If you have an eCommerce business the success of any and indeed all your products depends on many factors. The demand for your product, its quality, your competition and even the overall economic landscape at the time. So why is it that some eCommerce businesses succeed even when the cards seem stacked against them?
The answer in a lot of cases is the quality of their copywriting and in particular, that used to sell their products on their eCommerce site. Great copywriting can transform the sales performance of a product and in a wider context that of an entire company.
There have been millions of words written and spoken about what good copywriting looks like and still most business people fail to understand it. In reality, the definition of copywriting is very simple…it is the use of words to cause an action to be taken by another person. That’s it.
Getting someone to buy your product, to give you their email address or to fill out a call-back form can all be achieved with the use of good copywriting and more specifically the words used within that copy.
This brings us to how these words can do this. To explain this fully we’d probably need another million words, so let’s see if we can narrow it to just a couple of hundred.
There are three core emotions which you want your copywriting to spark within anyone who is reading your sales copy. They are:
- Excitement
- Fear
- Urgency
Firstly, you want the reader to get excited about the product you are trying to sell them. One key point here is you don’t create excitement using logic. In other words, don’t fill your sales blurb with loads of facts and figures. Instead, paint pictures in their minds of them using the product and build anticipation of all the wonderful benefits and advantages it is going to give them.
Use colourful and descriptive language that speaks to their senses to the point where they can already see, feel, taste, smell or even hear the product as though it is already in their possession.
Fear might seem a strange emotion to want to create with your customer but please realise we are not talking about scaring them in a way a Stephen King movie would. Instead, we want to get your customer thinking about problems or issues they may have and how your product can provide a solution to them.
By getting customers thinking about the negative results or consequences of NOT buying your product you are going to create an emotional response which induces them to buy and thus solve the problem that exists.
The final emotion you want your sales copy to create is urgency. You need to get people ready to buy your product right now because if they don’t, any excitement they currently have will soon dissipate. Touching on their fear emotion, you can describe how every day they wait is a day that their problem still exists.
Stoking up their desire so that they want the product immediately is a great way to build urgency. You can also use time limited promotions and offers to build urgency within your customers especially if they know by waiting they will miss out on a great deal.