8 copywriting essentials to turn luxury brand browsers into buyers
Building a luxury website is like cooking an amazing meal - it’s ALL about the quality of the ingredients. With great ingredients, very little is needed to make the dish any better. And in the same way that a chef will need to use strong spices and flavours to mask the taste of cheap ingredients, there’s not a lot we can do with a cheap logo, bad photography, or poor wording (our topic of conversation today).
An author called Donald Miller, CEO of StoryBrand (a company that helps businesses clarify their messages) puts it like this:
“The fact is, pretty websites don’t sell things, words sell things.”
Now we don’t agree with Donald completely because for luxury businesses, well designed, high quality websites are incredibly important. More than for run-of-the-mill brands as there is an expectation of high quality right from the outset. But words are astonishingly powerful too. They have the ability to persuade, influence and change behaviours.
A large part of our job as an agency is to make sure the brands we work with have the right ‘ingredients’ before we build their website, create their brochure, or tell their story.
In the case of badly written copy, we inevitably have to rewrite our clients’ words. Great copy is great copy, whether you are selling legal services or shirt buttons - but with luxury brands it is also critical to keep things succinct as the wealthy people who will be visiting your site are almost always time poor.
So what are some of the secrets to writing good copy for luxury brands?
Here are 8 that we use time and time again…
Make sure you use ‘You’ language rather than ‘We’ language. This means talk ‘to’ your customer through your website rather than talking about your business and how great it is.
Focus on benefits not features. A benefit is what a product or service can do for a person. To turn a feature into a benefit just ask the question ‘which means that’ - i.e. All our cars have stitched leather steering wheels - which means that you get better grip and enhanced control, particularly on long journeys.
KISS. Keep it short and simple. Don’t be too wordy. Unless you have to explain things in detail, keep the details to a minimum.
Use plain English. There’s nothing worse than long words that no one understands, gobbledegook or jargon. Make sure your copy is easy to read by all different kinds of people. We try to adhere to the guidelines set by the Plain English Campaign www.plainenglish.co.uk where possible.
Use testimonials. You may think that customer testimonials don’t carry much weight with your potential customers. You’d be wrong. Like starred reviews on website like Amazon, Trip Advisor, etc, testimonials are very powerful tools. They create social proof and encourage people to get in touch and buy from you.
Make sure your headlines are short. And sweet. People have a very short attention span online, particularly wealthy individuals, and it’s getting shorter every year. So make sure your headlines are short (8 words or less ideally) and that they grab your reader’s attention.
Use questions. Why? Exactly. Questions make people stop and think. And that makes them more curious to find out more about your company.
Watch the typos. There’s nothing worse than spelling mistakes on a luxury website. It shows a lack of attention to detail and leaves your customer thinking ‘if they can’t get the spelling right on my website, how will they get my holiday / jewellery order / hotel booking / etc right?’.
So there we have a few pointers to improve your website copy significantly. More often than not we insist that our copywriters look at our clients’ copy, even if its just an editing job, as a lot of the time it’s just not up to scratch.
Oh there’s also the dark art of of SEO (search engine optimisation) and using keywords and phrases to improve search engine rankings but that’s another post entirely.
Need a powerful, compelling story for your luxury website or brochure? Let’s talk.