List As Many Benefits As Possible

Having no idea what objection is going through the mind of the visitor, the safest route is to list as many benefits as possible to overcome ALL objections, no matter who is visiting. However, there is an art and strategy to how you list these benefits so as to keep the reader involved and interested enough to continue reading to the end.

Realize that the majority of people who visit a site are skim readers. They skim the text looking for visual signals that cue them into when to read and when to skip reading. Things like major headings and subheadings may actually be read before they even read the inline paragraphs. If a heading is interesting, the eyes might skip to bolded, bulleted, or italicized text to see what the major points are being discussed. If that's interesting, then they might finally be persuaded to read the normal font and find out the details of each bullet. Thus, the format of your benefits list is just as important, if not more so, than the content of your list.

Bulleted Lists Are Best

For a list of benefits, you want to start with the strongest benefits at the top and then work your way down to the weakest ones. This way, if the reader reads something at the top that convinces them to buy now, they won't even see the ones at the end. They're simply not needed. However, if they have objections that aren't addressed as they continue to read down the list, they'll eventually (and, hopefully) spot a weaker benefit that might have been a larger concern for this customer that overcomes that objection, leading to them also being sold! It just takes a little more time.

List your benefits in a bulleted list that clearly separates them from the rest of the text on the page. You can add subheadings to each bulleted item to concisely explain what the benefit is in a few words and then expound on that in detail after a hyphen. This is one of the best ways to create a list that is not only influential, but is also easy for modern skim readers to pick apart and to read for their particular interests and concerns.

Add enough white space to make the reading of the list easy on the eyes. If that means adding a space between each bulleted item, that's fine. Your audience will appreciate you for it, and there's no need to worry about page length on a Web page. There is a scroll bar for just that reason. Go down and list as many possible benefits as you think are relevant to your demographic. Near the end, ask them for the sale and put a button or link for where they can buy.

When To Sell Benefits

In our previous example, you would sell benefits the most on a sales page. That doesn't mean, however, that there aren't other times when you want to sell your benefits. Any time you are marketing online is a good time to sell benefits, whether you have your own website or not. It can be done in the copy of your sales page, in email marketing, in a comment you place on a blog, or even in article marketing. Selling benefits makes it that much easier to read your copy, have it be more enjoyable, and raises the chance that someone will buy from you.

Email Marketing

Unlike a sales page, in email marketing, you won't be able to list every last benefit. Therefore, you want to pick one large benefit to put in the heading of the email and to directly support it when they open the email to read it. Email marketing tends to be short and to the point, but also should pack an emotional wallop that gets the person to click the link that takes him/her to the sales page. There, he/she can find out about all of the other benefits that you have listed.

Commenting

If you comment on other people's blog posts, on social networking sites, and on articles so as to place a link back to some offer, you want to make sure that you contribute to the conversation first. Just a link to your offer and little relevant conversation will get you placed in the spam folder, pronto. Add your two cents worth and then, if it is relevant, add a benefit to why you use a particular product, why it's worth buying, and link it back to that page or a personal blog where that ad is prominent.

Article Marketing

If you are writing free articles for directories to get more exposure, you know that they give you a resource box where you can typically place two links. Depending on the terms of agreement between the article archive and you, you might be able to place a link to a sales page or not. If not, you can usually use an intermediary page to link to, like a personal blog or an article on another one of your sites.

The biggest mistakes made with these resource boxes is that people are very unimaginative about how they place their links. They don't sell the benefits, but instead say something like, “For more information, click the link.” Instead, sell a benefit to get them to click through more, and you will see a big difference in your click-through rate.

Benefits That Hook The Reader

Technology may change, but people don't. They are still human beings living in a world of warm bodies, a slightly inconvenient and embarrassing condition. Add to that the added pressures of career, child-rearing, and personal ambition, and you have a host of demands that people clamor to meet. It's these needs, whether material or psychological, that will hook the reader when he/she reads a benefit that solves some demand or problem for him/her.

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