Writing Effective Content for an e-Commerce Website
July 9th, 2006 by Matt InglotThis article is part of the Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business series. All week you will find articles that demystify what’s involved and what the secrets are to success.
Yesterday I wrote about the importance of testing and optimization in getting the real revenue that your online business is capable of achieving. In the next two days I’m going to let the cat out of the bag by providing theory and guidance for intelligently putting together a highly effective e-commerce site for your product or service. The tips in this article can be applied to any site where you ultimately want the user to perform an action, such as purchasing a product, signing-up for a service, or even taking advantage of a free offer.
Today we are going to look at completely shifting the mindset that you use in putting together your sales site. If you’ve taken some marketing courses then much of this first article is hopefully familiar, as we are simply taking marketing theory and applying it online. Tomorrow we’ll take this foundation and build on it with specific highly effective methods used by successful online companies to attain massive sales and increase customer happiness at the same time.
Establish A Single Desired Visitor Action Resulting From Your Website
Before you can possibly improve the results that your business receives from its website you first need to figure out what it is that you want your site to convince people to do. An effective site usually only has one main purpose, and everything else stems from that one purpose. If your goal is to sell a product then you need to make sure that everything you place on your site ultimately relates back to this single purpose. It’s very easy to add pages that make the site seem more fleshed out and interesting, but in reality have very little to do with your goal and only serve to distract the visitor.
On the surface this advice may seem obvious, but ever since I started explicitly doing this with my website clients I have attained dramatically more focused projects and been able to deliver results that work specifically towards this single goal. This leads to the actual results that the client was hoping to receive from the site rather than just some information floating in cyberspace.
Write Your Content to Promote Your Intended User Action
There is a major difference between an action-benefit-oriented site and an informational site that can be spotted almost instantly. In the latter case you will find a bunch of links to information about the product and the company, including an overview, features, photos/screenshots, purchase, and about. Each page proudly talks about its respective material so that the visitor knows just how great this product is. Intuitively this sounds like a good approach, so what on earth is wrong?
Your potential customers could care less about how great your product is! What they do care about is how this will benefit them. By taking the approach described above you are leaving the work of figuring out the benefits of what you are selling to your visitors. It’s almost like assigning them a research paper!
Your content should constantly reinforce the benefits that customers receive. These should be based around a Unique Selling Proposition, the unique benefit that only your product provides and which differentiates you from your competitors. Once you have your USP and are writing content based on it, you should be providing a next-action that connects the promise of these benefits with the way to obtain them. If you leave closing the sale to a single Order link on your navigation bar then you are literally throwing money away.
Getting the Hang of It
There’s no substitue for practice and it does take some time to learn how to write effective copy in the style above. You ultimately want to place yourself in the customer’s shoes and address the desires and concerns that they may have. You have created a fantastic product that you are proud to be selling, why not do your absolute best to make sure that your visitors know what it can do for them?
I am constantly looking at websites of successful online companies and carefully examining what they do. You don’t even need to look online to gain insight into writing effective copy as we are talking about basic marketing principles here! Look at flyers, watch TV advertisements, pay close attention to signage inside of retail stores, and learn to spot which material draws you. I like watching As Seen on TV commercials and reading those extremely long single page websites extolling the virtues of “home business opportunities”. While the quality of these products may sometimes be called into question, the sales pitches behind some of them are amazingly convincing. You don’t have to lay it on as thick as they do in your own product, but pay attention to how they systematically remove your barriers to making the purchase.
You’re skills will improve with time as you get a better feel for technqiue and a better understanding of why your customers buy your product. With this in mind be sure to regularly revise the copy on your website and test the results it delivers!
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