Anyway, What Exactly Are Benefits ?
Think of benefits as advantages to the customer. It’s what your product ‘does’ for buyers… rather than what it ‘is’. Benefits give value to a product — value that exceeds the cost of the product itself. Benefits make your product appealing, causing others to willingly shell out their hard earned cash in order to get the perceived benefits.
Benefits are the real reason your product exists and has a chance in the marketplace. Without major benefits, you have nothing to sell and will not success.
Benefits are what prospects get as a result of buying your product. They’re all about prospects and answer the foremost question on every visitor’s mind
Benefits give meaning, significance, and value to a feature and make the product more appealing in the prospect’s eyes. For example, a desktop widget that’s available in 43 different colors enables buyers to suit any imaginable office design and décor.
What About Features?
Features on the other hand, are actual product details. It’s all about your product and what it is and may include details about the product color, size, shape, and materials used among many other things. Features are facts and characteristics.
Used alone, they offer little in terms of selling power. But when employed as the reasoning behind a benefit, features can act as effective supplemental sales tools.
The most effective way to use a feature is to align it with a compelling benefit where the exclusive feature creates in essence, an exclusive benefit. Make the feature a valuable characteristic because of what it does.
Always use benefits first and foremost. Benefits influence, persuade, and sell prospects on your product or offer.
Features play a secondary role, if they play one at all in your sales letter.
Every feature has at least one corresponding benefit and it’s up to you as marketer to uncover it, dust it off, and present it in a way that gives the product added value. The idea is to build a credible and realistic bridge from a product’s feature to an appealing benefit.
Which Benefits Should Be Included?
Everything that represents a genuine helpful advantage or benefit to your prospect should be included in your sales letter. List every conceivable benefit. Prioritize and deliver your benefits in the order from the most relevant and important to the least. Omit any single benefit and you might be leaving out the one advantage that could sway an undecided shopper.
The more benefits you stress in your copy, the more opportunities you have to sell others and the better will be your response. In fact, your sales letter should consist of one benefit on top of another.
Launch your sales letter with a big benefit in your headline. Expand on this major benefit in your subheading. Continue along with a string of benefits throughout the body copy of your message. Repeat your main benefit in your close or on the order form. The more benefits you present, the more convincing, persuasive and effective your sales copy is as a decision-making tool in the hands of prospects.
The Easiest Way To Turn Features Into Benefits
Simply take any feature and ask yourself what it means to customers or prospects.
Since features are about products, you need to give it a new twist, making it about the prospect.
Here’s an easy way to convert any ‘fact’ about your product into a prospect benefit. Simply take a feature and add the words “You get”. When you think in terms of ‘You get’ — you’re thinking about how the prospect/customer is greater advantaged by having or using the product.
Here’s an example…
- Fact or Feature: Fax machine prints on regular paper
- Benefit: As a result, you get clearer printouts on standard size paper. No need to buy costly fax rolls again. In addition, there’s no cutting required. Plus, never again will you ever have to deal with unsightly oversized pages that jam your filing cabinet and make a mess of your files.
Another way to phrase it is “so that you get”. State the feature and follow it up with “So that you get…”
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Think the answer through from your prospect’s point of view. See it how he’s likely to see it. What’s the advantage from their perspective? What is it about that particular feature that makes it valuable and advantageous to the audience? That’s what you need to think about… and that’s what you need to communicate to your prospect.
Why Benefits Are So Important
Meaningful advantages sustain and build reader interest. Lose interest and you’ve lost any chance for a sale. Benefits focus on prospects and address human wants, so they naturally attract and hold the interest of readers.
Your prospect has a problem he’d dearly like to solve, or a goal he desperately wants to reach. He wants less pain in his life and more pleasure. Suddenly, he discovers your product. But it’s not the product itself he’s most interested in; it’s the perceived benefit he’ll get to experience as a result of buying.
But how does your prospect know if your product is the ideal answer he’s been searching for?
If you merely reveal descriptive details about your product in your sales copy, it won’t have much appeal. You can’t simply present your goods in a ‘here it is’ approach and expect prospects to figure out the advantages for themselves. That’s lunacy. Yet, many do try this approach. A much more effective strategy is to paint a glorious picture of the kind of results that are possible with your product. Make it absolutely clear and utterly obvious.
If you don’t unveil all the benefits, they’ll never figure it out for themselves, nor will they waste a minute of their precious time in trying to do so. If your message doesn’t reach out and grab them because of its magical appeal – due to the benefits expressed – you don’t stand much of a chance in an increasingly competitive online marketplace. Benefits tell prospects where to go in search of the answers.
They have magical, emotional appeal and offer hope and promise to those in want and need. Benefits are solutions to problems, cures to symptoms. Few purchases are made without a strong reason. The reason prospects are even remotely interested in your sales message is because they have a problem they’d like to solve, a symptom they’d like to cure, or a desire they’d like to attain.
When you communicate benefit on top of benefit, your words cut through the noise and directly trigger your prospect’s hot buttons.
Features are about things – specifically your product. Benefits are about feelings and it’s these feelings that control human actions. If you want to communicate effectively, you’ve got to arouse feelings consistently throughout your body copy. Emotions give life and passion to your words.
Since benefits are explained in self-serving terms (self-serving to the prospective customer, not the marketer) they immediately strike a chord with the audience. To prospects, perceived benefits are reasons for paying attention ultimately buying.
Without appealing benefits your product or offer has little value in the minds of consumers. They haven’t yet been ‘sold’. But stack up a huge list of benefits and suddenly the perceived value of the same product goes sky high.
It’s the relative value that ultimately determines the prospects decision to buy. Benefits build value and make the purchase decision an easier one. Prospects add up the perceived value of your offer – the sum total of all the benefits. Mentally, either consciously or subconsciously, they attach a figure to the list. At the same time, they look at the real cost – the actual dollars and cents required to purchase.
So, successful your sales copy is all about product’s benefits. And if you write of sales copy must included all benefits, not only features.
