The Ultimate Guide to Features and Benefits
If you don’t know anything about copywriting, start with features and benefits. Learning what they are and how to use them will put you way ahead of most people. They’re the foundation of good copywriting and knowing how to use them is a vital skill for making your copy stand out.
Read this post to learn what they are, what’s the difference between the two of them, and how to use each in your copy. Once you learn the basics, you can use it in any piece of copy you write: sales pages, emails, and social media posts.
What are features and benefits?
Let’s start with a simple definition:
Features are facts about a product or service.
Benefits are what someone gets from using a product or service.
Features tend to be more descriptive and tangible, like size and color. Benefits focus on what someone gets from using a product or the problem that it solves. You can think of features as what they get and benefits as why they want it.
Here’s how to figure out the features and benefits of your offer. List out all the features first. Then go through each and ask why someone would care about that feature. How does it help them? That will get you to the benefit. Each feature will have a corresponding benefit.
Examples of features and benefits
To help illustrate the difference, let’s go through a few examples. First, let’s talk about a physical product. For this example, I’m using a Fitbit.
The main feature of a Fitbit is that it tracks your steps. But why do you care? Well knowing how many steps you take can help you improve your fitness and health. If you see that you’re 1,000 steps from your goal, that might be the motivation you need to take a walk around the block.
Another feature of the Fitbit is that it tracks your heart rate. The benefit is that it helps you get to your target heart rate zone. Working out at your target heart rate is more efficient and helps you get the most out of your exercise. Ultimately the benefit is a better workout.
One last feature of a Fitbit is the long battery life. That makes it easy to use and low maintenance. You don’t have to be inconvenienced charging it every day, which makes it even easier to reach your fitness goals.
I went over a product example first because it’s usually easier to pick out features and benefits in physical products. There’s a tangible thing you can point to and actually see the features.
Services can be a little harder though because it all seems intangible. You’re selling your time and skills, not something physical you can point to. We’ll go over a couple examples so you can see how to tell the difference between features and benefits in your services.
If you don’t have a physical item, how do you tell what the features are for services? It’s actually pretty simple: features are the deliverables. If you’re a web designer that creates websites, the deliverable might be a three page website. That’s the feature. What your client can do with a three page website is the benefit.
Or if you’re a coach, you might offer a package of 4 x 60 minute coaching calls. That’s the feature - what your clients actually get. The benefits are what they get out of it - the results of your service.
Here’s one more example. Let’s say you’re a virtual assistant and you offer a package with 10 hours of assistance per month. That’s the feature - the 10 hours. You might also offer email support or weekly check-in calls as part of the package. Those are also features.
The benefits to your clients are what you can do for them in that time, like answering customer service emails or scheduling social media posts.
But you can even go a little deeper with the benefits. Another benefit to your clients is the time you give back to them and what they can do in those 10 hours. It might be that they can work with more clients, take time off, or have time to pick up their kid from school everyday.
The deeper you go, the closer you get to people’s real desires. That’s the secret to great copy. When you highlight those benefits your clients care about most, you connect with people on an emotional level.
If you’re not sure what the benefits of your service are, think about the problem that you’re solving. You can also ask past clients for feedback. Ask them what they got out of the service, what goal it helped them achieve, and what the biggest benefit was to them. You’ll get some great insight you can use on your sales page.
How to use features and benefits in your copy
Now that you know what features and benefits are, here’s how to use them in your sales page copy. Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “Features tell, benefits sell.” It’s a total cliche, but it’s true. Features aren’t what get people excited. A rundown of features isn’t going to get people to click the buy button - they need to know how it will make their life better. That’s why you want to lead with the benefits in your copy.
When writing your sales page (or any other piece of copy), start with the benefits they get from buying the offer. You can always talk about the features later, but if they don’t care they won’t keep reading. Talk about the benefits first, then outline the service features.
That’s the basics of features and benefits! Next time you’re writing copy, list out the features and the corresponding benefits. Then you’ll know exactly what to highlight in your sales copy.