WIIFM (pronounced wiffum)? Whats in it for me?

Your web site and your copy writing must be full of benefits for your visitor.

Ultimately your site is designed to attract targeted visitors who have different objectives, desires and behavioural characteristics and then persuade them to click through to your sales site and where you will hopefully convert them to buyers.

Features are easier than benefits

Talk to almost anyone about their product. You will be enthralled by the unending list of features. The product will be:

The biggest
The smallest
The most useful ever
The widest range of colours
The largest range of pack sizes ever seen
It will be lightweight
It will be unbreakable
And so on forever

You see it is easy for someone to list features. To list benefits is much more difficult because of the need to focus on someone elses view of things.

Rarely does the customer say before buying that I will buy this because it is the biggest, or because it is one of 50 different pack sizes, or the fact that it is available in 35,000 colours (a favourite way for a paint company close to where I live to promote the sale of its products).

The customer will buy what you have to offer because he/she will perceive it to save 2 hours of work a day so that time can be spent with the kids, it will be bought because all the neighbours will envy the new colour of the freshly painted house. The customer will buy because benefits so closely tied to emotional thinking will be recognized. Buying is normally an emotional decision and not a logical one. Logic must of course be used to justify the decision to buy but get the decision first, create some emotion.

Web sites, product packaging, advertising should scream benefits and also maybe some features.

Converting features into benefits

Some considerable time ago and I cannot remember the source I learned a very clever and very simple technique to convert features into benefits. With this simple word tool it becomes easier to create long lists of benefits.

Think of the following product purchase opportunity lightweight is the actual product feature in this example of what I want a customer to buy.

Buy a lightweight fibreglass waterfall for your backyard water features.

Then say So What? Maybe the response would be

So it can be installed without the help of the reluctant husband
So it can be taken home immediately instead of waiting for special transport for which I would pay $100 more
So it will reduce building time by 3 weeks
So it will fit in my boot (trunk)
My sister arriving tomorrow will be really impressed

This is a foolproof and simple way of creating benefits. Try it if you dont like the first answer keep going until you do like the answer. Once you get the answers you like then mould the answers into good compelling, copy.

Another approach is to use the words with this feature you can do this ...

Combine features and benefits

It is often a very good idea to combine benefits with features because then you can simultaneously appeal to those logical and emotional types. This is a very useful approach in using bulleted lists:

A lightweight product making it so easy to carry by 1 person
Low power consumption, save $100 per year
Saves 1 hour, enjoy more time with your kids
Kills algae and allows you to see more of your valuable fish

And then work a few advantages of the benefits and features into your copy as well

writing for traffic trust and sales continued