Determine your customers’ biggest pain point, how your solution solves their problem, and how it will make their lives better.
Pull out any customer quotes or frequently used words worth testing in your copy.
Include your key differentiator, or what makes you special.
Think beyond your headline when developing your value proposition. It can extend to your sub-headline, supporting bullet points, and any supporting copy your visitors first see upon landing on the page.
Chapter 8
Tying Together Your Features and Benefits
When people go to write copy, nothing seems to confuse them more than the difference between features and benefits. You have a website you need to fill with copy, and your first inclination is to simply talk about all the components that make up your product or service. After all, isn’t that why visitors are coming to your site? They need information so they can figure out if what you’re selling is something they want.
You’re not wrong. Your customers have to get the details of what’s on offer; otherwise, all they’re reading about are their pains. Problems without solutions aren’t going to help them. They’re looking for answers. The challenge for you becomes balancing your customers’ need for information and your very real need to convey the value of what you’re selling.
The key to this balancing act lies in telling your customers about the features of your product or service within the context of how they’ll benefit from them. For instance, just listing the ingredients in your organic dog shampoo doesn’t tell customers how their and their pooch’s lives will be exponentially better after using it. You have to spell it out for them in a way that ties in with what they care about most.
Before you can do that, you need to get comfortable identifying the difference between your features and the benefits that go along with them.
What are features?
Features are the items that make up your product or service. I like to think of them as the facts behind your offer. For an organic dog shampoo, this would be a feature:
Made with organic tea tree oil
That statement tells us about one of the aspects of the product. It’s all fact. There’s no why behind the what, simply fact.
While knowing what you’re getting from your purchase is important, rarely do features sell on their own. It’s the benefits that do the heavy lifting in your copy.
What are benefits?
Benefits are the why behind your features. They give your customers an emotional, intangible reason to buy into your product or service. In a nutshell, benefits help answer that critical question people ask when they move through your site: Why should I care?
Here’s an example of a benefit of using the organic dog shampoo:
Keep your dog safe from fleas and ticks without worrying about nasty chemicals
Worry about diseases and fear of exposing myself and my pet to scary pesticides taps into two very real emotions. Telling me this product can make that worry and fear go away is compelling. In fact, it’s a whole lot more compelling than simply being told there’s tea tree oil in the shampoo. Knowing I can keep my dog safe makes my life better—and that’s something I care about.
Determining key benefits
Do you remember way back in Chapter 1 when I talked about motivations and finding your customers’ why? Figuring out the deep down why behind your customers’ motivation for seeking out what you’re selling is a similar process to discovering the key benefits of your product or service. You start by asking why, and then you continue asking until you’ve gotten to the root of the emotional core.
Let’s take the tea tree oil feature of the dog shampoo as our starting point.
Why is tea tree oil an important ingredient in the shampoo?
Because it helps repel fleas and ticks naturally.
Why do I care if it repels fleas and ticks naturally?
Because my dog won’t get sick from the bugs or chemicals.
Why do I want my dog to be bug- and chemical-free?
Because I love my dog and I don’t want to be worried about him keeling over from a disease or bathing in pesticides.
Now that’s the ticket! Immediately I understand how my world can be a better place with this tea tree–filled organic dog shampoo. That’s the key benefit, and if you haven’t noticed yet, it corresponds to the deeper motivations of the customer.
Think of it this way, your key benefits should be the answer to what’s keeping your customers up at night. It’s the part of your copy that matches your customer’s desire with the value your product or service can provide. Which brings me to a distinction between benefits that are directly tied to a particular feature and those that can be attributed to your business as a whole. Those overarching benefits that go beyond features can speak to what makes you different or special.
Consider the online retailer Zappos. Their passion for customer service seeps into all of their messaging. How they approach keeping their customers happy is core to their company’s ethos. You better believe that ethos counts as a big old benefit. And Zappos doesn’t let you forget it. From their tagline, “Powered by service,” to their Shipping and Returns page, it’s everywhere.
How to apply your voice of customer research to your features and benefits
Now that you know the distinction between features and benefits, it’s time to see how all that juicy voice of customer research can be used to your advantage when talking about them. The place to start is with a list of the features that make up your product, service, or solution. Once you’ve laid them out on the page, look at each closely and determine if there’s a compelling benefit you can attach to them.
You may find that you can assign several benefits to one feature and you have to rack your brain to come up with even one for another feature. That’s okay. It’s worth the time to go through this process so you can start comparing what you think is important to your customers with what your research tells you is important.
Using our health coach example, a list of features for her coaching services packages might look like this:
One-on-one coaching sessions via Skype
Recordings of all the coaching sessions
Customized diet and exercise plans
Access to private online community for coaching members
E-mail support to answer questions
These are the items that make up her offerings, the things her customers will get when they pay. These features don’t tell the visitors coming to her site why they matter. That’s the job of the benefits.
Let’s take a look at the “Customized diet and exercise plans” feature and map out the benefits associated with it so you can see how one looks.
Key benefits of a customized diet and exercise plan:
No more obsessing about what to eat and how to exercise, because it’s all spelled out
Feel confident in your choices when you’ve got a plan geared toward setting you up for success
Both benefits clearly speak to how this component of the packages will make the customer’s life better. They tap into the motivations behind why someone looking for this type of service would choose it.
Comparing what you think is important with what your customers care about
Which brings me to exactly how you take your research and apply it to your features and benefits list. Go back through your priority messages list and pay particular attention to the Wants/Needs and Motivational Triggers columns. These are the places where you’ll find what kinds of features and benefits your customers care about most.
For instance, when we look at the list of wants/needs from our health coach priority list, we find that taking the guesswork out of knowing what to eat and how to exercise tops the list.
Let’s compare that with the features I came up with earlier in this chapter. The customized diet and exercise plan feature matches up with this top need. That means I’d want to make sure to highlight this feature first by talking up its associated benefit
s.
Notice from the list above that increasing confidence is the number one motivational trigger. I’d want to see how my most desirable feature might tap into that desire. Going back to the key benefits I came up with for the customized diet and exercise plan, the second one fits the bill:
Feel confident in your choices when you’ve got a plan geared toward setting you up for success
Highlighting this benefit on the home or services page makes sense, given the hierarchy of messages we previously determined.
What does this whole feature/benefit thing look like on the page? Let’s take a real-life example from a brand that has become synonymous with showing the value of a product’s features within the context of its benefits: Apple.
Apple’s copywriters have mastered the art of selling the experience of owning one of their products, not just the products themselves. When you read any of the copy on their product pages, you’re immediately drawn into the deeper emotional reasons why buying an iPhone, iPad, or computer will make your life better.
Why there’s nothing quite like iPhone.
Every iPhone we’ve made—and we mean every single one—was built on the same belief. That a phone should be more than a collection of features. That, above all, a phone should be absolutely simple, beautiful, and magical to use.13
In the above case, they literally tell you why the iPhone is greater than the sum of its parts (or features). Using an iPhone will be a “magical” experience. As you scroll down the page, you find out how. Each feature becomes a launchpad for something new and exciting you can do or create.
Take the camera, with all of its enhanced features in the iPhone 6S. It has things like “Focus Pixels,” “auto stabilization,” and an “image signal processor.” Sounds pretty cool, right? If you’re a gadget geek, maybe. What the copywriters at Apple understand is that while those fancy-sounding features may pique your interest, they don’t mean a whole lot on their own. They don’t convey how they will make your everyday life better, more exciting, or interesting.
That’s why they use images to show you how amazing the photos you can take with your camera are, then they tell you what those features can do for you.
“What does that all mean? It means we’ve taken care of the technology. All you have to do is find something beautiful and tap the shutter button for the best, most awe-inspiring photos you’ve ever taken.”14
The power in the copy comes from transforming lifeless features into conduits for capturing a moment in time that’s relatable. Those “Focus Pixels” and “auto stabilization” features suddenly seem way more valuable when seen within the context of taking point-and-shoot photos of real-life things.
What to do next
Make a list of all the features of your product or service. Once you’ve done that, go back through your customer research to determine the following:
What features your customers care about most
The associated benefits tied to those features
How you can talk about your features within the context of your benefits
Then, bring all the elements of your product or service to life by telling your visitors exactly how they will make their lives better.
Chapter 9
Closing Thoughts
If you’ve made it through the entire book, give yourself a pat on the back. You are light-years ahead of most small business owners when it comes to thinking about communicating with the customer online.
This is a very good thing. Even if you only dip your toe into conducting voice of customer research without diving headfirst, you’ve made an important step. You’ve shifted your mind-set away from making your website all about you and focusing on how to help your customers be successful.
Once you start talking to your customers, you’ll get hooked
Doing all of this voice of customer research may seem tedious. I’d be lying if I said it’s all rainbow sprinkles and unicorns. It takes time, energy, and a whole lot of brainpower. For most of us trying to keep our heads above water while running a small business, these are three things that are usually in short supply.
But you might just find something magical happens once you do start getting on the phone or exchanging e-mails with your clients. You learn things about your business and your offerings you never would have found out otherwise. You gain insights into not only what’s working and what’s not working but also why your customers love what you do. Armed with that kind of knowledge, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it before.
About the Author
Jennifer Havice is a conversion rate optimizer who specializes in writing copy. She believes data-driven research combined with a brand’s personality can make copywriting magic.
She has worked with companies large and small, helping them articulate their messaging and better connect with their customers across a range of industries.
When she’s not chasing after three large dogs and two larger horses, you’ll find her tapping away at her laptop with a strong cup of Peet’s coffee by her side. Jen and her husband call the Twin Cities home, or as she affectionately likes to call it, the Land of 10,000 Hot Dishes.
You can follow her on Twitter @jenhavice.
Get exclusive resources related to the book at http://findtherightmessage.com/sheets.
Notes
1. Jakob Nielson, “How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?” September 12, 2011, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-long-do-users-stay-on-web-pages/.
2. Jakob Nielson, “How Users Read on the Web,” October 1, 1997, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/.
3. Kathryn Whitenton, “Satisficing: Quickly Meet Users’ Main Needs,” March 30, 2014, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/satisficing/.
4. Deborah Frisch and Jonathan Baron, “Ambiguity and Rationality,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 1, no. 3 (1988): 149–57.
5. Jennifer Havice, “How to Create Customer Personas with Actual, Real Life Data,” ConversionXL, http://conversionxl.com/creating-customer-personas-using-data-driven-research/?hvid=2AD8ar.
6. Adele Revella, Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2015), p. 28.
7. Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (New Riders, 2014).
8. Noah Kagan, “How One Survey Created Insane Results,” OkDork, October 14, 2013, http://okdork.com/2013/10/14/how-to-use-surveys-to-get-insane-results/.
9. Jonathan L. Freedman and Scott C. Fraser, “Compliance without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4, no. 2 (1966): 195–202.
10. Morgan Sherwood, “What Is Typically Considered a Good Response Rate?” January 2, 2015, http://help.qualaroo.com/hc/en-us/articles/201484047-What-is-typically-considered-a-good-response-rate-.
11. Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, rev. ed. (New York: William Morrow, 1993).
12. Peep Laja, “#6: Using Qualitative On-Site Surveys,” Conversion Optimization Guide by ConversionXL, http://conversionxl.com/conversion-optimization-guide/using-qualitative-on-site-surveys/.
13. “Why There’s Nothing Quite Like iPhone,” http://www.apple.com/iphone/why-theres-iphone/.
14. “iPhone 6s Cameras,” http://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/cameras/.
Table of Contents
Praise for Finding the Right Message
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
Contents
Get the Audience Core Messaging Sheet
Introduction
Part I: Getting Your Voice of Customer Research
Chapter 1: Understanding Your Customers’ Why
Chapter 2: Asking the Right Questions
Part II: Analyzing the Research
Chapter 3: How to Do Customer Research without the Customers
Chapter 4: Tapping into Your Resea
rch
Chapter 5: Determining Your Key Messages for Those Ideal Buyers
Part III: Applying What You’ve Learned to Your Website Copy
Chapter 6: It’s Time to Talk About You
Chapter 7: Nailing Down Your Value Proposition
Chapter 8: Tying Together Your Features and Benefits
Chapter 9: Closing Thoughts
About the Author
Notes
Finding the Right Message Page 7