Online Copywriting: difference between features and benefits

Jun 23, 2009 Comments

Recently I needed to prepare two documents for a client selling a software product: one describing features and the other, benefits. When I delivered him the documents he said I needed to get clear about the difference between the two, and I had basically written the same thing in both the documents. Ever ready to learn more I eagerly agreed to re-write the documents and do more study on the differences between features and benefits.

While working on an online copywriting project my main focus is understanding features, and then communicating the most compelling benefits. Below I’m trying to lay down the basic difference between features and benefits

Features

Let’s suppose you are selling a desktop blog editing software. It’s features would be:

• Ability to add multiple blog accounts.
• Inbuilt word processor, thesaurus and spell-check.
• FTP functionality to upload images.
• Support for offline and online editing.
• Support for CSS formatting.

These are the features, things that the software lets you do. But how do you benefit from these features?

Benefits

• Post blog posts extremely fast and conveniently.
• Work in a familiar, world-processor like environment.
• Reduce spelling and grammatical errors.
• Upload images easily.
• Format your blog posts to your heart’s content.

All in all, become a better, prolific blogger.

Not all features are equally beneficial to all, but we use products and services for their benefits and not for their features. This is why it is very important to highlight the benefits when you are preparing the copy to sell a product or a service.