Customers don’t simply buy your products because of their features. You must convince customers to buy your products because these features will benefit them in some way. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that most advertisements hit on so your customers must figure these benefits out for themselves. This means it’ll take you longer to get customers. However, if you start clearly communicating these benefits to your clients up front, you’ll gain more customers faster. Fortunately, there are some things to do so that this easily and naturally happens the next time you’re talking to a potential customer.
Understand how Benefits and Features are Different
Features are what your product or service “is” or “does” for someone while a benefit is what your product or service “means” to your customer. For instance, when you tell your customer that the car has a reinforced safety roof, you’re telling them about one of the car’s features. However, if you continue on to tell them that this will help keep them and their family safe, you’re telling them about one of the vehicle’s benefits.
Make Sure the Language You’re Using is Plain but Vivid
Customers tend to remember the benefits you tell them your product or service offers for much longer if you express it properly. To do so you’ll want to used simple, strong works that evoke emotion that convinces customers they really do need what you’re offering. So, instead of telling your customer that the roof will protect them if they get in an accident during which their car flips over, make sure you tell them that in such an accident they have a great chance of walking away from the accident unharmed.
Don’t use Clichés and Jargon
When you choose to use tired business clichés and overly technical terminology you detract from the beneficial, emotional language you just used. This is why you never want to say something like, “robust implementation of 80210 protocols” when you could simply tell your customer that the technology will help them connect wherever they’re at.
Keep the Benefits Short and Simple
Although you may be able to think of multiple benefits for your product, the typical person can only remember two or three things at a time. Their short-term memory can’t remember a long list of benefits. As such, providing them with such a list will only confuse them. So, instead of giving your customer the top 10 benefits they’ll enjoy when using your product or service, only give them two or three things at most.
Emphasize What Makes Your Business and its Products Unique
To convince customers to buy a product or service you may be tempted to give them a generic list of benefits. While this may help them decide to make the purchase, they may not buy the product or service from you. This is why it’s important for you to make sure the list of benefits you share with your customer are ones that help differentiate you from your competition. As such, you never want to tell someone that the software will make them more productive (something that any software of this nature can accomplish). Instead, you want to tell them what your customers are saying. For instance, “Our customers have found that this has helped them decrease their cost by 30%, which is twice the average for our industry.”
Make Sure You’re Offering Concrete Benefits
Customers don’t pay attention to abstract benefits that are vaguely described. Instead, when you’re trying to convince customers to buy something from you, make sure you use concrete, specific words that they’ll remember. In other words, don’t tell them why you’re great, tell them how you’re great (e.g. decreasing costs by 25%).
This is something you must remember whether you’re working to convince customers online or in person. When trying to do this online make sure you engage the services of ISEOU so they can help you start increasing your sales today.