Make your product page sell more - use storytelling to increase sales

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to how to present your product on the product page is not how to actually show the product, it is how to sell it. I constantly see product pages with tons of bells and whistles. There are multiple product pictures or perhaps even a 3D model which is now getting more common. There are splashes for sales, discounts and campaigns. There are social media links and sharing capabilities. There are reviews, some better presented than others, and there are product attributes.

The thing that I rarely see is: the selling text. How many e-commerce sites have you visited and looked at a nice product only to be served som SEO optimised text that just spit out keywords and attributes? Imagine for a moment that you ventured into a store and you see that same product. You walk up to it and just as you do that a sales clerk come up to you and start to talk:

“ Stainless steel watch featuring textured dial border, contrasting chronograph subdials, and pebbled leather band with stitching.
Quartz movement with analog display. Protective mineral crystal dial window.
Features buckle closure, date window, stick hour markers, and blue second hand.
Water-resistant to 300 feet (100 M): suitable for snorkeling, as well as swimming, but not diving.”

I bet your first reaction would be to wonder why the sales clerk talk like that and then you would probably feel a bit uncomfortable because you would suspect that the person is a robot. No one talk like that, it’s simply not a very human like way to communicate. You probably already know that psychologically we tend to like things we can relate to, like people with similar taste in music, clothes or that look like us. Imagine if we instead write the text like if a real person would speak to us and see what happens:

“This beautiful stainless steel watch have a nice textured dial border and the armband is actually handmade in Verona, Italy, that’s why the stitching have that special look. It was designed by the famous artist named Bruno DiMalo who is famous for his attention to the finest details and for his glass sculptures that are featured in many fashion magazines in Italy. In this particular piece he added contrasting chronograph subdials and a protective crystal dial window.

The rumor has it that this watch was designed as a gift for a famous Italian actress and that is why the second hand is sapphire blue, just like her eyes, but also because of her love for the sea. Because of that love for the sea this fine watch can be used in water, but you should not dive too deep with it.”

Suddenly we weave a story around the watch and if I have done my research on my customers this text should attract the customer and s/he can probably picture the city of Verona or some other Italian city in the mind. We add a feeling of luxury by tossing in words like handmade and then connect it’s origin to a celebrity. All of a sudden the selling text sound more appealing, even if I did not put a lot of effort into it. A skilled copywriter can surely do much better than this and it does not have to take a lot of time to write.

So why not make a test, right now. Pick say 5 products that you are already measuring conversion for and re-write the selling text and weave a story around the product with the use of basic copywrite techniques. Match the story to fit your best selling usergroups and see what happen! If you do it right you should see a nice increase in conversion as you connect to your users, just by writing as a human and not as a robot.

If you do, please let me know how your experiment turned out!