic to their website? That shows how powerful numbers can be.

Include Specific Benefits

Now, you may already have a list of benefits that you got from the previous step. It is time to assimilate them into your copy by including one in your headline. Note how I indicated that you should only include one and not many. This is to prevent you from confusing your target market. Including benefits in your headline can help you entice readers to click on it. If the benefit speaks to their needs, then there is a greater likelihood that they will click it.

Avoid Clickbaits

You may have seen tons of so-called ‘clickbait’ headlines on Facebook. You may have seen it before and it includes an element of secrecy and surprise such as “The One Thing That’s Making You Fat”. While these titles are enticing and it gets people to click, people who click on them often feel misled or cheated. So instead of creating headlines like these, I suggest that you go the traditional route of numbers and benefits. Those headlines always work better.

Headlines are just one part of your copywriting process. The most important part is in the content itself which you’ll learn more about in the next chapter.

Copywriting Strategy #4: Support Content

Running an ecommerce website doesn’t mean that your content should just be limited to your product descriptions and delivery policies. After all, no one is stopping you from creating content for your target audience. And in this content-driven age, content is much more in demand than ever before. In this section, you’ll learn more about creating non-ecommerce content which I like to call as ‘support content’.

The Power of Blogging

Blogging is the only real pathway to claiming expertise on a particular topic. When you blog, you disseminate information and form a clear opinion of who you are and what you stand for. It is with this reason why blogging is very important not just for content marketers but also for ecommerce website owners.

Blogging can provide an avenue for you to be an expert in your niche. Why do you need to do this? Well, these days the Internet is no longer run by the rankers in the search engines. Instead, websites are now able to form mini-communities. Therefore, the Internet is run by influencers. In order to be an influencer, you need a blog.

More than selling products, you should aim to be a market leader through your expertise. You should be an influencer. When you do that, you’ll find that selling products are easier.

Comparison Blogposts

Comparison blogposts are quite common in influencer blogs. This is where they put two products side-by-side, go through their pros and cons and choose a winner. This can be done between 2-10 products. It all depends on the writer.

Review Blogposts

If the idea of comparing your products to others just sound way too scary, you may want to create a review of your product instead. Or if you want better conversions, you can give your product to an influencer for an honest review. Many small businesses have done this and this simple action has resulted to a wave of traffic for them.

List Blogposts

The third type of blogpost is the list. This can include top 10 lists, hauls or roundups or gift lists. List posts come in handy for ecommerce website owners because people usually go to these posts for advice on what to buy. If these posts contain their product, then it will generate leads to their page.

There is so much more to learn about blogging than the post types. And you have to do the blogging yourself for you to know the types that will work for your business.

It is not just about writing content but writing something that can assert your authority and will make you stand out from the rest. In the next section, you’ll learn more about standing out in competition mining.

Copywriting Strategy #5: Competition Mining

No man is an island in the online marketplace. While you may have the most unique products in the world, there will still be some competition that you have to look out for. In this section, we’ll go deeper into the world of your competition through some competition analysis.

Title Analysis

Instead of looking at the backlinks of your competitors, we will look at their content. This is all about copywriting after all. We’ll look at the pages with the highest traffic using tools like Ahrefs and then look at the titles.

Another way to analyze the titles of your competitors is through a tool called BuzzSumo. In this tool, you can search for your topic and see all the titles that have the most social media shares. You can then look to these as examples as you create headlines for your own content.

Benefits Analysis

Another interesting way to look at your competitors is to look at the benefits that they showcase in their products. This can be as simple as a list of benefits in their front page or it come as separate bullets with images and descriptions. If you are a direct competitor, you can use their benefits in your own website. But instead of merely copying, I suggest that you aim to offer more than your competition. This way, your customers will choose you over them.

Content Strategy

Aside from the titles and benefits, you should also look at the content itself. Look at the blogposts. What type of content do they have? Do they have lists, hauls or gift lists? If not, what content has the most views and comments? This will guide you in the types of content that your market is interested in.

Looking at your competitors is a great way for you to understand how copywriting works. With your competitors, you get to understand more than the theory for you get to see it in action.

Putting it All Together

You now have some strategies that can help you create copy not just for your products but also for your entire website. You now know the art of attracting people to your site and converting them into a sale for you know how to meet their needs. You may not be able to get it in your first shot especially if you’re new to writing. But once you understand the words that your market is looking for, you’ll be able to make more sales than ever before.

How is your ecommerce copywriting? Are you doing all the strategies listed here? If not, do you plan to do them? Tell me all about it below.
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5 Response to "eCommerce Copywriting (Advanced Guide + Step-By-Step Case Study)"

  1. Comment From Bethany Brighton

    In all my years of trying to come up with my site content I never really captured the true persona of my customers. This is a very important step that can help you come up with specifically targeted content.



  2. Comment From Dave Stuart

    Coming up with a blog to support information about your product and industry is very important. I have seen that if you come off as an authority in your industry, your customers will trust you and be more willing to buy.



  3. Comment From Dale Krueger

    One way to get an accurate customer persona is to survey your customers and ask them certain brief questions whenever you have contact with them.



  4. Comment From Chance Lewis

    I have seen a big difference when I have catchy headlines for blog posts. If it is not enticing, people will not click to read.



  5. Comment From Sara Nelson

    Before doing anything, it is really best to have a strategy for posting your content. This can be done by coming up with a schedule for blog posts and updates to key content areas of your site.



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