“Why  should I give you my money?” This question comes to every person’s mind before they do anything that requires them to open their wallet. This happens whether it is offline or online. However, there is a strategy that top marketing and copywriting experts use to get people to want more.

Sell with Benefits, Not Features

Getting people to want something can be difficult, especially if you take the wrong approach. One of the ways to fumble your marketing is to talk only about the features you offer. Features may sound nice, but they don’t add to the “want” effect that your prospect should experience.

The fix to this type of marketing is to take features and make a list of all the benefits that those features give to your prospect.

How to Pick out the Best Benefits

This process can be done with just one person, or an entire team, with charts and graphs or with just a pen and paper. Let’s keep things simple and use a pen and paper. For your product, let’s say you want to sell a cup of hot coffee. Here’s how we can pick out the benefits of your product.

List the features – On one side of the paper, list all of the features that your product has. To keep things simple, these features would be:

• It’s hot
• It’s loaded with caffeine
• The cup is made of recycled material
• It has milk

If buying was a rational process, these features would be good enough. However, the buying process isn’t rational at all. Most people do not need to buy a cup of hot coffee from you; they can make it on their own.

Here’s how we can make the cup of hot coffee a little more enticing.

Simple vs. Complex – One of the secrets of top copywriters is the way they market their products. If it’s a simple product, you make it sound complex by explaining intricate details of how it was created, how it works and other details beyond what meets the eye.

And if it’s a complicated product, market it as simply as you can. Back when computers were new to the public, master copywriter Joe Sugarman marketed computers as simply as he could. He didn’t explain the complicated technology inside the product, but instead the simple ways people can use it.

With the cup of hot coffee, since it’s a simple product, you can include complex details to make it more enticing:

• It’s hot – Can range from 140 to 180 degrees Celcius
• It’s loaded with caffeine – Coffee beans are imported from Kenya
• The cup is made of recycled material – Made with 60% post-consumer recycled fiber
• It has milk – You can choose between dairy and soy milk

Getting the features – As mentioned above, buying isn’t a rational process but an emotional one. People flock more to products that enchant them, or arouse their curiosity. If they find an emotional connection to the product, it makes them want it more.

Once you have applied the simple vs. complex method, it’s time to list the benefits of your product. You need to first figure out who your ideal customer would be, and apply your features to that certain group.

For our example, let’s try to sell it to a group of college students. They’re tired from a full day at school, and they still have to finish their papers. Maybe they could use a hot cup of coffee?

A cup of steaming-hot coffee brewed from premium-grade Kenyan coffee beans can keep you sharp, alert and awake to get more work done, and provide the extra boost you need to keep from falling behind on work and school.

There are probably more than four features of your product. You can use these features as a basis for coming up with benefits. These benefits, when coupled with an emotional aspect, uplift your marketing strategy to make your product more appealing for consumers.