Whether you're a retailer selling your wares online or you’re a DNVB, words matter on your eCommerce websites and other marketing channels. Your online store has no fitting rooms, no flashy signs or displays to grab customers' attention. No shelves for them to browse, no impulse buys neatly arranged at the counter, no smiling sales staff waiting to answer questions, overcome objections, and close the deal.
The words on your eCommerce site, social media platforms, and other consumer-facing channels must take the place of it all, so you need valuable content that helps promote customer loyalty and improves search engine rankings. Happily, Stretch Creative offers top-notch content writing services that’ll have your customers checking out with confidence.
Here’s a rundown of the types of eCommerce content that can take your brand's web presence from mediocre to masterful in 2024, along with some great examples and pro tips.
Table of Contents
- Brand voice guidelines
- Content Strategy
- Website Content
- Blog Content
- Category Landing Pages
- Product Descriptions
- Product Photography
- Buying Guides
- Local City Pages
- Email Copy
- User-Generated Content
- Need help with eCommerce content in 2024?
Brand voice guidelines
Brand voice guidelines spell out the way your company talks to the consumers most likely to buy from you. They establish your brand personality, tone, attitude, and the words you use (and don’t use) to communicate your values and your product’s value props.
Ideally, your brand voice is consistent across all of your various eCommerce content marketing channels, from blog articles to social media posts and from category landing pages to product descriptions.
What they do & why you need them:
Brand voice guidelines serve as your road map for creating content that's compelling and on-brand. A strong brand voice helps you connect meaningfully with your audience, and it fosters brand trust and loyalty.
Good guidelines take your epic back story into account and embody your vision, mission, and values. They identify your potential customers in vivid detail and explain exactly how to communicate with them at each position in the sales funnel.
Check out these great examples of distinctive brand voices from Drumstick, Brilliant Earth, and Shinesty:
Pro tip: Start your brand voice guidelines with a rundown of your core values and mission statement, then create personas for both existing and prospective customers — who are you trying to reach? What is the overarching message you want to convey? How formal or casual is your tone of voice? What vocabulary do you use — and not use? Include the grammar and formatting rules you want your writers to follow — do you love the Oxford comma? Detest semicolons? Lay it all out! Need help putting together your brand voice guidelines? Stretch Creative can help!
Content Strategy
One of the most common content marketing mistakes is approaching it without direction. Your content strategy maps out what types of content you’ll use to drive organic traffic to your website, generate leads, convert visits to sales, and help with link building. It encompasses your email and social media marketing campaigns, blog articles, and category and product copy, and it aligns with your business goals.
All eComm content is SEO content, and a solid content marketing strategy pays attention to how all of your different types of content interlink and interplay. Great eComm content tells a story — your story. It takes pains to avoid keyword cannibalization, and it’s mindful of editorial flow within and across channels.
What it does & why you need it
Publishing eCommerce content without a strategy is like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Not even the highest quality content will perform to its potential if there’s no cohesion, no direction, no plan of attack.
A solid eCommerce content strategy starts with a strong understanding of your target audience and some heavy initial keyword research, which tells you things like what your target audience is searching for, how many are searching for it, their search intent, and how easy those queries are to rank for in the search engine. The final step of creating a solid content marketing strategy is to set up a publishing calendar that covers all of your channels, including your blog, social media, website, email, and other client-facing content.
A carefully crafted strategy helps you get the most out of your your content marketing efforts. It takes your audience on a curated customer journey that culminates on the product page and makes it easy for them to ADD TO CART with confidence.
Pro tip: As you create your eCommerce content strategy, consider your audience, the topics you want to cover, and the purpose of the content, whether it’s to engage, educate, spur action — or all of the above. Set up your calendar so that if you’re posting a blog, for example, you’re also posting on social media to promote the blog. Don’t have the bandwidth to create a full-fledged content strategy? Stretch Creative helps many online retailers and small marketing teams create a content marketing strategy and set up a monthly, quarterly, six-month, or yearly content calendar. We can also produce high quality content for you — and even load it into your CMS so all you have to do is hit “publish.”
Website Content
Website content comprises the written, visual, and audio components found on the pages of your eComm site. You want the main content on your website — your homepage, about page, product pages, and other core pages — to engage people who land there through both search engines and direct links. To do that, your content needs to be compelling, on-brand, and visually interesting, with high quality images.
What it does & why you need it
Your eCommerce website is the digital equivalent of a brick-and-mortar storefront — it’s your main opportunity to make a great impression on visitors, quickly gain their trust, and win loyal customers. Your website content tells consumers who you are and what you have to offer — and that information should immediately be crystal-clear in the design elements and the writing on your site.
The content on your website should take your visitors on a journey, which means it should offer an easy, enjoyable user experience and provide a clear pathway for navigating your various pages. It should be helpful, consistent, cohesive, and fully optimized for the search engines on both the page and the back-end.
Pro tip: ECommerce website content should be much shorter and more concise than other types of content. The content on your site needs to be scannable — research shows that on average, visitors only read about 20% of the words on each page. Keep it short and snackable, and make use of headings, bulleted lists, and images and videos to enhance user experience. Put the most important information at the top of the page, above the fold, and avoid fluffy preamble and unnecessary copy. Stretch Creative has a roster of experienced website writers (and UX specialists) to help you create a helpful eComm website that’s easy to read and a breeze to navigate.
Blog Content
A business blog is one of the best ways to bring potential customers to your website and, ideally, get them to buy your product. Blog content should be 100% original and written in your brand voice. Above all, it should provide valuable information.
Google’s September, 2023 helpful content update made it excruciatingly clear that no matter how “optimized” your content is, it’s not going to perform optimally if it isn’t authentically helpful to the reader.
Great blog content adheres to Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines — it's authoritative, trustworthy, and written by someone with experience or expertise in the topic.
What it does & why you need it
A well-done blog serves many purposes for eCommerce businesses. It brings organic traffic to your website, increases the amount of time people spend there, and encourages them to visit more pages — all things that please the search engine gods. A well-written blog alone can make a huge difference in brand recognition, authority, and trust — and it can be a major driver of conversions.
If the content is helpful and authoritative, the reader at the very least comes away with a good impression of your brand. Ideally, if you have a solid content strategy in place, the article leads the reader through the sales funnel, all the way to the checkout lane.
When properly optimized, a thoughtfully constructed blog post can help your website move up in Google rankings. Every blog post you add means more landing pages for the search engine algorithms to access. When your blog ranks for multiple search terms, consumers in your space will begin to recognize your name on the search engine results pages (SERPs) — and that’s solid gold in eCommerce.
Share your posts widely on your social media platforms, and include links in your email campaigns to extend your reach and increase customer engagement. If the blog posts are really good and super helpful, your audience will share them on their socials, too, which means even more eyeballs, more engagement, and more conversions.
Pro tip: If your blog isn’t authentically helpful to your audience, it won’t perform on the SERPs and it won’t help move the reader through the funnel all the way down to conversion. The best-performing blog articles are easy to read — snackable, we like to call it — and carry clear value for your readers. Stretch Creative specializes in writing high quality blog content that’s informative, educational, engaging, and geared towards guiding your customers to the product page — and the checkout line.
Category Landing Pages
Category pages on your eCommerce site help your customers quickly find what they’re looking for. You may have just one level of category pages, or you may have three or more levels. For example, a small apparel brand may have just one category landing page for women’s clothes, while a larger brand may have a landing page for women’s clothes, along with landing pages for sub-categories like dresses, pants, tops, shoes, and accessories. An even larger brand may have landing pages for sub-sub categories, such as button-down shirts, crop-tops, t-shirts, and hoodies.
Since there’s not a lot of content on category pages by nature, adding some can help boost SEO, increase your website rankings, and bring in traffic from the SERPs. Also known as “bottom copy” because it’s usually placed at the bottom of the page, category landing page copy, like blog content, needs to be authentically helpful in order to perform the way it’s meant to.
What they do & why you need them:
Even though it’s hidden at the bottom of the category landing page, category copy can improve search engine optimization as well as provide huge value to your customer — and your brand. The category landing page is the perfect place to showcase your expertise in your niche and cement your brand as an authority in your product category.
Great category pages are created with user intent and funnel position in mind. They’re informative — they educate existing and potential customers about the products in the category and serve as a mini-buying guide to help them make a decision. They strategically link to related category and subcategory pages, giving the reader other ideas and options.
Like blog posts, category pages can boost your search rankings with relevant, natural keywords.
Below are two category pages for air fryers. One is helpful. The other really isn’t.
Pro tip: If you’re an eCommerce brand with very old category copy from the days of yore when the trend was to just jam as many keywords and links onto the bottom of the page as possible, 2024 is a good time to start replacing it with helpful content that’s built to enhance the consumer experience and convert to sales. Stretch Creative knows all of the ins and outs and best practices of writing great category page copy for eCommerce sites, and we’d love to help you get yours in shape for 2024!
Product Descriptions
Great product descriptions don't just mention the features of what you're selling — they turn those features into benefits that speak directly to the prospective buyer. Because product descriptions are the last thing your customer sees before they ADD TO CART, you can't afford to put anything less than the best product copy on your site.
What they do & why you need them
Well-written product copy can increase conversions — and brand loyalty. Great product copy builds desire and confidence in shoppers. Product pages filled with high quality valuable content can make what you're selling shine, and it can bring in more organic traffic — and more customers. Clearly written eCommerce product copy preemptively answers consumers’ questions, which helps to reduce buyer confusion, meaning fewer returns and fewer headaches for your customer service reps.
Below are three product descriptions for a rope-style photo frame. Which do you find the most informative?
Pro tip: Great product copy reflects your brand’s personality and offers all of the information your consumer needs to make their buying decision. A “features + benefits” approach explains the features of the products in the context of how those features benefit the user, and a little aspirational romance copy helps your customers see themselves using your product. Put it all together in second person (“you”) makes it clear you’re speaking directly to your customer — and they like that, which is a boon for customer retention.
Product Photography
Would you ever consider using your driver's license photo to represent you on your website? Hells no. Most of the time, DMV photos come out looking like mugshots even if you say "cheese" with max enthusiasm.
The same conditions that lead to those embarrassing ID photos — poor lighting, thoughtless angle, hideous background, lack of creativity, and mastery of the camera — matter when it comes to your product photos.
What it does & why you need it
Product photography can assist with the buying process and make or break conversion rates for eCommerce websites. After product descriptions, they are one of the most important factors for determining whether or not visitors purchase from you or a competitor. Great images also have the chance to be shared on Pinterest, Instagram and other social media sites, giving you more ways to reach your target market.
Pro tip: Our product photography service allows whatever you're selling to appear on your website pages in the best possible way. Our professional photographers know what type of lighting works. They're experts at displaying merchandise in an appealing way and will take the time to capture all of the important details so that your buyers can clearly see what it is they're buying.
Buying Guides
As an expert in whatever you're selling, you understand the features and benefits of your products — but your customers likely lack that expertise. Buying guides enable your customers to make informed buying decisions and move to checkout with confidence.
Buying guides can be short ‘n’ sweet, or they can be comprehensive, but the idea is the same: break down what customers need to consider when buying the types of products that you sell, and make it as easy as possible for the reader to make the exact right choice.
What they do & why you need them
Buying guides define unfamiliar terms and answer common questions about a particular product or product type. Depending on your offerings, a buying guide can help customers compare similar items or envision all of the ways in which a product can improve their lives. Buying guides can be inspirational, aspirational, or cut-and-dry, laying out all the facts someone might need to know in order to make the best purchasing decision.
As long as they’re truly helpful to your customers, buying guides on your site can lead to increased conversions, since your shoppers are less likely to feel like they need to do more research elsewhere before they buy. Buying guides help lower return rates by ensuring that shoppers consider important aspects of your products. From an SEO standpoint, buying guides can help your store get discovered by people who Google terms like "how to choose a television" or "buying skis."
Below is an example of the different buying guides the surf brand Quicksilver has on its site to help consumers choose the perfect item for their needs.
Pro tip: Before you write a buying guide, determine who your audience is, what questions they might want answers to, and what your brand’s overarching value props are. Use product images and videos to enhance your buying guides, and optimize your guides with relevant keywords, keeping search intent top-of-mind. Stretch Creative can help you create helpful, engaging buying guides that give your audience all of the information they need to choose the product that’s right for them, converting to sales — and increasing brand loyalty.
Local City Pages
Once upon a time in a land where the Internet didn't yet exist, there was a book of knowledge called the Yellow Pages. Brave messengers deposited these mystical tomes on the doorsteps of businesses and homes. Those fortunate enough to receive one of these books were granted the ability to quickly find every plumber, pet supply store, attorney, and other businesses serving their local community. The Internet has made those hallowed yellow pages of old obsolete — now, people can simply type in a product or service and their city to get a list of stores or providers.
If you have a brick-and-mortar store with a well-optimized website, your business is likely to appear close to the top when someone searches for the city included in your address. But what if they search the next town over? There's a chance that your site might appear organically — but it might not. And that’s where local city pages come in.
What they do & why you need them:
Local city pages help the odds be ever in your favor. These optimized web landing pages outline your products and services and include relevant content that references your city and those nearby.
A local city page is a geographic-themed landing page that improves your chances of showing up at the top of the SERP — if it’s helpful. In a world without yellow pages, optimized local city pages with excellent copywriting are the best way to ensure people can find your business throughout the region you serve — even if it’s a large metro area.
When they’re authentically helpful and well-written and properly optimized, local city pages can increase emails, phone calls, and both web and foot traffic to your business, giving you more leads for sales.
Below is an example of a city page for CVS Pharmacy:
Pro tip: City page copy doesn’t need to be very long, but it should include relevant city-specific content and offer helpful information for those searching for a particular product or service in that location. Stretch Creative writes high-performing city landing pages with customers in mind. We create location content that makes a great first impression and clearly spells out why people in a certain city need to choose your business.
Email Copy
How often do you open and read all of the retailer emails you signed up for? If you’re like most, it’s probably not very often. According to Mail Chimp, overall, around 16% of recipients open emails from eComm brands. If you’re selling vitamins and supplements, around 15% of recipients open your emails. If you’re a beauty and personal care brand, around 17% of recipients open your emails. If you’re hawking electronics, it’s around 19%.
But that doesn't mean email marketing isn't worth your time — emails can still lead to sales if they’re well-written.
What it does & why you need it
Email copywriting gives you another way to communicate directly with both your existing customers and potential buyers. You can use emails to announce new products, advertise sales, keep your customers engaged, and even educate your customers about related topics of interest to them.
Even if your weekly or monthly emails remain unopened, the recipients will still regularly see your name, promoting brand recognition. Great subject lines can help you convey your value props and further cement yourself in the minds of your prospects.
Once the recipient clicks into the email, they should find something worthwhile — helpful information, neat tips ‘n’ tricks, a discount code, or other beneficial messaging.
Below is a screen recording of a spectacularly done year-end email from Shein. It’s got tons of pictures, scores of deals, abundant shopping links, snackable copy that’s 100% on-brand, and plenty of fun opps for customer engagement.
Pro tip: Effective emails have a curiosity-sparking subject line and highly engaging content — and at Stretch Creative, we know how to write the kind that entices clicks rather than deletions and solidifies your brand through voice, imagery, and user experience.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is exactly what it sounds like — content created by users of your product. Many consumers routinely seek out UGC in their online community while shopping to help inform what they buy, whether their community lives on TikTok, Insta, or the eComm website itself.
User-generated content on your website may include product reviews, testimonials, videos, guest-written blog posts, customer stories, and other content created by real people who use your product.
What it does & why you need it
User-generated content is a helpful human standing next to the cheese case waiting to give advice on which goes best with a chardonnay. It reinforces the benefits you tout in your product descriptions and helps your potential buyers feel more confident about the products they purchase.
Including user-generated eCommerce content on your site can also strengthen your SEO game. Search engines often prioritize sites that feature product reviews over those that don't. Properly optimized UGC might even appear in the search results when someone searches for reviews for a specific product or product category.
Our writers LOVE creating first-person content based on their experiences, as we've done for brands like Grove Collaborative, below. (Our writer took the photos, and our graphic design department did the illustrations!):
Pro tip: While it’s unethical to pay for positive product reviews, it’s another thing entirely to hire blog writers to offer candid, honest reviews of the products you carry.
Need help with eCommerce content in 2024?
The eComm content you put on the internet matters — a solid, consistent web presence is everything in the eCommerce world. The quality of writing matters, the tone of voice matters, and the value the reader walks away with matters.
Maybe you have a teeny tiny marketing team — or no marketing department at all — and need support with blog articles and social posts. Or maybe you’re a ginormous enterprise in need of hundreds of category pages. Our content creation process is highly collaborative and personalized, whether we create content ad hoc or at scale.
We’re a full-service content agency with a roster of talented creators including writers, designers, photographers, and video content producers. We’re experts in SEO and content strategy, and we know how to engage consumers, move them through the buying journey, and compel them to ADD TO CART.
Contact us today — we've got your words waiting.