Hey everyone! My name is Jesse. I have been marketing for some of the top ecommerce stores for a little over 5 years now. I started just like you guys, creating stores and learning as much as I could.
I found that I didn't really have a passion for running my own stores; I love helping others reach their goals. So I sold the online store I built up and used that to create a marketing agency. Now I run Facebook ads and do copywriting full time for ecommerce stores big and small!
Today I wanted to talk to you guys about copywriting. So let's jump right into it.
We have probably all run into the same issue—tons of traffic but absolutely nothing in return. People are visiting the store, but no one is converting.
Here is the simple answer to this problem, your ads are working, but your dropshipping store is not converting people. Your store is essentially not doing the job it was supposed to, converting your traffic into sales.
The #1 reason most dropshipping stores do not convert is because of the copywriting. How you sell a product in a way that develops interest and need. It is not your store theme, it is not your product, it is not your pricing or ads. It is simply the fact that you have not sold your visitors on the idea that they need your product.
What is Copywriting?
Copywriting is essentially all the text involved in selling your product or brand. It is your ads, your home page, product page, about page, and email sequences. It is how you build trust with your visitors and, ultimately, how you get them to whip out their credit cards and throw money at you.
Terrible copywriting will quite literally break your dropshipping store. Your words could either influence someone to trust you or to feel like you are scamming people. They could make someone believe in your brand or not believe in your brand.
Now that you understand the importance, let's get into some steps to write persuasive and engaging copy.
1. Know Your Customer
The best way to write persuasive copy is by putting yourself in your customers' shoes. Now I know this sounds like "generic" advice, but it is absolutely crucial.
You see, people don't care about you or your product. They only care about what it can do for them. So if you don't put yourself in their position, you will never truly understand what would make someone buy your product.
Here are some things I do to understand my customers. First, I study the market; I understand who my ideal customer is. I understand how they talk, the words they use, their personality, etc.
Then I fully put myself in the shoes of my customer and create a pros and cons list of my competitors and my own store. You gotta be 100% open to writing anything and everything down. You can't just write cons like:
It is not my store, so it's not as good.
You gotta be open to every possible reason why someone would buy the product and why someone would not.
You want to create in-depth pros and cons of your competitors' stores and make sure your store solves the cons your competitors have.
This takes practice to understand fully and to get good at, but once you do this, you will be able to pick out ways to make your store stand out and rise above your competitors.
2. Tell a Story
A study recently showed that people would buy a product for its story before they buy into the product itself. Let me give you an example:
A jeweler found an old crusty sapphire in a garage sale during his travels. Something no one would be interested in buying. He cleaned it up and named it the Star Of Artaban based on a story thousands of years ago in Jerusalem.
He came up with a story about where the gem came from and how he got it. His story was so interesting, people from around the world came to hear the story and see the sapphire.
Guess where it is today... Years later, the Smithsonian bought it for a couple of million dollars! And it now sits in a museum for all to see.
You see, people not only want your product to benefit them, but they also want to have some sort of special connection with it. Instead of just thinking like a salesperson, think like a writer and how you could make your product 10 times more interesting with a story.
Now, of course, you don't have to go as far as the jeweler did, but you can try. Instead of naming your product, "The 5 in 1 hair straightener" name it something unique that fits your brand. Maybe the "Wonder Wand" haha, be creative with it.
And start your product description like a story:
You wake up late for work only to find that your hair is a mess, and you have no time to clean it!... and so on.
Be creative and have fun; people will be able to sense it in your writing.
3. Sell Benefits
Your visitors don't care if your product is made with a matte finish or a gloss finish. All the customer cares about is how your product will benefit their life, us as humans buy mostly on emotion, not logic. Once you have done market research, you should now understand how your audience thinks and the problems they face.
The best way to sell a benefit is by highlighting a clear problem that they face and how your product solves it. You can do this with the story format. It will make it more engaging than just creating bullet points of the benefits. It also makes it more personal. With the example of the straightener earlier:
You wake up late for work only to find that your hair is a mess and you have no time to clean it! Thanks to the Wonder Wand technology, you can straighten your hair hands free.
Now, doesn't that sound more engaging and interesting to read than if I just said put a bullet point saying:
- Hands Free. The wonder wand is hands free so you can concentrate on other things while in a hurry.
People will be able to tell how passionate you are about the product through the words you use and how you used it. I am sure you could tell that there was less passion in the bullet point example.
It not only identifies a problem in a fun way that people can relate to, but it also solves that problem.
4. Brand Tone
Your tone is very important when it comes to writing. You can be happy, angry, chill, casual, formal, motivational, you name it and people will be able to tell.
Since you did market research, you should understand your audience's personality and the words they often use. So you want to make sure your brand tone matches your audience, you want to essentially speak their language.
For instance, if you are creating a skate shop and your audience is skaters, you want to make sure your brand matches their tone. You would want to use a more chill tone and use words they use. Like "dude", for instance.
If you are creating a luxury watch brand, your audience would most likely be older people with money. Which means you would want to use more sophisticated words.
By doing this, your audience will feel more connected to your store and will feel like you understand them. If you have a skate shop, you want other skaters to get the sense that you are a skater too. This develops trust; the more they trust you, the more they will convert.
5. Practice
Learning copywriting is like learning how to draw or write a book. It takes practice to understand how to properly make words flow together, what words to use and how to get your mission across to others.
You won't be able to do it overnight, so you need to practice. Just like how artists have that "artist eye" you will develop the "copywriter eye".
This allows you to come up with unique ways to sell and get your idea across with relative ease.
The best form of practice is to just study how other big brands write. See how they word things and try coming up with ways to sell the product yourself. The more you write, the better you will be.
Bad Copywriting Example
Here is a perfect example of copywriting that could use some work. This store sells products for people with hearing problems that allows them to feel sounds through vibrations. Now because of this, it is a very emotional product.
Meaning people will buy it because they want to feel like they can be more connected with their surroundings without the sense of sound. Now, if this store made the person reading the description, imagine what it would be like to feel these things, they would kill it. For example, something like:
Just take a second and imagine what it would be like to feel the ringing of your doorbell. To feel the sounds around you brings a whole new connection to your surroundings.
If it was written in this way people with hearing problems would imagine their life with this product and they would honestly probably get emotional and in turn feel like they need this product to enhance their day to day life.
And on top of that, if they added a video review of someone with hearing problems using the product and talking about how it changed their life. Their conversions would go through the roof.
Client Example
I had a man come to me last October with the problem I mentioned earlier, high traffic and no sales. He was ready to take his losses and move on from the product. I took a look at his store and saw pretty much a copy and paste of his competitors. It was very generic and not fun to read at all.
He became a client of mine and we did a total copywriting makeover. We created a story for the product and used the techniques I discussed above. We re-launched, and within 3 days the ads optimized and the results came in.
In 3 days he went from $0 in sales to a little over $1200 in revenue. His conversion rate went up to 3%, and his ads jumped up to an 8 ROAS. That is an 8 times return on his investment!
His costs went down because of the conversions, which means he was more profitable than ever. You see, when you get the store right and your ads right Facebook will pretty much help you out, you will get low costs and, of course, because of your conversion rate, more conversions.
Now months later he owns a store making almost 5 figures a month. All because of copywriting, now if this doesn't show the importance, I don't know what does…
How To Determine The Problem
I hope you have learned a lot from this post, but you are probably wondering. How do you know if it is your copywriting that needs work or if it is your ads? This is actually very simple; you just need to be able to understand the data Facebook is giving you.
- Click-Through Rate. Your click-through rate tells you how well your ad is doing. If your click-through rate is under 2% this tells you that your issue may lie in your ad itself.
- Cost Per Unique Link Click. Your cost per unique link click tells you if you are targeting the right audience. If it is over $1 this tells you that your issue may lie in the audiences you are targeting.
- Store Conversion Rate. If both your CTR and CPUC are good. Then it is safe to say that your problem lies in your store. Your store is not converting the traffic Facebook is sending you. So start with looking over your copy and making sure it is the best it can be. (You can click here to learn more ways to increase your conversion rates)
For more information, check out this article here, which contains 14 things that you can check if nobody is buying from your store.
Conclusion
You now should have a pretty solid understanding of how copywriting affects your business and how you can start taking action to fix your writing. It is very important, and I wanted to write this article because most people overlook copywriting and focus on overall store design and ads.
To help you further, one of the best books I have ever read is "How To Win Friends And Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. If you read this book and apply it to the online world, you will have a thorough understanding of how people think and why people buy—definitely, a must for anyone to read whether you are in business or not.
If you want to learn more about writing product descriptions, then you can either click here to learn it on this blog, or you can watch this video by Oberlo below:
Contact the Author
Have issues with your store? Some more questions on copywriting and marketing? Get in touch with me on my agency Facebook page or email. You can find them below:
Email: jesse@planprofitmarketing.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/planprofitmarketing/
