sales letter benefits

10 April 2009

It is important to convey the benefit of buying in the most clear, direct and appealing means possible in your sales letter. A benefit is something that affects the buyer personally.

It will appear in the sales letter headline and the benefit should be reinforced through copy, sub-heads, illustrations, incentives and the coupon.

Do not confuse a benefit with a feature. Your product, for example, may have more features than its competitors, but this is not necessarily a benefit to the buyer.

Each feature needs to be translated into a benefit to help persuade the reader to buy. You must list the benefits in your sales letter. If you look at the sample sales letters on this website, you will see most are constructed in a similar way.

Using our list of motivators, benefits could be described in this way:

There are three basic levels of benefit. These are best described as ‘The hierarchy of benefit.’

THE HIERARCHY OF BENEFIT
Putting benefits in your sales letter copy isn’t a simple process.

Your main benefit should come from what the product offers the reader — its unique proposition — and provide the theme that runs through your copy.

The marketing letter headline, offer, guarantee and even the incentive should also support this benefit.

There are three levels in the hierarchy of benefit which you can develop to create a benefit proposition:

 Level 1 The idea — what the reader will gain

 Level 2 Example case studies — how the product helps

 Level 3 Implementation — how to successfully use the product

THE VALUE OF BENEFIT
Each level is worth more money. A buyer buys value. Whatever the price being asked, the reader will compare it to the benefit he or she is getting from the purchase as they read your sales letter.

The more value the benefit has, the higher the price the reader will pay for the product. It’s as simple as that.