Designing Digital Product Content to Engage Shoppers

By Candice Pires

At Work & Co, when we design digital experiences with our clients, we always think about how content is presented to an audience. For many audiences, content is what they judge a digital experience on and this is especially true within e-commerce.

While retail teams are well set-up to create relevant social, OOH, and even digital editorial content, when it comes to the shopping experience, browsing retail websites often feels more akin to a traditional catalogue experience than an inspiring, informative, branded experience.

To stay ahead, e-comm teams must center content creation that supports shoppers in their decision making and tells them something about who you are. Here are four principles our teams use, and e-comm teams can use, to create effective, relevant content in digital shopping experiences.

1. Embody your brand

For so many brands, your website is your biggest—or most rapidly growing—touchpoint, so it’s critical that the content there is not generic to the category you operate in and is truly telling your story. Brand shows up in a digital experience in the feature sets you include, visual choices you make and interaction patterns you design. And in content, specifically, it’s through how brand values are reflected in your imagery, copy and stories you decide to tell.

Last year we collaborated with Good American to launch their new e-commerce platform. A key brand value for them is uplifting and empowering women of all shapes and sizes. In the new design, we directed focus to how the brand shoots each product on models of different sizes and backgrounds and highlighted that on the homepage. You can see how those values come to life here in the copy. In the swimming category, the line “Designed for every size and every shape, because we love your body” is speaking directly to inclusivity and belonging. The tone is also warm, inviting and personable, like the brand.

2. Think like a user

Designing effective content for e-comm is all about context. What a user needs on a product detail page (PDP) is different to what they need on a homepage. Ask yourself where they are in their journey—what have they just done, what are they looking to do next, and what do they need?

It’s essential we don’t bombard shoppers with everything we know. In this PDP for the global sports retailer Decathlon, we designed a content module called ‘Highlights’ where we first identify for the shopper the most appealing, distinct and unique design elements of the jacket, and then invite those who want to go deeper to reveal more information. This is a key feature of content design for e-commerce; it’s up to us to do the job of organising and parsing storytelling and facts for the shopper.

3. Integrate your best editorial into the shopping journey

Often, a brand’s best editorial storytelling exists in a separate, siloed, blog-like experience away from the shopper’s journey. Why create content for a place they rarely visit? At Work & Co, we always look for effective ways to integrate editorial into more highly trafficked shopping pages. This could be content about the brand’s history or values, about a product’s design or usage. For a jewelry brand, this could both be about how its materials are sourced or inspirational styling advice. In the shopping journey, it’s crucial that this content doesn’t distract from purchase; that it’s in support of both decision making and brand storytelling.

4. Create consistent bridges from other platforms

Shoppers no longer conform to the traditional marketing funnel of linearly moving from upper to lower. In digital, they display looping behaviours in the way they browse and buy. Going from social into an e-comm experience, bouncing between pages, leaving and returning before making a purchase decision.

We worked with Gatorade to identify that the creative in their paid social ads wasn’t giving the shopper a smooth experience into their website: their best-performing social creative showed assorted products for NFL bottles and towels, but there was no one single destination to drive people to, just a collection of individual PDPs. By designing a new, immersive collection page for the assorted products, this site optimization effort (along with several others) aided in +171% YoY growth in NFL bottle and towel sales, with the page quickly ranking #1 in Google Search for generic high-volume search terms like “NFL Bottles,” beating out both NFL Shop and Amazon.

Adopting these principles, along with effective content measurement strategies for both brand and commerce, and solid content governance across regions, will enable your e-comm teams to create relevant content.

About the author

Based in London, Candice Pires is a Writing Director at Work & Co. Centering audience needs and embodying a brand’s voice are central to her approach at Work & Co. Through tight collaboration with design and strategy, Candice has worked on digital products for Decathlon, Pandora, and Loewe. Candice is also an established journalist, writing for The Guardian and The New York Times.

To find out more about how we design e-commerce experiences, explore select case studies or connect with us at hello@work.co.