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Copywriting for Etsy

So the last step to a perfect storefront is copywriting. Copywriting is a sales conversation, and it includes a direct request, and it's often more persuasive than other online writing. It's persuasive, but at the same time it's still casual, it's still personal and friendly, and it's very welcoming. It would be equivalent to in the storefront, 'Would you like to try that on, 'is there anything else I can help with' type of moving the buyer through to checkout. It's written specifically to help the buyer decide. To encourage them to checkout, and to keep them moving through, and to become actual customers for your shop. When the customer is reading your listing, again, it's as if they're in the store, physically handling the product, and they are either going to add it to their shopping cart, or put it back. It's step four of a only a five-step buying process. This is an exercise that you can do right now to determine if your copywriting needs work. Now, the industry conversion rate fo...

r online sales is a very low two-to-three percent. And those are very good numbers. So you can expect two percent of your traffic to actually make a sale. We talked a lot about the truth of online business, and that's why I love these numbers. This is a very low conversion rate, and it's naturally low. And if you can say that your conversion rate is two percent, you have very strong copywriting. So just to give you an idea of how that figure converts, if you wanna make two sales, you wanna make sure you have offered it to 100 people. So I'm gonna say that again, because that's important to note. Because we're always looking for more sales, and so I wanna make two sales. I have to make sure 100 people have seen that offer in order to guarantee and hope for those two sales. If, sometimes we're dreaming big, and we say we're gonna have a sale or something like that. And in one of my examples, I have that I want to make 150 sales. Well if I wanna make 100 sales, I have to show that offer to 5000 people. That's how those numbers get bigger. If I want to make 100 sales, I have to work to market my product in front of 5000 people. So, the exercise you can do, pull up your most popular product, and look at the number of views it's had in the last 30 days. And then, you're going to multiply those views by 0.02, to calculate two percent, and then you wanna compare the sum to the number of sales that you actually have. That you've converted. And this offers you, again, a realistic idea of the number of views. People are saying, 'I'm getting a lot of views 'but I'm not getting any sales.' And this gives you a realistic idea of really how many views you need to get when you're asking for those sales. And if you're pulling this up, and your products aren't converting, that means your copywriting needs work. So the whole point of copywriting is to move the buyer through that buying process. And that is a lot of movement. It's a complex technique, and I spent an entire day teaching all about copywriting in a class called Copywriting For Crafters, right here on CreativeLive. But I'm gonna take some key points, because you need copywriting to have a selling storefront. One of the biggest mistakes that sellers make is writing from their own perspective. So I'm gonna pull your average listing up here. This is a mock-listing, but I'm gonna put your average listing up on the screen. And as you can see, it's not awful. It's intelligent enough, it's grammatically correct, it's written well. We see listings like this all the time. This is very common. This wouldn't shock you if you saw this in somebody's product listing. In fact, the majority of product listings look like this right now. And this listing says, "I sewed these toy owls from cotton fabric, "and then hand-embroidered the felt details." Which is that's fine, right? There's nothing offensive about it. If you were shopping, it wouldn't stand out as anything offensive. You really wouldn't think... If I was the buyer and I saw that, I would be like okay, you sewed cotton owls. However, what if I took a picture, and I used that 50-millimeter lens that I referred to earlier, where there is gonna be a focal point of the picture, and everything behind it is gonna blur. What's the focus here? "I sewed these toy owls from cotton fabric..." Pay attention to the mental imagery you're pulling up, the visual imagery. "I sewed these toy owls from cotton fabric "and then hand-embroidered the felt details." If I'm saying that, do you see the product? Or do you see the activity of me making the product? Am I the focal point? Yes, I am. And I started this with "I sewed," so I've pulled you right to my workshop where I'm working. But that's not the point. The point is not for me to show you what I'm doing as the maker. My point is to join you in your mental dressing room. It's my job as the seller, it's my Etsy's job as the product listing to showcase what you're gonna bring home, okay? So this is a more visual description. And it starts, "These colorful brown and pink owls "are made of crisp cotton with pretty little details "children love to touch!" So I used this in my first class, Copywriting For Crafters, I used this exact example. And my daughter was home from school on the East coast, and she was tuned in, and she was watching it, and she was hoping I would bring these owls home. She was sold, and she got really excited. And my husband said to her, 'You want those pink owls, don't you?' And she said yes. And so that's a product listing's job. She can see the product. Even though it doesn't exist, this is a mock-up, and she was sold. So why is it working? Let's look at why it is working. "The colorful brown and pink owls..." There's a strong color contrast there. Immediately it's colorful and vivid. "Crisp cotton." The words "crisp cotton" bring a durable sense of mind. You're thinking fresh. You can smell crisp cotton. And then "children love to touch," "the pretty little details." Now you're seeing little fingers. And you know how a child's beloved toy, they just can't get enough of those little details. And you probably even remember a toy where you just loved to touch it. Like you loved the feel of it, you loved the details on it. The listing goes on, "Each fuzzy felt heart is hand-embroidered "for a truly unique toy your child will treasure for years!" When I say "fuzzy felt heart," we don't maybe not have all the same picture, but we're all picturing something. That sounds very familiar. And you immediately understand, just from me giving you that visual. We haven't even seen the product yet, but now you're starting to get what it looks like. And you know for a fact that you can envision a fuzzy felt heart. "Your child will treasure for years." Now at that point, I just brought this product home. I put it in your child's room. "Loving it and treasuring it for years." And I did that simply by offering you the visual. I brought this product home. So this listing joins the customer in their mental dressing room. It gives them the mental imagery, and then enhances it from there. Because that's where they came... They already came to me in their mental dressing room. Now I'm going to give them a little visual to help enhance it. If I were to take a picture now, of this scene, I'm not on the scene. Notice that. I am not on the scene. The seller has stepped out. The scene is this product, and if there's any extra parties, it's your child holding it and playing with it. Copywriting is a sophisticated technique. It's where you get advanced with moving the seller. Again, I spent a whole day teaching it in Copywriting For Crafters. But, I want to give you a summary of how you're going to put a listing together in a powerful and impactful way to enhance your storefront. So when you write a listing, you wanna focus on the what, the why, and the how, and you wanna focus on those three aspects from the customer's perspective. And you as the seller is really gonna step off this scene. You don't need to be there. This is between the product and your customer. Those are the two things that are gonna have the relationship. So this slide gives you a step-by-step breakdown that will help you write an effective product listing. And as you can see here, the what is a mix of key words. We just got that great lesson from Tim, where he showed you that the first two sentences are the most powerful sentences on the product listing page. And you can see that this is going to be keyword rich, but tell the customer the features of the product. Remember if I were in a store, if I were picking a product up, I'm not thinking about anything except for, is this quality? What's this feel like to hold it? What's the weight? How does it feel in my hands? So this is still a very technical place. This isn't really the place to get too creative. You want to really keep it keyword rich, and specific for the product. And so I had it fill-in-the-blank style, so it could basically be translated to any listing. And then the next section, which I would call the next paragraph, is the why. And this helps the customer imagine your product in their life. So here you are addressing the customer's challenges, or what they're looking for, whatever solution you might be providing, and you're describing the results they can expect and the benefits they'll be bringing home. That's important, I'm gonna say it again. You are describing the results they can expect, and the benefits they are going to be bringing home. This is a very customer-oriented paragraph to write. And then finally, the how offers a brief summary of your services, and I like this to be a simple, yet strong brand statement. In my Etsy shop, I say "The Energy Shop offers affordable luxury "and holistic solutions." Then I go on to say, "Energy Shop stones are cleansed, "charged, and smudged." And that's specifically me. I have read and worked with clients who use a little bit of 'I' and 'my' language. Because my tip with copywriting is try to take I and my... Try to extract, any time that you feel called to say I or my. But I have read some 'how' statements that include I and my and feel very natural, and feel very right, because it's signature to their brand and it makes sense to be there. For me with the Energy Shop, not only is my customer having a relationship, but it's a very personal relationship. I don't even wanna remind them that I'm there. I want them to get their product home, and I want them to go on with their relationship with it. And I'm happy to step out of the scene altogether. So that's why you won't see anything about my process, or that I cleanse the stones, that I charge them with Reiki, or that I smudge them, and all of the language that goes along with that. And then I close with my signature call to action, which you wanna add at the end of that listing to sort of move them again. They're at a bottom of a page, they've read all the way down. To get them away from all those slippery tags at the bottom that they can click, and be redirected to Etsy search. You wanna get them to the bottom of the listing, and give them a call to action that tells them to go back up and add this item to cart. My signature is, "Your satisfaction is guaranteed. "Buy unique, buy quality, buy Energy Shop." So the important, key points here. Make sure you keep a customer's focus in the listing. If you're getting a lot of views that are not converting to sales, then stop everything and focus on copywriting and, again, Copywriting For Crafters is a great place to start, and excellent value in that class. Alright, and I wanna make sure before we go on, that if we have any questions about copywriting. I glazed over it, because it is kind of a big, heavy, in-depth topic, but I want to make sure we had some key points covered. If we're good, I can continue... Oh, Cara. Just one small question. Do you have any preference of short listings versus really really long ones? Like, how much information is too much? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think, definitely I cover it in that other class. Because the idea is, sometimes people start to put policies in their listings, or they'll start to really go overboard. With every question that you might have, that seller starts to answer it. And you'll lose your reader at that time. Remember, it's like, if I picked this up, and I was handling it in a store, this is a very, very important place in their movement. And you want to be a conductor of that currency. You don't want to stop them and drag on and on and on. They're looking for specific information, so I like to keep it short and sweet. So if handling this product in a storefront, if I'm in a boutique shopping, and I ask about this product and then the shop owner goes on and on and on, and 'Oh that came from here,' and 'We make those' and 'We ship those all the time' and just started talking, you know at some point, I'm gonna be like thank you. (audience laughs) because I know that comes with a lot of explanation, and I don't need that explanation. So I like to keep it short and sweet. And if you have to say it, make sure you have to say it, make sure you couldn't just refer them to the policies page for that. Because, again, you want to keep their momentum going, and you want to be a conductor to the 'add to cart' button at that time. Before we move on, Lisa, I wanted to read you a comment from Little Girls Pearls on the chatroom. They said, "Lisa's class, Copywriting For Crafters, "is the best class for that. "That was the first CreativeLive class I purchased, "and I go back and re-watch it over and over." Oh, that's a great testimonial. It's like the best class ever, I've ever, ever, ever participated in. Oh thank you, Rebecca, that means so much coming from you. No, seriously. Oh my gosh, what a testimonial. Can I take a picture of you and write that down? What a testimony. I would tell people that all the time. Like, do it. Even I haven't implemented all of your suggestions. Thank you, thank you, that means a lot that you all like it. Thank you so much, wow. I appreciate that.