As online sellers, we are limited to one sense – our sense of sight – for giving buyers a complete five-senses sensory experience. When buyers are browsing online, they cannot feel, smell, taste, or hold an item in their hands to turn it over and look at it from all angles. So it is up to us, the sellers, to create that experience for them using two devices: photographs and item descriptions.
A couple of years ago, I conducted a sensory awareness experiment, where I focused each day on one of my five senses and journaled about what I experienced. In trying to capture my experience with words, I realized that your senses are EXCELLENT tools for coming up with creative and descriptive titles, tags, and descriptions for the items in your shop.
So how do you use your senses? Well, give it a try right now. Grab one of your shop items and hold it in your hands. Look at it from different angles. What does it remind you of? Feel it. Rub your fingers over it. If it is jewelry, put it on (if this is hygienic for the particular piece) and feel how it wears on your body. Is it heavy, light, smooth, textured? If it is something that you eat or drink, taste it. If it is not something that you eat, imagine what it would taste like if it were edible. How would it smell if it had a scent?
Take notes while you do this, and be adventurous! Grab a thesaurus and use any or all of these as guides:
1) What are the first three words that come to mind when you see your item?
2) What does it look like? Use colors, shapes, familiar scenes or objects.
3) How big is it? Use references as well as measurements; For example, “about the size of a nickel” (***This is a perfect place to use up one of your photo slots as well! Not all of us can visualize measurements through a numerical measurement - I want to see a photographic reference if possible)
4) What does it feel like? Think textures, temperatures, how it would feel in your hands, on your skin
5) If it were a smell, what would it be?
6) If it were a taste, what would it be?
7) What kind of sound would it make?
Now take your notes and pull out the key descriptors - words you think really POW ZING! - and think about whether they would be good key words to accurately describe your item. If so, consider using some of those *sparkle words* (as my son's first grade teacher calls them) in your titles and tags. And remember, the Etsy search function searches tags and titles (not descriptions), so your tags and titles are precious real estate. Use them wisely and try to avoid redundancy. If you use the word "green" in your title, you do not need to repeat it in your tags - use that space for a different word, even if it's just a different word for green (emerald, lime, grass, chartreuse).
Have fun! (If you need a little jump start in finding words for your sensory experience, I've got a couple of entries on my blog from my experiment. Here's the first - "A Day in Sounds" -
http://www.blog.sacredsuds.com/?p=52)xo,
Andrea
