How to Make your Product Sound Compelling to Buy

Introduction

Ever been given an ordinary, boring object to describe for a web site or catalog? Or been given 3,791 of them? Perhaps you suspect that your monotonous product or service descriptions could be more captivating, but you’re not sure how.

This manual explains how to create product or service descriptions that engage readers and turn shoppers into purchasers. It tells how to prevent a multitude of product or service blurbs at an ecommerce web site or in a printed catalog from becoming tiresome. It also reveals how to inject those descriptions with an appropriate and consistent voice – a personality that fits the selling company and appeals to the target market.

These techniques work whether you must fit everything into one short paragraph or have the space to go on for a page or more about each item.

The foundation of effective product and service descriptions is an idea that belongs to Copywriting 101, yet nevertheless is still not applied skillfully by the run-of-the-mill copywriter: interweaving features and benefits. Accordingly, I’ve begun with this technique and provided lots of examples.

Once you’ve gotten the knack of joining features to benefits in a compelling way, you’re ready to surround such basic statements with interesting angles on ordinary stuff. That’s where you’ll profit from my checklist of 73 ways to describe a widget. I’ve illustrated it abundantly with examples drawn from seven real catalogs – L.L. Bean (outdoor clothing and gear); Staples Furniture; Kingdom Tapes, CDs & Electronics (aimed especially at the church market); Cabela’s camping equipment; The Popcorn Factory gift baskets; A.G. Russell Knives; and Cannondale bicycles – along with items from a fictional catalog for spa services. Study these examples and you’ll know how to analyze any catalog or web copy to come up with even more ways to hold the reader’s interest.

The final element of persuasive product or service descriptions is voice, and I’ve demystified that elusive concept for you so that you can cast everything your write into a single style of expression that your target market will recognize and respond to. Whether you want to come off as authoritative, humorous, iconoclastic, girly, macho, sly, world-weary, worshipful or zesty – or need to do so to match an existing catalog – by the end of this manual, you’ll know how to do that.

At that point, instead of feeling overwhelmed by the chore of description, you’ll be able to have fun at it, and pass that pleasure along to shoppers – whoops, to buyers.

Although we don’t cover that here, whenever possible you’ll want to supplement your product descriptions with signed testimonials.

So let’s get started with the fundamental descriptive skill you need to master.

Features Plus Benefits: The Foundation of Descriptive Copywriting
Don’t skip this section even if you think you know all about features and benefits, because it’s unlikely you’ve thought through all the variations on this theme that help you create compelling, concise product descriptions.

In a nutshell, a feature is a fact about an item – a “what” about it, while a benefit is the difference that the feature makes for its user – a “so what.” For instance, with reference to a dictionary:



Feature
Benefit

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