One of the common mistakes of many websites is placing an emphasis on the product or service features as opposed to benefits. Laura’s blog about the differences between copy focused benefits and copy focused features is an excellent introduction on how to evaluate your site to make sure it is benefit focused. I’ve said it many times, clients do not care about the features of your product; they want to know what benefits they will get from using it. Clients don’t care about you or your company, they want to see what the products or services you offer can do for them.

This is by no means a new problem nor is it particular to online copy. A great example is sent the promotional materials sent to you frequently from banks or credit cards? The financial industry has been doing this for so long, that it got the consumers very used to reading their features and translating those into benefits.

I received an email yesterday of what I would consider the worst example to date of feature based copy. The company is trying to sell me a technology outsourcing solution. I will let the copy do the talking:

We motivate. We empower. We lead. We follow. We laugh. We succeed.

ACS offers innovative and effective outsourcing solutions for clients around the world. We deliver higher quality, increased productivity, and lower costs. Can we do that for you? Sure we can.

For business process outsourcing (BPO) and information technology outsourcing (ITO), ACS is not a product, we’re services. We’re people making technology work.

We’d be glad to demonstrate the ACS advantage. Let us tell you about our world-class people, our company, and the “can-do” attitude that motivates us to deliver nothing less than the very best.

I am not sure if I can eve call this feature based copy. In a paragraph of 97 words, there were 17 mentions of the company (We, ACS, us). That means 25% of the copy talked about the company. The problem is the number of clients that click away after reading the first two phrases because the copy is so focused on the company, and not the client.

This example was very funny, and I wanted to share it. Not only is this company doing a bad job promoting, selling, and persuading customer to buy their services, but a lot of businesses fall into the same mistake. Maybe not as dramatic, but it’s a common mistake that we must be weary of.

How about you, do you have any examples you would like to share?

Tags: Benefits-vs-features, we-we, Webcopy
Posted in Copy Writing