What are reader benefits, and how does one create them? This essay answers those questions.
Introduction
Reader benefits are the advantages your audience will receive by using your service, purchasing your product, following a policy, or adopting an idea. Good reader benefits meet four criteria, and each criterion suggests a way to create reader benefits.
Criteria
First, adapt the benefits to the audience. When you write to different audiences, you will need to stress different benefits. For example, suppose your company manufactures a product, and you want to persuade retailers to stock it. The advantages to customers--convenience, durability, price--will not persuade retailers to stock it. To persuade them to do such, you need to stress the advantages to the retailers: quick turnover, high profit margin, and a national advertising campaign that will draw attention to the product and to the stores.
Second, stress the extrinsic and intrinsic benefits. Extrinsic benefits do not come from the service or product; somebody decides to add them to the service or product. Intrinsic benefits come directly from using the service or product, and they are better than extrinsic benefits for several reasons. There will never be enough extrinsic motivators for everything you want people to do. You will not be able to reward every customer or employee. Furthermore, research suggests that extrinsic motivators make people less satisfied with the products they purchase and the procedures they follow.
Third, regard each benefit as a claim that needs grounds (reasons and/or evidence) to convince the reader. (Refer to "The Components of an Academic Argument.") Provide enough grounds to prove that the service, product or policy will benefit the reader. Always provide enough details to be concrete. You will need many details when the reader may not have thought about the benefit before, when there is a difference between a long-term and a short-term advantage, and when it will be difficult to persuade the reader.
Fourth, create reader benefits with a you-attitude. A you-attitude regards things from the reader's point of view--emphasizing what the reader wants to know, respecting the reader's intelligence, and protecting the reader's ego. Use you in positive and neutral messages, but avoid you in negative messages. In negative messages you may seem like a verbal attack.
Creating Benefits
Use the following steps to identify effective reader benefits. Then, choose the benefits you think are the most effective and explainable and develop them.
First, identify the physiological needs that may motivate your reader. Physical needs are the most basic, followed by needs for safety and security, for love and a sense of belonging, for esteem and recognition, and finally for self-actualization or self-fulfillment. (The needs are hierarchical.) Although we move among higher- and lower-level needs, low-level (basic) needs take precedent over high-level needs. Often a service, product or policy can meet needs on several levels. Develop those that are most relevant to your audience.
Second, identify the features of your service, product or policy that meet the needs you identified. Sometimes it will be obvious which features meet a need. Sometimes several features will meet a need. To develop your benefits, focus on the details of each one. When you are writing to clients or customers about features that are not unique to your organization, present the benefits of the features themselves and the benefits of dealing with your organization.
Third, reveal the ways the reader can meet his or her needs with the features of the service or product. Because features alone rarely motivate readers, link each feature to the reader's needs, providing details to make the benefits concrete.
Conclusion
The audience of most of your business and technical messages will not be a single person. When it is not possible to meet everybody's needs, meet the needs of the gatekeepers (those who decide whether your message will be sent to others) and decision makers first.
Provide a summary for those who will want only the primary points. If the decision makers will not need the same details as others will need, provide those details in appendices. Insert a glossary of terms for readers who will not have as much knowledge as the decision makers, and, early in the document, state where the glossary is. Create a table of contents and effective headings, so readers can go to the sections that interest them. If both internal and external audiences will read your document, use a more formal style than you would in an internal document. Avoid personal pronouns, especially you, for it is not applicable to several different audiences.
