Today we’re gonna talk about features vs benefits because if you know the difference you can easily make your conversion rate explode.
The fact is, for persuasive sales copy we need to use both features and benefits.
On my journeys around the persuasion-underground I’m seeing lot of people make mistakes with this stuff.
And I get it, it’s easy to become confused when it comes to features and benefits.
I’m seeing a lot of copywriters, albeit mainly newbie copywriters, listing out features instead of benefits.
Or on the on the flip side, I see other copywriters listening out benefits but not including features.
Table of Contents:
Using Both Features & Benefits
And we really need a good mix of both because the old adage is ‘features tell, benefits sell’.
I’m also gonna take it a little step further and say that we really need to lace our sales copy with emotional benefits – and that is really what’s gonna make or break your sales copy.
So it’s your job to flood your sales copy with powerful emotional triggers that act as benefits.
I say that we need both features and benefits because we need to appeal to both the logical side of the brain and then we need to appeal to the emotional side of the brain.
We have to embrace both of these because they are both big drivers when it comes to making decisions.
We use the features as the logic and then we can use the benefits as the emotion.
Features vs Benefits
But what’s the real difference between a feature and the benefit?
Well, a feature is something about your product.
It’s the what.
For example if you have a cordless drill the feature might be that it has a variable speed.
The benefit is what the advantage is for the customer.
It tells why the feature is a good thing.
So variable speed might give you the benefit of greater control or more accuracy or a greater degree of precision.
That’s the main difference between features and benefits but if you can then attach an emotion to your benefits too.
If we’re using the drill as an example the variable speed means that your customer won’t make any embarrassing mistakes or they won’t feel as much frustration using the drill.
Now for you to find out the real emotional triggers for your products you’re gonna have to ask yourself three questions.
3 Vital Questions
The first thing you have to ask yourself is:
What does it do?
And then the second question is
Why is that a good thing for your customer?
Maybe it saves time or maybe it makes them more money or maybe it helps them look good.
And the third and possibly most important question that you have to ask yourself is:
How does that make them feel?
There you will have the main emotional trigger that you can use as a benefit to sell your product.
Features vs Benefits Structure
Typically we would list out feature followed by the emotional benefit.
You’d structure is as a feature then benefit, feature then benefit.
And we would typically do this in bullet point fashion.
I actually have got lots of information for you about the nature of bullet points – it’s a really fascinating area that we can delve right into, and I will do that in a future post.
But for now use feature followed by benefit, followed by feature followed by benefit.
And this appeals to both the logical and the emotional drivers in the mind, resulting in a much higher conversion rate.
So there you go I hope you found this useful I hope you use this information to skyrocket your conversion rate.
If you’ve found it useful then share it with others who might also, erm, benefit. And they might be thankful to you for it – and it helps me out too.