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Keep it short and simple, focus on benefits, and repeat. Job done.

Marketing is a message in a bottle. Just keep sending the bottles.

Just last week, this flyer landed on my doormat. It’s simple but very effective. Why?
  • It makes easy look easy. You’d be surprised how many people do the opposite. If you’re telling people you’re making their lives easier, make sure you walk the talk.
  • It has a magic number. It wouldn’t work with two, or four, or six. Three, yes. Five, yes. For some reason (to get geeky for a moment, probably because they’re prime numbers, being divisible only by 1 and themselves) they work. And in this case, five is enough. Any more, and you’re making easy look difficult.
  • It tells a good story, which is what the best copywriting is all about. It solves a problem and seems to have no downside, which is always what people are looking for when they’re wondering why not to buy.
There is one area where it falls down, and it’s common to a lot of copy: it leads with features. The thing is, it starts well with an up-front benefit: why I can make your life easier. It grabs your attention. It certainly grabbed mine. But it doesn’t follow though. And yet, the step required to change features into benefits is a simple one. All you have to do is flip around the order of the sentence, or add a few words, and you’re there. So let’s work that feature/benefit magic trick:
  • Get it all in one place. Choose from over 250 daily essentials.
  • Order anytime, anywhere with milk&more mobile.
  • Shop when it suits you. Order up to 9pm the night before your next delivery.
  • Save time and hassle. Avoid those trips to the shops and beat the queues.
And what about Free delivery? I hear you ask. That’s a feature, isn’t it? Yes it is. The benefit is that you don’t need to struggle to reach a minimum amount, and can just fire off an order when you feel like it. But this feature has one trump card: the word free. That beats all other cards in your marketing deck. So feature it is. And did I sign up for milk&more? Well, no. But not because the flyer isn’t an effective piece of communication. It is: simple and direct, with a friendly tone and funky graphics. But the milk&more marketing gurus can stop scratching their heads and wondering where they went wrong with me. Because it wasn’t anything they did or didn’t do. It was simply that somebody else got there first. In this case, Tesco, who’ve locked me in with their super-duper midweek delivery-saver programme. For now. So should milk&more give up? Absolutely not. One day, I may be ready to buy what they’re selling, so they need to stay top of mind in the meantime. Marketing is a message in a bottle, and timing is everything. So keep the bottles coming, and one day somebody will pick it up, read it and buy.

Related posts:

  1. Try to see it my way
  2. Turning features into benefits
  3. Back to basics: turning features into benefits
  4. Forget logic. Short-circuit the process with emotion.
  5. Can long copy survive in a world of short attention spans?
Kevin Copywriting, Marketing.
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