For any e-commerce business, interaction centres around the website, and while a lot of effort is put into its design, text that populates it is the most important thing. Yet getting it right is no easy matter.
While many of you may not know – or remember – your participles from your dipthongs, here are some top tips to using the right language and making it work with your design to engage consumers.
Read on:
Writing snappy editorial for your website
Writing a business growth plan
Compose the perfect email
Speak their language
OK, its obvious that if you are a UK site selling mainly UK products then English is probably the right language to use on your site.
But should it be formal and polite? Should it be funky and informal? Should it be full of jargon and buzzwords or should it be written as simply as possible?
The answer of course lies in who your audience are. The National Trust, say, will not speak its audience in the same way that Ministry of Sound does (although these days many people are into both).
Short and sweet
The best copy short and sharp. Just bursts of information. Broken up and well structured – and your website should embrace these textual attributes:
• Bullet points
• Short sentences that make one point per sentence
• And if you use paragraphs, keep them short and clear.
More verbs please
So let’s get technical for a moment: the kind of words used are crucial and the more ‘active’ you make your content, the more compelling it will be. And this means using verbs (“doing words”) rather than adjectives (“describing words”) to get your point across.
Compare these two descriptors and decide which you think has the most impact.
This has a lot of action in it, words that are about doing and what you can do. Whereas competitor Evernote is less punchy because it uses more nouns and adjectives and far fewer verbs – and it suffers as a result.
Benefits not just features
When looking at what to write, look very carefully at what you are trying to achieve. If you are looking to engage and then sell, the best way to approach talking about your products is to look at the benefits and not just the features of what it is you do or sell.
So rather than just list what your product or products do, think about how to explain that in a way that shows why it would be desirable to have this product do this for the customer.
Bust the jargon
Unless you are selling something very specific – and usually technical – to a very small, knowing audience, jargon is best avoided.
Why? Well, to anyone not au fait with the world in which you operate it will be an instant turn off and an excluder. To anyone else it just smacks of cliques and clichés.
So jargon is best avoided unless where it is absolutely necessary – and then you must explain what it means in layman’s terms. And above all be conversational.
Tell a story
Everyone loves stories and you can use that to tell people how great their life could be if they bought your product. While getting the language right – clear, snappy, engaging and pitched right – getting people to shop emotionally is the greatest thing words can do. And once you get them to buy emotionally then you have them.
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