EBizInsider

help make the experience more personal, which keeps shoppers on your site.

Once the desire is there, the last step is provoking the customer to act. Any good salesman will tell you the call to action is the most important part of a sales pitch.

A key to e-commerce success is writing persuasive copy – copy that provokes a desired response. On the web, that could be anything from getting people to read the next page, follow a link, sign up for a newsletter or whitepaper, or buy a product. The bottom line is–good copy sells!

Speak To Your Audience

Speaking to your audience is arguably the most important aspect of content writing. Look at the vocabulary your target audience uses. By speaking the same language, you make your readers feel comfortable and show them you know your business, your products and them.

For instance, if you’re marketing designer purses targeted toward young women (ages 16-29), using a light-hearted, fun-loving vernacular - as opposed to rigged sales talk - will give you credibility with both your audience and search engines.

Search Engines Love Good Copy

Adding fresh, new content to your website is helpful for search engine optimization and increasing linking efforts, as well as building and marketing your brand.

Search engines crawl websites searching for text. Therefore, the best way for website crawlers to decide what your site is about is to provide rich, invoking text on every page.

Try to make your website ‘sticky’ – to keep customers on your site browsing, reading, and interested as long as possible. When you feature content that is related to what people are looking for, they’re not only more likely to stay on your website, but they will also potentially remember and recommend it to others. Should they find you to be a reputable, expert source of information, interesting, entertaining or thought provoking, they’ll also be more likely to remember your site for future purchases.

Power of the Word

“The words you use, either written or spoken, can have a powerful effect on your audience - if you use them carefully and skillfully. Whether your goal is to inform, to persuade, to call for action or to entertain, your words and your stories can be powerful. They can be powerful, because language is software for the mind. Learning how to write that software well is well worth the effort.”

— David McNally, speaker and author of the best-selling book Even Eagles Need A Push.

Copy is Selling in Print

Lackluster copy that fails to invoke emotions, tell compelling stories, create vivid mental imagery or excite your potential customers about your product or service is a common reason why websites fail.

Copy is selling in print. Therefore, its job is no different. Since e-commerce lacks the human interaction you would normally get in a face-to-face sales encounter, your copy plays an even more important role. It must communicate that same enthusiasm your salesman would, energize your potential customers, excite them about your offer and entice them to buy.

By Michelle Johnson
michellej@ebizinsider.com

Name (required)

E-Mail (required)

(Will not be published)

Website

Comments

Security Code

Enter the code above into this box. There's no letters, only numbers. We just want to make sure you're human.