If you’ve ever tried your hand at doing any sales or marketing copy, then you know the importance of writing about benefits instead of features. When you’re selling a car with your copy, you’re not really selling a box with four wheels and an engine; instead, you’re selling the benefits of having that specific thing in your prospects’ lives.

Here are a few tips to help you write about benefits more effectively:

1. Use persuasive language. Think back to the kinds of writing that have successfully persuaded you in the past. If you have one on hand, bring it up. Chances are, you’ll notice a lot of active verbs with short phrases and memorable rhythm. You’ll see verbs that lean towards positive action and less that imply a negative response.
2. Know your prospects. Study your audience and investigate how the product can be genuinely beneficial in their lives. Flesh them out in as detailed a manner as you can, taking into account their backgrounds, future aspirations, and present stature in life.
3. Play to your prospects’ motivations. What, exactly, drives your prospects to buy the things they buy?  What is it they value?  This could be a whole gamut of things, from the appearance of prosperity to exclusivity to the feeling of being smarter than others.
4. Present the most attractive benefit first. That way, you stir enough interest in the prospect to keep them reading your pitch. Go from the most attractive to the least attractive.
5. Don’t list every possible benefit. Instead of focus on 1 to 5 key benefits, depending on how long your pitch is going to be. Yes, one can be enough provided it’s a very attractive lure to the audience you’re aiming to reach.
6. Work to condense each benefit into a single sentence. The shorter you can state a benefit, the better. Not only will it be more memorable, it gives you plenty of room in formatting, allowing you to summarize everything later in a list.
7. Illustrate the benefits. Don’t just say it, show it. Provide examples and anecdotes that help the readers imagine that benefit coming into their own lives. Narratives make what you’re describing feel more real.
8. Encourage the reader to act. Always make a call to action that ties your pitch to the benefit they can realize if only they take that next step. Summarize your benefits, if you have more than one, before calling for action.

Integrating emotion into sales copy can be done in two ways: obvious or subtle.  The former involves telling the reader exactly what you want them to feel, while the latter uses imagery and language to evoke the same feelings.

Obvious emotion can work.  However, you have to know your readers’ position very well so you can tailor the presentation based on their experiences and likely reactions.    More often than not, though, it will sound awkward and forced.

Subtle emotion is best, especially for sales copy.  Be overt and a good chunk of prospects will quickly stop reading — people will only respond to being told what to feel on select circumstances.   If you make the audience feel those same emotions without telling them, though, they’ll own it and, creating a favorable atmosphere to get the rest of your sales pitch going.

The two main ways of doing it involve:

1. Using imagery describing things that can evoke those emotions.  Want to make the reader feel safe?  Describe how your product will help ensure their security, talking about how it protects them and the kinds of dangers it removes from their lives.
2. Creating a narrative that can evoke those emotions.  Want to make the reader feel angry?  Describe driving peacefully and having another driver cut you off, then cursing at you like it was your fault.  Or talk about a woman who was fired at her job after being used as a scapegoat by her supervisor.   Short, simple stories like that can be enough to bring out anger — just make sure you can tie it in with whatever product you’re writing about.

You write a landing page that gets 10,000 visitors.  And you don’t make a single sale.  After a few more tests in changing layouts and graphics, you come to the only possible conclusion: your copy sucks.  What do you do?

The Luck Factor

An element of luck always plays into the success of any copywriting job.  You can do everything right, yet still turn out a flop.  Sometimes you get lucky.  Sometimes you need to test, revise and test again — that’s the nature of copywriting.

Making Changes

How do you know which things to change?  You can start with these things:

1. Look for obvious errors in the copy.  Are any pertinent facts missing?  Did you put in the right offer?  Is the phone number or sales page link correct?
2. Make sure every sentence is clear.  Is everything clear or are there any sections that can be interpreted the wrong way?  If prospects can’t understand the product properly, there’s little chance they’ll actually want to spend money.
3. Look for jargon.  Do you use any jargon that some segment of your target audience can’t understand?  Maybe it’s what’s causing them to bounce.
4. Check your assumptions.  Do you make any assumptions about your readers that may not necessarily be correct?  For instance, you may have harped on a long time about a benefit that isn’t necessarily important to them.  Watch out for these cases.
5. Check for consistency.   Is the ad that leads to the landing page consistent with your headline?  Similarly, are the promises you make in those actually realized in the copy?
6. Is your sales message appropriate to the target buyers?   Make sure your message is a match to the audience — a pitch that sells effectively to students won’t necessarily work for engineers or doctors.

You just finished drafting the copy for a sales letter you plan to use on your landing page.  Problem is, you’re not sure what to look for during review.  What exact things should you watch out for, remove, add or fix?

• Polish your headline.  Headlines need to grab the reader’s interest if you want them to give the rest of your pitch a try.
• Make sure the sales letter focuses on the prospect.    Sales letters aren’t about the product.  It’s about what the product can do for the reader.  It’s a subtle adjustment that makes a world of difference.
• Does the copy persuade or does it merely inform?  Sales copy is not about listing features and information.  It’s about convincing the reader of the benefits they will gain from a product, rather than rattling off a spec sheet.
• Are the benefits easy to find?  Your discussion of the product’s benefits should stand out among the text, making it easy for readers scanning the copy to notice them.
• Have you put the terms in perspective?  Make sure the reader understands why the terms for the product are the way they are.  Why is it priced that way?  Why are the payment terms arranged that way?  Why does the product include bonuses?
• Your claims should be accompanied by detailed evidence.  If you don’t have any facts or figures to support a claim, don’t put it in.  A single unconvincing claim can ruin your entire pitch.  It’s not worth the risk.

Ever seen one of those web pages with sales letters that seemed to go on forever?  In the direct marketing industry, they’re known as long-copy sales letters and they supposedly work like a charm.

When many people first see long-copy sales letters, the first thing they wonder about is whether anyone actually reads through that much drivel.  And the reality is, they do.  In fact, you will, too, if the letter was for a product that actually interested you.

Why go the long-copy route?  According to most direct marketers, the long sales letter is a great way to filter out good prospects from the bad.  Anyone that goes through the letter and onto your next step is a very good prospective buyer.

Here are some tips for creating long-copy sales letters:

• Make a big promise in your headline.  Don’t be afraid to sound sensational.  As long as it’s within the realm of believability, feel free to promise big.
• Create a catchy opening paragraph.  Because of the letter’s length, you need to start off with a compelling opener.  The interest you generate from that will, hopefully, sustain their attention until the end.
• Use subheadings.  Adding subheadings help break up the text into logical sections, making it easier to read through.   Keep your subheadings descriptive, so that the reader gets the central element of what the section is about.
• Focus on benefits and testimonials.   Those are the two best types of content to use when trying to convince readers.  The better you can highlight them, the more effective your sales letter is going to be.
• Summarize the benefits at the end.  List down the benefits at the end of the letter.  That way, readers get a quick reminder before finishing with the copy.

As a writer, you’re constantly told to learn to trim your words.  Why write an entire paragraph when the same idea can be clearly conveyed with a sentence?  This focus on writing concisely, however, should not come at the expense of expressing complete facts.

While it’s important to be brief, you should also learn to be thorough.  It’s especially important when you’re composing any type of material that’s meant to persuade or push the reader into action, such as argumentative essays or sales letters.

Take a look at the thousands of long-winded sales pages on the web.  Even though you hit the back button every time you come across one, they’re heavily used for a reason: they work.  Because they attempt to cover every imaginable question the prospect might come up with about the product, they are a treasure trove of information for an interested individual.  Contrast this to a short landing pages that leave more questions than they answer.

As a rule, you want to write short for a general audience.  If you’re writing for an entertainment magazine or doing a blurb on a product, then use everything you’ve learned to cut and trim your piece.  Use a proofreading software in case you need additional help.

If you have a highly-targeted set of readers and specific actions you want to push, though, it’s better to cover all the bases, going as far as to cover the same points multiple times.  This is especially important in sales letters, where the copy is tasked with more than entertaining the readers – it has to sell them on the virtue of the product.  Short and sweet just won’t cut it.

When writing regular content such as blog entries and article pieces for your website, it’s usually tacky to blatantly sell to your readers who stumble upon it to try and get information.  I’ve seen the over sales pitch over and over when I research stuff and I can just imagine the frustration regular folks end up with when faced with them.

It’s perfectly understandable if you want to sell.  After all, few folks will bother putting in the work to make a real website filled with real information if they’re not going to be compensated for it, in one way or another.  However, once all your articles begin sounding like sales pitches instead of pieces that actually look to help a potential customer, it usually ends up blowing up in your face.

Instead of hard selling your customer, why not work towards imparting real, useful information and adding in a soft sales pitch to help guide the conversion?  Make sure your copy provides the value your potential buyers are looking for (that includes cleaning up your writing with a grammar software).  All readers, after all, can be turned into customers, if you put in the work to arrange your copy that way.

There’s no one more willing to buy what you’re selling than someone you’ve helped out.  As such, always look to provide more value.  An appreciative reader will always be more willing to be persuaded.  They’re also less likely to experience buyer’s remorse.

I shop a lot online and, as such, am frequently exposed to landing pages and sales pitches of all sorts and designs.  Being a copywriter myself, I notice many selling errors that writers commit all too frequently, each of which can affect your entire sales process.

Along with using a grammar software to ensure your copy’s structural correctness, you’ll need to be certain that its functionally in shape.  Whether you’re paying a professional writer or crafting the sales page yourself, make sure to watch out for these problems before unleashing your copy the world.

1. Forgetting the audience

The only thing you write for yourself is your diary and your journal.  Everything else, for the most part, is written for an audience.  A lot of amateur copywriters end up being self-indulgent in their copy, forgetting that the most important part is appealing to the reader, instead of looking clever. Always write with the audience in mind.

2. Not enough information

If your prospects already know about your product, they won’t have to go through the trouble of reading about them.  The reason they’re paying your copy any attention is the hope that they will pick up more information that will help them make their choice.  Be succinct, but don’t be stingy.

3. Excessive focus on facts, instead of benefits

People, for the most part, don’t want facts.  Facts are boring and that’s why few people read the specs sheets.  What people want are benefits – the exact good that a product or a service can do for them.  Instead of listing down facts, rework the copy into showing the benefits they can derive because of it.

4. Too much copy

There are audiences that respond well to short copy and there are those that respond to long ones.  Knowing your audience and presenting your sales pitch in the manner that they prefer can go a long way into properly closing the deal.  I’ve literally seen two-field page sign-ups that was preceded by a pitch of 5000 words.  They lost me at 501st.

5. Making the action too difficult

Regardless of what you do with your copy, the final action that seals the deal must be simple and straightforward.  Copies that present the prospect with ten things to do or five courses of action often end up confusing them.

Great slogans, on their own, can mean the difference between people remembering your product or having it slotted into a heap of similar offerings.  Slogans play a large part in many marketing initiatives, with some campaigns built around the simple and memorable phrases.

The thing is, slogans are extremely difficult to craft. Anyone can compose a 1000-word treatise on your business.  Drilling it down, however, to 10 words or less requires a little more finesse.  While an English writing software can help make sure that your text features no grammar, spelling and vocabulary errors, you’ll have to fill in the creative part of the work.  What can you do to craft better taglines?

1. List Down Taglines That Impress You

Pore over magazine ads and watch TV shows, intently looking out for particular slogans that catch your eye.  See how they’re structured and use them as inspiration for your own attempts.

2. Start Writing

Even if takes you 30, 50 or 100 words to express what your business does, write it down.  That will be your base, the well from which the slogan will spring out from.

3. Find The Key Elements

From all that you’ve written down, find the key phrases and descriptions that you find most meaningful for your business.  Get rid of redundancies, along with items that may not be the most integral to your operations.  Ideally, you should trim it down to one central element.  If not, try to keep it to less than five.

4.  Craft Your Slogan

Based on your key elements, fashion a tagline using those slogans you’ve previously listed down as inspiration.  Don’t worry about not getting it right the first time – the best slogans usually take some time to work out.