Intro to Writing a Compelling Product Story [Rishi Rawat’s Top Tips for eCommerce Marketers]
We’re living in a world of over abundance. Online shoppers are literally drowning in options.
When they enter your website, they already have 5 other tabs open (5 other tabs with competing brands).
In 2020, 130 million eCommerce site sessions were analyzed.
Here’s what was found: the average time on site was just 2 minutes and 32 seconds (source).
What’s even more shocking is that this metric is getting worse year-over-year. Yikes.
What is a marketer to do in such a situation?
You might be a really good marketer. Even then, closing a sale in under 3 minutes is a herculean task.
Rather than trying everything under the sun, let me share a secret: an effective strategy is to tell a product story that’s so compelling, the visitor wants to stick around.
What is a product story?
It is a special type of story in which your product is the central character. This story is so compelling and relevant to the buyer, it shakes them out of apathy and gets them invested in your cause.
A good product storyteller is like a good martial artist. She knows exactly how much pressure to apply to every marketing situation.
— Rishi Rawat (@BetterRetail) December 1, 2020
Where to place your product story
The best location for your product story is your product description page (also known as PDP) – why?
Shoppers behave in curious ways. When they first land on a site they dart around like crazy, missing most of the great content we’ve placed for them. They quickly navigate to the product page and come to a screeching halt here. It’s like they’ve hit a brick wall. We’ve been seeing this in user session recordings for years.
It’s as though they were giving us only 15% of their attention initially. The moment they land on the product page, we have 100% of their attention.
The product page is where the buy/no-buy decision happens. This is where we lose 90% of sales. Therefore, this is where we need to seduce them with our product story.
Developing your key product story elements
The building blocks of a great product story are: “Why we exist” and “Why this product must exist”
- “Why we exist”: this story aligns the buyer with the creator’s journey.
- “Why this product must exist”: here we are letting the buyer know that for a very specific type of buyer, there is no better product.
In our experience working with clients, we find that while they have a really compelling story, they are often unaware of it or just too shy to talk about it.
To overcome this natural hesitation, we invented a role-play exercise to give them direction towards how to start thinking about their story:
Fill in the blanks
You are sitting at an upscale bar enjoying a delicious cocktail. It’s been a good week.
Someone sits next to you. You get talking and hit it off. You tell them about your business. They smile and lean in with interest.
Turns out, they’ve been looking for __________. This is a crazy moment of serendipity.
They’ve visited plenty of online review sites and seen plenty of products, but just haven’t found the right model. If anything, there are too many options out there, and now are paralyzed by choice.
They ask, “Mind if I play around on your site on my phone right now?”
You say, “Absolutely!”
20 minutes later, they are ready with questions:
When did you first see the need?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
Why did it affect you? What personal frustration did it connect with?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
Were you surprised the product didn’t already exist?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
How did you go from having the idea to mustering the courage to start a company? Was that scary?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
Running a business is hard as hell. How did you overcome setbacks along the way? What gets you out of bed every day?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
What are your guiding principles?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
How do stay ahead of competitors with deeper pockets?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
Before you started what options were available to the shopper?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
What was the most complicated part of the _______ (product name) development process? Were there parts that turned out to be way more complicated than you had originally anticipated?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
How important is it that this product exists? What would the world miss out on if it didn’t exist?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
How do you stay ahead of the competition?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
Your invention has been available for the last ___ years. What improvements have you made along the way? Please share some of those product improvement stories.
Your reply: __________________________________________________
When you talk to customers who have bought and used __________ (product name), what feature do they seem most surprised by?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
What’s one aspect of your product story that most buyers don’t know?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
Sites like __________ and _________ can outspend you online. They will always show up #1 in a Google search. How do you plan to deal with that?
Your reply: __________________________________________________
There we go, you’ve just completed your “why we exist” and “why this product must exist” stories.
Framing with buyer psychology triggers
Now we need to place this story on your product page. Just placing it on the product page can give you a nice sales bump. But if you want more (we hope you do) then you’ll need to work on framing the story. The goal of framing is to align this story with buyer psychology.
Remember that scene from Star Wars when Luke takes a single shot and brings down the Death Star? Proper framing will have that impact on your product page conversion rates.
You need to take the story you created above and frame it using these 9 buyer psychology triggers:
- People are skeptical of “too good to be true”
- They find expertise attractive
- They root for people who beat the odds
- They are fascinated by surprising details
- They are visual animals
- They need motivation to break habits
- They love personalized experiences
- They like knowing they’ve stumbled onto something rare
- We must resolve their negative thoughts
Examples for each of 9 triggers can be found in this article: Conversion Copywriting: The Formula That Unlocked Conversions.
About Rishi Rawat
Rishi specializes in radically improving product page conversion rates. He does this by supercharging your product story.
The most valuable thing he owns is a reprint of an 1897 Sears catalog.
These copywriters were the best.
Rishi’s company, Frictionless Commerce uses copywriting to optimize conversion rates.
Frictionless Commerce works with product inventors. Companies like HandicappedPets.com, Oransi.com and BakingSteel.com.
And lest we forget, Rishi has a weekly example-filled buyer psychology copywriting secrets newsletter: https://www.frictionless-commerce.com/JOIN
