Features and benefits

If you’ve dipped your toes into copywriting before you’ve probably heard the staple advice that you should: “Sell the benefits, not the features”.

The difference between features and benefits: A feature is a part of your product or service, while a benefit is a positive impact it has on your customer. Think about your favorite pair of jeans. Your favorite pair of jeans has a specific number of threads keeping everything together, a certain length and size, a particular metal for the buttons. Those are features.

Benefits are important because they answer your customer’s question: “Why should I care what you have?”. Rather than simply telling your customer what you have or provide, you’re telling them how your product or offer is going to have a positive, valuable impact on their life. If you think about a feature as the facts and figures of what you offer, a benefit is a combination of:
• The effect it has on your customer
• How they feel because of this

A very simple 3-step approach to identifying the benefits of your product is:
• What does it have or do?
• What effect does this have on my customer’s life?
• Does this cause a positive emotion or eliminate a negative emotion (or both)?

Features are just as important as benefits because they give your customer the proof behind the promise you’re making. When writing your copy, think about having a conversation with your customer that sounds like this: “This is what you can experience [benefits / emotions] with our product, and here is how we do this for you [features]”.