692 – A powerful copywriting combination: Tom talks Features and Benefits

Episode 692 – Features and Benefits
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 692 of Screw the Commute Podcast. We got another copywriting episode here for you. We're going to talk about features versus benefits. And this is really, really powerful. So stay tuned. Hope you didn't miss Episode 691 That was on urgency and scarcity. Creating that in your copy to get people to buy. Now we want them to buy now, not later. All right. TikTok still going strong for me. tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. One of my TikToks is just passing 350,000 views as of this morning. So check that out. And please, if you go over there, if you have an account comment like share all that stuff. And I've got I think probably 160 or 170 short training videos over there for you now that you will profit from. All right. I want to thank everybody from Patreon that's helping out with our scholarship program starts as little as three bucks a month so check it out at screwthecommute.com/patreon.

[00:01:33] All right. Let's get to the main event. First of all, I want to do a simple and very common definition of features and benefits. A feature is what something is. And a benefit is what it does for you. For instance, let's say I'm selling a PDF e-book. The feature is that it's a PDF file.

[00:01:59] I mean, that's what it is. The benefit would be that it's immediately downloadable. So a piece of sales copy for this e-book here might be. I'll give you a sample. Your e-book will be in the convenient and immediately downloadable PDF format. You'll be reading it 5 minutes from now. All right. So what it is, it's a PDF file. The benefit of that is that it's convenient, it's immediately downloadable and they can be consuming the information in just a few minutes. Let me tell you from my own experience, how powerful this can be. Years ago, when I released my Wake Him Up video professional speaking system, I identified over 1000 things you would learn if you had this training system. I put as many of them as I could in the sales letter for this product. It was a long sales letter and at the time it cost about 1500 bucks. If you financed it, then about 3500 if you paid all at once. I put out the sales letter to my very responsive email subscribers. And guess what? I sold Nothing. Nada. Zippo, zilch. It's goose egg. I couldn't believe it. I had never had a product fail so miserably. So I hired a guy named Drew Eric Whitman, who was a copywriting coach, and he reviewed the sales letter. And he told me, he said, Tom, this looks like a heck of a product with tons of features, but you have not conveyed the benefits of those features to your email subscribers.

[00:03:36] He told me to go to each feature in the letter and right next to it. To put the corresponding benefit of that feature. So I did what he told me and I put the new sales letter, which was pretty much the old sales letter with the added benefits for each feature. And I sold 10,000 bucks the first day and a ton more after that. That's the power of benefits. Now, if you're going to screw up a sales, okay, screw up and leave out the features and just include the benefits. And I'm not suggesting that you screw up, put them both in, but never, ever leave out the benefits. Now, here's an example of the changes that I made. One feature is you will learn how to pre sell products. Now that's an important thing, but it didn't hit the speakers reading it in the face with the benefit. So here's how I changed that copy in the sales letter. Here it is. You'll learn how to pre sell products. You'll never be stuck at the back of the room packing up unsold products again. Now this is a benefit and it's doing that is really embarrassing to speakers. They don't want to be packing up the products they couldn't sell because nobody liked them.

[00:04:54] I mean, that's what they feel like. So pre selling them, you have none of that problem. So the benefit is there. So all he had me do was go through the sales letter and add a benefit to each feature. And boy, did things take off. Now that product has sold well over $1,000,000 and generated countless millions in spin off sales of my other products and services. Now you need to really sit down and figure out the benefits of your products and services. I mean, I have my mentees do this and I tell them here, if you can't figure out the benefits, how do you expect your potential customers to figure them out? All right. So you really need to put some thought into this. And you may have noticed recently I've been doing lots of copywriting episodes and if you've followed me for a while, you know, I've stated over and over that copywriting is the number one skill in my entire business career that's brought in and also saved the most money because it's an expensive skill to purchase and there's so many places you need copy you'd go broke. Just having it all written for you. Now, of course, if it's great, copy, it should pay off in sales. But the thing is, is it's most people just can't afford to do it and it's time consuming.

[00:06:16] You've got to go back and forth with revisions and it just takes forever. So learn how to do it yourself. You got to acquire this skill for maximum success at what you're doing. So check out my course at copywriting901.com. I call it the fast track to writing words that sell or speaking words to So because it's got video sales, lot of stuff in there too. I mean, every element of sales copy, whether it's written or on video, has tons of details to do it correctly to generate the most sales and unique copy just everywhere. Even your blog post titles and your blog postings, you want to move people to action. And that's where copywriting is. It doesn't have to be blatant and and obnoxious to get the results that you need and to help the people you're trying to help. So my course gives you all those details and it's way cheaper than courses charging thousands of dollars that leave out those critical details. So check it out at copywriting901.com. Happy New Year and we will catch you on the next. I'll catch you next year. Right. That's what it is. All right. Be careful on New Year's. I want to see you next year listening to this podcast.