Getting Emotional

It's tough to get a consumer excited about a product when you aren't talking to them directly. This is why a brick and mortar furniture store typically converts 30% of foot traffic to buyers, and a typical online furniture store typically converts about 1% or less of site visitors.

Words, images and design must stand in for the salesperson on a website. If your copy consists of what the manufacturer (or more likely the rep) wrote about the product, people aren't going to be persuaded very often.

It's a lot like dealing with a warehouse worker brought up front to fill in because the salespeople are out golfing. He can probably recite some facts about the product he schleps all day, but he's not going to have any clue about what the customer is really interested in. In other words, she will learn about features, but not necessarily about the benefits that make those features valuable to her.

Anybody who's sold knows you want the customer to feel like she's "got to have it", which requires that she is emotionally committed to owning the product. So how do you get her to feel that way when you can't probe for motivations in person? Here's a great quote from a great book, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg:

Identifying and speaking to the emotional needs in your audience has very little to do with being emotive. It's not really about extravagant, flowery writing. It's not really about your ability to get your audience laughing or crying alongside you. Engaging people's emotions is not about escalating flamboyance.

So how DO you help your customers make a buying decision by appealing to their emotions? You focus on benefits to the consumer, not the features of the product. Benefits allow the consumer to relate to product features in ways that matter to her, and help her imagine her life with this new product in it. Here's a tip--if you can't think of a benefit to pair with a product feature in your copy, then don't mention the feature at all.