James Curtis
Product descriptions are one of the most important elements of your business. While everyone likes to say they “don’t judge a book by its cover,” it’s unlikely that anyone will buy your product if the first impression is off.
What goes into a good product description though?
Let’s take a look below.
What Makes Product Descriptions Great
There are a lot of elements and it varies heavily depending on the product and audience in question. While there is no one-size-fits-all rule, there are some best practices to keep in mind.
Some of the most important of these include:
Engage emotionally
Put some flesh and bones on the cold steel of your product. Emotions sell more than facts do! It’s easy to overwhelm prospects with too much information and confuse them. More often than not, this leads to them walking away from a sale.
When you play into the emotional aspects of making a purchase, however, you capture their attention and make them think. In addition, it’s also important to understand your audience. What keeps them up at night? What problem are you solving for them? Once you know the answers to these questions, you can create a story around your “fix” to the problem — your product.
Focus on the benefit
Your customers are probably wondering, “Features are great and all, but how does it benefit me?” It’s a great question and one you should be prepared to answer in your product description.
Instead of writing a laundry list of facts, figures, and features, take a step back and highlight the benefits to the customer. For example, it’s great if your product is eco-friendly or boasts a low carbon footprint. But unless that product works and solves a problem for them, they aren’t going to care.
Decide on which features are most important to the customer and build those into your product description toward the beginning. You don’t want to bury the lead!
Keep your audience in mind
If you’re selling basketball jerseys at a Mariah Carrey concert, you won’t likely have much luck.
We hinted at this above, but it’s all about your audience. When you understand who exactly you’re selling to, you can create copy that speaks directly to them and their problems.
This is also a great place to let your brand voice shine through. If your audience is mostly Gen Z’ers with a few millennials sprinkled in, you can likely be more informal with your description. Use company slang. Throw in an emoji or two. Whatever makes sense for your brand voice and your audience, lean into that for the best results.
Keep it scannable
The internet is directly responsible for an 8-second decline in human attention spans. Engage your audience quickly and then make your writing easy to follow from there on!
This goes back to our first point where too much information can actually confuse customers and make them less likely to buy anything at all. Scannable copy where they can easily pick out important information is definitely the way to go.
With these points in mind, let’s take a look at some times when companies knocked their descriptions out of the park.
Examples of Great Product Descriptions
One of the best ways to better understand what goes into a great product description is to look to the greats. Take a look below at ten of the best product descriptions we could find:
Weber Grills Spirt II E-210 Gas Grill:
Open the door to the world of grilling with crazy good food and friends coming together. Equipped with the powerful GS4 grilling system and convenient features such as iGrill 3 compatible (sold separately), this two burner gas grill is your entry to the Weber family and to everyday grilling. The compact open-cart design and the practical folding side table makes it fit even on small spaces, and you have all the basics you need to get familiar with gas grilling. So whether it’s a busy Monday or a relaxed Sunday – invite a couple of friends over, push the ignition and enjoy the special atmosphere that surrounds the grill.
Why it’s great
This content-heavy product description speaks to the customers and focuses on the many features that the grill has to offer. After going over all the facets and components of the grill, they set the stage for a story of you, the reader, enjoying this grill in many atmospheres.
This visualization is highly effective in this ad and speaks volumes to the grill and the audience.
Focal Speakers On the Wall 360
Why it’s great
People listen to music, watch tv, and otherwise consume media so they can feel things. The fascination with finding better sound systems, clearer TVs, more intricate storylines, and more all point to this. Whether it’s putting on a movie that makes us cry or playing a record that makes us dance our asses off – emotion is at the core.
Focal crushed their description by focusing on this with a big headline at the top: “Creating Emotions.” From there, they dig into the specs but only after already catching your attention.
Oransi Max Air Purifier
- Clean the air of Allergies, Dust, Asthma, Bacteria, Pollen, Mold Spores, Pet Dander
- Rated #1 in Only Comprehensive University Study for the Performance You Need
- Room air purifier removes 99%+ of Airborne Particles
- Best for Bedroom, Office, Living Room, Basement
- Lightweight and Easy to Move
- Activated carbon filter for light odors and gases
- For smoke removal you are better going with the EJ air purifier
- Max also available in 220V/50 for international markets
- What’s included: 1 Max HEPA Air Purifier / 1 Complete set of filters / User’s Manual.
Why it’s great
This product description does a great job of anticipating the questions and needs of their customers. The bullet points help keep the attention of viewers by keeping everything easy to read. While this format isn’t right for every product, this is how it’s best done when that fits.
Kong Puppy Toy – Treat Dispensing
The KONG Puppy toy is customized for a growing puppy’s baby teeth, the unique, natural rubber formula is the most gentle within the KONG rubber toy line. Designed to meet the needs of a puppy’s 28-baby teeth, it helps teach appropriate chewing behavior while offering enrichment and satisfying a younger pup’s instinctual needs.
Meanwhile, the erratic bounces make it ideal for those pups that just want to play. A stuffed Puppy KONG occupies busy little ones while allowing pet parents the freedom to attend to their unique needs. Want to make crate training easier or extend play time? Be sure to stuff with puppy kibble and a dash of peanut butter. Add to the fun by including KONG Puppy Snacks and top with KONG Puppy Easy Treat.
Why it’s great
If you have a dog, you’re likely familiar with Kong. They’ve established themselves as the brand that people go to when they need something durable. Within the opening paragraph of the description, they lay out their dominance in this field.
One of the main things they’re doing in this is anticipating the needs of their customers. The first need revolves around a durable chew toy for dogs. Secondary to this, as the next paragraph lays out, is an entertaining toy. Kong leads with their primary need and establishes the less-important one after.
B. Witching Bath co. Natural Honey Facial Cleansing Bar
Selected by House Beautiful Magazine as Best For The Bath. Our award-winning Natural Honey Facial Cleansing Bar is enriched with natural skin nourishing extracts, honey and royal jelly. Remove dirt and impurities from your sensitive skin with our all-natural cleansing bar. Our gentle formula is especially designed to help neutralize skin irritations. This therapeutic blend is great for all skin types, especially sensitive or problematic skin, gentle yet effective.
Why it’s great
B. Witching Bath co. demonstrates an exceptional understanding of their audience with this description. The two people that are most likely to reach for an all-natural soap like theirs are going to be nature-lovers and people with sensitive skin.
This product description speaks directly to both of these.
Joybird Adina Sofa
Add a timelessly classic sofa to your living space that delivers on style and comfort in equal parts
Your couch-surfing days just got a whole lot more stylish! Dual back and bottom cushions and rounded-edge arms means this sofa packs quite a punch in the comfort department. With enough room to sprawl out (and take an accidental nap), here’s your living room’s new anchor piece.
Why it’s great
All of the dry information is already conveyed up top. The dimensions of the couch are in the display image so why not use the description to connect with the customer instead?
This description paints a picture of couch-surfing and falling asleep (by accident.) then, they shift focus and connect the couch with you, the reader, as a focal point of a living room. This customer-first approach works wonders for this product description!
Nike Air Max Plus
Every Air Max has a story. For the Air Max Plus, that story begins on a beach. A prominent arch draws inspiration from a whale’s tail, while wavy plastic overlays are a nod to palm trees blowing in the breeze. Nike Air units in the heel and forefoot create a Tuned Air experience that offers incredible stability and unbelievable cushioning. Lace them up and step into defiant style.
Why it’s great
If you are a person that owns a pair of shoes, you are likely aware of Nike already. Nike uses their product description to tug at the nostalgia of the company. When you’ve been around as long as they have, you have several different images, timelines, and associations to pull from.
In this instance, they choose a romantic telling of the story behind the design, both aesthetically and functionally. As a bonus, Nike also does something else really cool on their product page: they post every picture in a grid.
The product pictures don’t exist on a carousel with Nike because they want to encourage customers to keep scrolling.
Mountaineer Brand Beard Wash
Keep that beard clean and fresh with our Signature Collection Beard Wash. This wash is made with all-natural ingredients that won’t damage your skin or beard. You’ll love the thick lather and deep clean. We recommend only washing your beard two or three times a week but our beard wash is mild enough to use every day.
Why it’s great
This product description speaks to the senses. Specifically, laying out the feeling of the thick lather on your skin and the comfort of all-natural, non-harmful ingredients in the product.
Patagonia Black Hole Hiking Backpack
Our midsize 32-liter workhorse in the Black Hole collection. Perfect for organizing your daily commute and rugged enough to haul around the globe. Made with 100% recycled body fabric, lining, and webbing. Fair Trade Certified™ sewn.
Why it’s great
Patagonia packs a lot of content into this tiny description. Whenever looking for functional wear like a hiking backpack, specs are king. A product description is no place for an excessive amount of numbers and facts, however.
Patagonia focused this section on the quick facts – recycled, rugged, for daily commute or travel. When this piques the interest of potential buyers, they can scroll down and see this beautifully simplistic layout of specifications.
Imagine if they had tried to fit all of this into the product description! Patagonia focuses on the high-level view at the top and then pulls the reader back down to Earth with the features.
Indestructible Shoe Co
The all-in-one solution to work shoes that provide a perfect blend of comfort, style and protection.
It’s time to take your shoe game to the next level.
Now you can finally get more done in less time at work and play.
Our new J3 model is perfect for your busy lifestyle. Thanks to our hard-working research and development team, we’ve crafted the ultimate all-in-one footwear solution.
Each and every step you take will give you the productive edge you’ve been dreaming of.
These shoes are built with military-grade kevlar… An incredibly tough and extremely lightweight material.
For the first time ever, you won’t have to sacrifice comfort for protection.
Why it’s great
For starters, this is an easily-digestible description. From a format perspective, keeping the sentences and paragraphs short is best for holding attention.
On top of this, this description does a great job of both asking the customer to visualize themselves in the shoe and making a case for why they should do so.
In addition to the action-packed description above, they directly address some of the questions customers may have below. Like we saw with Patagonia above, trying to fit all of this into the product description would be insane!
Hire the Pros
A product description can make or break your business. Good product descriptions need to not only inform about the item but also encourage customers to buy it at the same time. That’s no easy feat.
Add into this the stress of running a business — constant fires to put out and millions of other tasks that seem more important — and finding time for content can feel impossible.
Product descriptions are deceptively difficult to write. People often think that the short format makes them easy but, in the same way that a poem is just as hard as a short story, product descriptions take time, effort, and skill.
Product descriptions are especially challenging when you’re trying to enhance your SEO and ensure your products can be ranked and categorized on a search engine, like Google.
For many businesses, the time needed to accomplish these tasks may seem impossible to come by but, luckily, you don’t have to do it on your own.
Content Cucumber is here with dedicated, HUMAN writers that work alongside you for all your writing needs. After signing up, we match you with a hand-picked writer that can handle all of your blog, email, newsletter, product description, and writing-related work needed.
This way you can relax and focus on things that are more pressing, like innovating or creating a stellar customer experience.
Have a list of product descriptions you need written and optimized? Reach out today and let us show you how we can help take your business to the next level!
