Emotional Appeal: The Secret Strategy of Ecommerce Seller Success

One of the ways you can improve your ranking is by optimizing your listings. Surface level optimization includes having the appropriate number of keywords, bullet points, images, and the like. Beyond those technical points, you need to create an emotional connection that will resonate with your potential customer’s wants and needs. 

Both the technical and emotional aspects are crucial to have an effective listing. In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the finer details on how to create effective emotional appeal that will drive sales, as well as utilizing Seller.Tools, to handle the technical parts of your optimization.

Selling Benefits Before Features … But Why?

If you’ve been in the Amazon game for some time, you’ve probably heard listing optimization experts advise you to lead with product benefits before product features. But what exactly does that mean?

Features are simply the attributes of a product that make it desirable. The benefits are how such features improve the customer’s life (i.e. why your product is valuable to them). 

Here’s an example: 

‍Do you sell running shoes with extra-thick tread? The treads are the feature, but the fact that these treads allow the running to run on multiple surfaces without switching shoes is what makes the potential customer’s life easier. So, if you were writing a product listing for example, you might say: “Perfect for running, hiking, and working out. Extra-thick tread for multipurpose use."

Another example: Let’s say you sell kids’ learning blocks with unique graphics like animals, numbers, and letters. The features are the cute designs, but the benefit is that your blocks will encourage learning development.

In the next section, we’ll take this idea a step further and talk about the importance of creating an emotional connection with your customers through product benefits and features.

Understanding Your Customer Through Market Research

Knowing what will differentiate your product from competitors from an emotional connection standpoint requires a deep understanding of your audience demographic. This includes not only gender, age, and location, but things like hobbies, morals, and interests.

Remember, your potential customers have a desire. There’s an image in their head of how they want their life to be, and it usually includes how certain aspects of their day-to-day life can be made easier. The simple truth is that if your listing can promise to fulfill their desire, then you will get their business.

Of course, this begs the question: how do you figure out what your customer actually desires? Fortunately, there are a few great sources for reliable market research.

Check Amazon Reviews

Find any listing for the same or similar product as yours, and look for the reviews with anecdotes. Those reviewers already purchased the product, and their stories will tell you exactly what you need to know about how the product has missed, met, or exceeded their needs. 

It doesn’t matter if the reviews are positive or negative. In fact, negative reviews often show you how the product failed to live up to their expectations, which also shows you what gaps you can fill with your product. To beat out the competition, make sure your listing addresses that your product will not fall short in the same way that your competitors did.

Go Outside of Amazon

Many sellers fall into the bad habit of staying in the “Amazon echo chamber” and forgetting there is a whole plethora of information on other online outlets. Do a simple search on Google or TikTok to find people giving honest feedback on products similar to yours. 

Videos directly from users can show insight and truth beyond a mere Amazon review. For example, try to match their tone of voice in your listings and you will sound more relatable to those people.

Use Your Network For Research

There’s no shame in using the networks you’ve got. Once you’ve established the main keyword phrases you’re going after, ask a group of your friends or colleagues to search those terms on Amazon, look over the SERP (search engine result page), and report back on which titles and images they were drawn to and why. 

You can also ask them to visit the actual listings and explain why they would or wouldn’t purchase the item based on the listing. This real user research can provide way more insight into how consumers see products than any software tool can. 

Putting Your Research Into Practice

Let’s circle back to the running shoes example. We mentioned the benefits of the thick tread, but what we didn’t do was build a meaningful, emotional relationship between the product and the consumer. A tagline or bullet like “Shoes that hold up, even when the journey gets bumpy” is a great way to arouse feelings of confidence and resilience in a reader (incidentally, also increasing dopamine levels in the brain that makes said reader more likely to cement a purchase). 

Better yet, when you create an emotional connection to your product or brand, your first-time purchasers are significantly more likely to become life-long brand enthusiasts. 

Let Computers Do What Computers Do Best

As we said at the beginning of this article, successful listing optimization requires both technical and emotional aspects. It’s plenty of work just making sure that you have effective emotional appeals in your listings. For the technical parts, that’s where you can let software do the work for you.

Thousands of top 1% sellers on Amazon use Seller.Tools to manage competition and keyword research, and automate product launches and PPC advertising. Their Chrome extension also includes a listing analyzer that gives you immediate insights into missed sales and realizing a product listings potential. If you’re looking for a personal touch, Seller.Tools also offers consultation and audit services.