Your product listing, including both photos and description, is not just used for describing what you sell.
It is a sales pitch. In that short amount of time, you need to say what your customers want to hear the most first.
In the previous section, we talked about some of the biggest drivers of why customers buy. Now you can look at your own products and see how it can be applied to your products.
For example, customers may not care much about the weight or the technical name of a fabric, but if you state the benefit of such fabric, they would pay attention. You can say it is a “with our lightweight cotton, you can float through your summer days with this floral dress feeling cool and breezy”.
After gathering all the selling points that appeal to customers emotionally, it’s time to tie them in with the features of your product.
Customers need to understand what the product actually is in addition to the emotional appeal. Information you can include:
These are essential information that customers are looking for to justify their purchase. They themselves may not be what catch customer's attention, but they are great for tapping into the logical side of customers’ minds so that they are easier to justify their purchase.
Using some examples, let's see how we can combine the features with benefits to make captivating selling points:
Another example from Lush about their bath bombs:
"Calm the storm as you unwind amongst clouds of mint and oakwood; you can almost smell the weather turning. Fair Trade, organic, cocoa butter and organic shea butter melt together in a serene softening pool as red and blue bleed together and bay oil warms."
You can see how Lush mix the emotional appeal and the relevant facts together. The words like "calming" and "serene" paints a relaxing picture for the customers, and those selling points are supported by facts/features like the ingredients.
One of the best ways to understand your customers is to read their reviews.
A good method is to go to the review section of your competitors. The customers who buy from your competitors should be very similar to your potential customers.
For positive reviews, pay attention to their feeling and experience, and how the product benefits them:
On the other hand, negative reviews are also important, if not more so. They reveal golden opportunities for your product to step in and be better. A customer may complain that the tote bag handle is too rough for the shoulder, or the vase turns out to be too big, etc. Negative reviews that are objective will be the most useful.
Look for reviews that are in the 2-4 star range. Those reviews tend to be more useful in terms of understanding what customers are looking for.
Now it's your turn:
Go on Etsy. Search for your competitors’ product reviews. Pay special attention to the ones that talk about their feelings and how the product benefits them (e.g. bringing a positive change, reducing stress, etc).
Other ecommerce platforms like Amazon and eBay are goldmines for knowing your customers.
You can also go to forums and see what people are talking about. In Google, type “inurl:forum + (your product/your product category)” and it will show you forum posts where your customers talk about your products, like this:
List out the selling points that tap into your customers’ emotional needs. And add supporting evidence to them, which include the facts and features of your product.