 Why your word choice might be costing you salesOne thing you will never find me doing is making blanket statements about the passive voice. In addition to copywriting, I’m a published novelist, and I know perfectly well that the passive voice is a respectable, functional and necessary element of the English language. There are some sentences that simply don’t work as intended in the active voice (“She was elected by over 50% of voters,” for example, transposes inelegantly from the passive), and I have little time for the kind of advice that suggests this particular construction should be avoided (see what I did there?) at all costs.
However. Copywriting is not like novel writing. There are crossover points, for sure – both involve telling a story, both strive to activate the reader’s imagination, and both involve evoking the reader’s senses in the service of an overall goal. But the key difference is that the goal of copywriting is to sell: an item, a service, a company, an idea. That’s where the passive voice makes things more complicated. Here’s why.
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 Five key things to avoid when writing product descriptions that convert“If you build it, they will come,” might be true of baseball pitches and long-dead sporting legends, but this far into the twenty-first century it certainly doesn’t apply to websites. And even when you’ve got your potential customers as far as your sales page, you’ve got a tiny window to shift them from “potential” to “actual.” When it comes to online retail, your sales page needs to be working hard if you’re going to make it convert, and a poorly thought out product description can actively harm your bottom line – according to Nielson Norman Group, a massive 20% of lost sales are down to lack of product information.
If you’re doing any of the following, it’s probably costing you money. Here’s why. |
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