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Read This, Sell More: Direct Mail Marketing Is About Benefits,
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Author: Alan Sharpe
Topic: Direct-Mail
Viewed: 63 time(s)
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Your customer wants a cleaner kitchen, not a kitchen cleaner.
Your customers are interested in benefits, not features. So sell
benefits in your sales letters.
The difference between a feature and a benefit comes down to
this: A feature is what something does. A benefit is what
something does for you.
Everything you have to say in your direct marketing sales
letters boils down to features and benefits. With every piece of
copy you write, however long or short your copy, you are always
talking in terms of features and benefits.
When I worked on the Bell Mobility account, I discovered that
the marketing folks at Bell have a policy of always presenting
the benefit first, followed by the feature. I had usually
written things the other way around. But they had a good policy.
For example, I would have said, ?Digital Data2Go lets you
receive email with your cellphone, saving you the hassle of
finding a phone jack for your laptop whenever you need to check
email while travelling.? Bell insisted that I present the
benefit first, so I instead wrote something like this: ?Never
again waste time hunting for a phone jack when it?s time to
check email while travelling. Digital Data2Go lets you receive
email with just your cellphone.?
I think Bell has the right idea, although there are times when
the feature needs to come first.
The tough part in all of this is translating features into
benefits before you start writing. Some benefits are obvious.
Others require some detective work to uncover. I learned that
lesson all over again when I taught copywriting at the
University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies.
I gave my students an exercise that always turned up a
surprising benefit. I told my class that the CN Tower in
Toronto, Ontario, Canada was 1,815 feet and 5 inches tall. Their
assignment was to come up with as many benefits as they could
that related to that feature. Most of them stared at me.
Then they picked up their pens.
Slowly, they started to write.
Each time I ran the exercise, a student or two came up with a
benefit that I had not thought of. Here are a few of the
benefits of having the world?s tallest free-standing structure
in your city:
* attract tourist dollars by charging for tours * see the whole
city from one vantage point * generate revenue by selling
souvenirs * impress your date with dinner at the revolving
restaurant * host fundraisers (a race up the stairs to the top
is a popular annual fundraiser) * generate revenue from
organizations that monitor the weather * navigate around the
city easily because the tower is a landmark visible from almost
everywhere * generate revenue from TV and radio companies by
hosting their antennas on the communications deck * improve the
flow of traffic along the nearby Gardner Expressway by locating
traffic cameras on the tower * generate publicity by hanging a
banner down the side of the structure
There were many more benefits, some worthy and some just wacky,
but all of them were benefits of one kind or another. Together,
they demonstrated that products and services, including yours,
probably have more benefits than are apparent at first glance.
So hunt for those benefits that are relevant to your potential
buyers and current customers. And remember this, every time you
craft a sales letter: your client wants a 5/8 inch hole, not a
5/8 inch drill bit.
??2005 Sharpe Copy Inc. You may reprint this article online and
in print provided the links remain live and the content remains
unaltered (including the "About the author" message).
About the author:
Alan Sharpe is a business-to-business direct mail copywriter.
Sign up for free weekly tips like this at www.sharpecopy.com
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