Your customer wants a cleaner kitchen, not a kitchen cleaner.

Your customers are interested in benefits, not features. So sell benefits in your sales letters.

The difference between a feature and a benefit comes down to this: A feature is what something does. A benefit is what something does for you.

Everything you have to say in your direct marketing sales letters boils down to features and benefits. With every piece of copy you write, however long or short your copy, you are always talking in terms of features and benefits.

When I worked on the Bell Mobility account, I discovered that the marketing folks at Bell have a policy of always presenting the benefit first, followed by the feature. I had usually written things the other way around. But they had a good policy.

For example, I would have said, “Digital Data2Go lets you receive email with your cellphone, saving you the hassle of finding a phone jack for your laptop whenever you need to check email while travelling.” Bell insisted that I present the benefit first, so I instead wrote something like this: “Never again waste time hunting for a phone jack when it’s time to check email while travelling. Digital Data2Go lets you receive email with just your cellphone.”

I think Bell has the right idea, although there are times when the feature needs to come first.

The tough part in all of this is translating features into benefits before you start writing. Some benefits are obvious. Others require some detective work to uncover. I learned that lesson all over again when I taught copywriting at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies.

I gave my students an exercise that always turned up a surprising benefit. I told my class that the CN Tower in Toronto, Ontario, Canada was 1,815 feet and 5 inches tall. Their assignment was to come up with as many benefits as they could that related to that feature. Most of them stared at me.

Then they picked up their pens.

Slowly, they started to write.

Each time I ran the exercise, a student or two came up with a benefit that I had not thought of. Here are a few of the benefits of having the world’s tallest free-standing structure in your city:

• attract tourist dollars by charging for tours
• see the whole city from one vantage point
• generate revenue by selling souvenirs
• impress your date with dinner at the revolving restaurant
• host fundraisers (a race up the stairs to the top is a popular annual fundraiser)
• generate revenue from organizations that monitor the weather
• navigate around the city easily because the tower is a landmark visible from almost everywhere
• generate revenue from TV and radio companies by hosting their antennas on the communications deck
• improve the flow of traffic along the nearby Gardner Expressway by locating traffic cameras on the tower
• generate publicity by hanging a banner down the side of the structure

There were many more benefits, some worthy and some just wacky, but all of them were benefits of one kind or another. Together, they demonstrated that products and services, including yours, probably have more benefits than are apparent at first glance.

So hunt for those benefits that are relevant to your potential buyers and current customers. And remember this, every time you craft a sales letter: your client wants a 5/8 inch hole, not a 5/8 inch drill bit.