How To Talk About Features on Your Landing Page

“Sell benefits not features” is one of the most overhyped and incomplete copywriting tips.

Benefits can grab attention and interest, but people don’t make buying decisions based on the benefits alone. They need to see the features and compare your features vs your competitor’s features.

You can’t ignore the features of your product or service. And if you think the features aren’t worth mentioning, you might just have a terrible product.

There’s a right and wrong way to do this.

Any copywriter telling you not to talk about features doesn’t know how to talk about features. You can’t simply list out the features and specifications of your product. You need to highlight the specific features in a persuasive manner.

I’m going to share 7 steps to choosing which features to highlight, how to communicate them, and share a few examples of good feature copy.

Create a list of features

The first step in the process is writing down a list of every feature of your product or service. Doing this will also help you nail down the big benefits that you want to highlight.

This is easier if you’re writing about a physical product. If you’re marketing a pair of running shorts, you’d list out the features like:

• All the materials used
• The length of the shorts
• Different size + color options
• The type of waistband
• Pockets — how many, where, zipper/no zipper

Features can be more challenging when you’re selling a digital product because the features are less tangible.

But even something like an email newsletter has features:

• What topics does it include
• How often/when does it send
• How is it monetized
• What type of content is it — interviews, Q&A, storytelling, etc.
• Are previous emails accessible?

List out as many unique features as possible.

Who + What

Next, we need to narrow down the list of features that your customers care about.

Copywriters tell you to sell benefits because customers care about them. There are features that your customers want to know about too.

Note that the features they care about might be different than the features you care about or think are the best.

The first question is who is using the product or service?

Are they younger? Older? Single? Married? Rich? Poor?

What does your ideal customer look like? Not everyone will fit into this category, but you want to define it as best as you can.

Then you need to define what the customer is using your product for.

You might be selling running shorts to people who will never run in them. They’re looking for shorts for weightlifting or some comfortable work from home shorts.

Another example I’ve heard about is hunting knives. One company found that 70% of their buyers were wives buying their husbands a gift. Since the buyers aren’t using the knife, they care more about features like shipping times, return policy, and packaging.

You can’t know which features you should emphasize unless you understand your customers and what they want to use your product for.

Here’s the first feature highlighted on the new iPhone 15 landing page:

Feature: It’s made with titanium.

The customers are carrying and holding their phone all the time. If this new phone is made of a different material, they want to know what it is.

What problem does each feature solve?

You have a list of the features, and you know who’s going to use your product, and what they’re using it for.

Your next step is to pair your features with the problem they solve.

A bigger problem = A bigger feature

What’s the big problem with phones?

They’re fragile.

You drop your phone once and it could easily crack. The new phone can use a more durable material to solve that big problem. That creates another problem: more durable probably means a heavier/bulkier phone that I’m holding all day.

The new feature (titanium) solves the first problem and avoids the second.

Now it makes sense why Apple would highlight that feature first.

Let’s look at another example.

Chomps chose to highlight these 6 features on their homepage. Each feature solves a specific pain point of their target audience.

Their target audience wants a high-protein snack with no sugar, low carbs, and high-quality ingredients. The big problem is that finding low-carb, high-protein snacks is difficult. Slim Jims are have fillers and not much protein. Most protein bars have sugar and other unclean ingredients.

Match each feature with the problem it solves, and rate the pain level of your customers experiencing that problem 1–10.

Feature | Problem Solved | Pain Level

10g of protein | An easy high-protein snack | 8/10

5x optical zoom (iPhone 15) | Taking pictures further away | 6/10

WiFi assist | Staying connected with poor WiFi | 3/10

Zipper pocket | Things slipping out of your short pocket | 7/10

Once you’ve matched your features with the problem they solve and given each one a pain point, you can eliminate some of the less important features.

How impressive is the feature?

The last part of choosing your most important features is giving them a Wow Factor. How impressive are they to your customers?

This depends on your competitors, the industry, and previous versions of your product.

When the first iPhone came out in 2007, there were groundbreaking features — a 3.5" touchscreen and web browsing. Three years later, the iPhone 4 had the Retina Display and FaceTime via the front facing camera.

Those features were a 10/10 on the Wow Scale.

Today, they’re standard on every phone and a 0/10 on the Wow Scale.

The Wow Factor doesn’t need to be a brand new innovation.

Claude Hopkins created a brilliant ad campaign for Schlitz Beer. The ad highlighted that Schlitz Beer bottles were cleaned with live steam. No one had ever heard of that before. It was high on the Wow Scale. But, every other beer company cleaned their bottles with steam.

It wasn’t anything new or different to the company, but it was new and exciting to the customer.

The features you want to highlight on your landing page have a high pain level and a high wow factor.

Pair your top features with their benefits

Now, how do you bring all of this together on your landing page?

The best way to write about your features while holding the attention and interest of your reader is to pair your features with their benefits.

At this point, you know which features your customers care about. You know which ones will wow them. The benefits of those features are the “so what?”

10 grams of protein. I care about that, and it’s impressive. So what?

A titanium iPhone. That sounds interesting. So what?

Here are three examples of how features + benefits are paired together.

Quick recap

1. List all your features
2. Create your ideal customer profile
3. Identify what your customers do with your product/service
4. Pair features with problems solved
5. Rate the pain level of the problems 1–10
6. Rate the wow factor of the features 1–10
7. Pair the top 3–5 features with benefits

Now you can finally stop listening to the people telling you to not write about features. Write persuasive copy that includes the most compelling features of your product or service.

Want to learn more about copywriting?

Follow Copywriter’s Handbook, and fill out this form if you want to apply to write for us.

PS. I just launched Landing Page Blueprint to help you learn and implement the keys to creating high-converting landing pages for your business and clients. It includes the essentials from my course, for 1/10th the cost.

Find out more here: