Reward your customers — they’ll reward you with repeat business

The best way to motivate customer behavior is to provide an incentive or reward for that motivation. Rewarding your customers for a specific purchasing behavior is not much different than training your puppy. With enough repetition and positive reinforcement, your pup can be motivated to act upon instruction. That’s because the pup knows if he listens to your command, he’ll receive his reward.

Human nature isn’t much different. People can be motivated to take specific actions that accomplish their buying goals while also accomplishing your goals to increase their spending, frequency of visits or combination purchases (or comparative goals relevant to your line of business).

The question then is how do you motivate behavior? Below are five ideas that will get you thinking.

1. Offer soft benefits that provide value such as special access limited only to members.
2. Offer relevant promotions through various lines of communication, for example: e-mail, SMS text, receipt messages, statement inserts, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
3. Up-sell complimentary products or services at the associate level.
4. Offer sweepstakes, random rewards or special offers for a limited time frame, keep your strategy fresh and exciting:
5. Strategically place messages (via signage, web banners, etc.) that will trigger motivating actions.

Motivate, But Don’t Mislead
Once you decide how you’ll motivate, always do so in an honorable way. Your customers won’t want to be misled into thinking they are receiving something greater in value that what they’ll actually receive as the reward.

Of course, the statement was made some 150 years ago and the President was referring to politicians attempting to fool their constituents; however, the quote resonates with me every time I see a program that offers empty loyalty. Such programs offer an elaborate program on the outside when, indeed, it’s only a facade to increase business. In time, savvy customers will see through the facade. Your promotional strategy to motivate behavior must be phony proof. Once your customers lift the hood and kick the tires, the promotions must stand on their own and offer real value, not empty promises.

Remember, whatever you do, don’t try to fool the customer! Loyal customers will catch on if the loyalty program does not have true value. This can also backfire and cause disloyalty amongst your customers and defeat the entire purpose of implementing your strategy in the first place.

There are two reasons why your rewards offerings should be upstanding:

1. Loyal customers have earned the right to receive a valid reward. If they weren’t enrolled in your program, they may have taken their business elsewhere.
2. Customers can see through transparent rewards.

If you want to be in the loyalty game, you have to offer attractive redemption items that are achievable for your customers to earn. If customers are willing to change their purchasing behavior and provide you with their loyalty, they will expect the same in return from you in the form of a relevant reward.

It’s the Little Things That Matter Most
If you put on your consumer hat, you’ll understand that it’s the little things that matter most. One component you should incorporate is providing feel-good loyalty. Feel-good loyalty is just what it sounds like, providing something that the customer will feel good about. Offering feel-good-loyalty incentives should be part of your overall strategy and will require some clever and creative thinking. Some companies offer free Wi-Fi, others offer free shipping. Whatever you decide, brainstorm hard, even hold an employee contest. but find your niche and add feel-good loyalty to the mix.

Photofiddle.com is an internet company that offers a service to turn your photographs into art. Simply upload a photo and you can instantly transform that image into pop art, impasto, a black and white sketch and even more. Once you create your personal masterpiece you then have many options for the type of surface the image is printed on (glossy photo paper, canvas, etc.). Finally, you can choose from a number of print sizes and framing choices.

Although Photofiddle doesn’t have a recognizable rewards program they do provide various levels of feel-good loyalty. Upon opening your order, customers see each piece is carefully packaged and accompanied with a pair of white cotton gloves. The label attached to the gloves reads, “All fine artwork should be handled with care. Please use white cotton gloves. Oils from your hands and fingers can leave finger prints. Jewelry on your fingers and wrist can leave markings.”

That’s a personal touch and that’s feel-good-loyalty. It’s doing the little things that matter most with customers. It’s thinking outside the box so that your brand motivates your customers and resonates in their mind. Providing the white cotton gloves with each order sends both a literal message and subliminal message. It reinforces the need to treat your artwork with care and that they treat all of their customers with care.

Roger L. Brooks is a respected loyalty strategist with more than 15 years of experience in developing, supporting, and implementing customer loyalty and rewards programs.

If you are a manager,  you know you are not only sandwiched between executive level people with big requirments, you are also surrounded by employees who look to you for guidance, advancement opportunities, motivation and at times a friend. Being a manager on almost any playing field is one that may require you to walk gingerly through political land mines while keep things calm on the home front, your department.

Managers know that it can be a challenge to keep valuable skilled employee who are grateful but still keep an eye out for new and improved opportunities. After all, in today’s job market if you don’t see thing happening within 2 1/2 to 3 years at your company, it is time to move. The days of moving up in your own company are often limited because many executives and directors bring in their own teams for their own job security limiting advancement for mid-level managers and front  line staff. Managers must keep nuturing their staff providing an environment that fosters cross-training in other departments, involvement in decisions and direction of the department and incentives to stay.

Regardless of our lovely economy, recent surveys reflect that over 80% of workers hope to change jobs in the near future. Job satisifaction is at a low. People need to feel valuable and appreciated and I don’t just mean during the holidays. One time in a job interview someone asked me “Why aren’t employees more loyal?” I almost burst out with a “Are you kidding?” Employees have felt since the 1980′s that companies are not loyal to them. Employees watched their mom and dad’s pension diminish or evaporate, we had Enron then we also began to see many mergers and buyouts. Company raises began to shrink from the once robust 10% increase down to a ceiling of 5% to 7%. Health benefits were beginning to shift into a more of a cost sharing type of thing.

As a manager, it is up to you and not just your employer to provide an valued incentive to stay interested in their job. If most people feel that their boss is doing what they can to keep the job and environment productive and interesting, they will invest added time. Also, if their manager sincerely cares about them as a human being and meets with them on a one on one basis once a month to hear about the family and the manager gives of themselves a bit,  an employee will feel appreciated and enthusiasm will soar! As it has been for years, employees leave their jobs first and foremost because of their boss, the job itself and then, because of dissatisfaction with pay.

Going back in time we learn about how our roles changed over the decades contributing to our jobs today:

70′s …
Training focused primarily on discrimination, racism, and management by objectives.

80′s …
Popular training topics were behavior modeling, the first real push towards teamwork, empowerment, diversity, feedback, quality and employee incentives.

90′s …
Lots of manager training to become visionaries,  learning groups, performance management, sexual harassment, re-engineering, fun incentives incorporating company executives and the evolvement of balancing work and life.

00′s …
A time when our employers want us to learn how to protect the company by attending training on topics such as employment law, computer security, workplace violence and prevention, stress management, differences between men and women managers and employee motivation to help with mergers and/or rightsizing.

Fun Ways to Provide that Added Incentive:

• Fun Fridays
• Funny Sock Fall Contest
• Outdoor Meetings under the Trees
• Host a surprise Un-Meeting
• Bring a Treat Friday
• Manic Monday Casual Day
• Scavenger Hunt Thursday
• College a Coupon for a Good Deed for a Prize

Being a manager is rewarding. The more you involve your team and keep them motivated, the better it is for you. Your team will help you meet your goals and your involvement with them will help them grow and feel valuable.  Those at the executive level will quickly see that you can easily motivate your team to move ahead through change.

Here is to being a manager, enjoy!

Find out how giving praise is the key to getting it

Happiness Thought for October: Praise early and often. As St. Therese of Lisieux wrote, “When one loves, one does not calculate.”

I’m a real gold-star junkie. One of my worst qualities is my insatiable need for credit; I always want the recognition, the praise, that gold star stuck on my homework. Recently, I was grumbling to my mother about the fact that some extraordinarily praiseworthy effort on my part had gone unremarked upon. My mother wisely responded, “Most people probably don’t get the appreciation they deserve.” That’s right, I realized – for instance, my mother herself! I certainly don’t give her enough praise for everything she has done for me. Our conversation started me thinking about the importance of praise, and how to praise effectively.

1. Be specific Vague praise doesn’t make much of an impression. Parenting experts often express this point of view: Praising a child means more when it’s specific than when it’s general. “What a beautiful painting!” is less gratifying than “Look at all the colors you’ve included! And I see you’ve used all your fingers with the finger paints. You’ve really made your picture look like a spring garden!” This is true for adults, too. “Great job!” is less satisfying than an enumeration of what, exactly, was done well. General praise sounds perfunctory and meaningless; specific praise seems heartfelt.

2. Never offer praise and ask for a favor within the same conversation It makes the praise seem like a setup for whatever you’re asking for.

3. Look for something less obvious to praise Highlighting a quality that a person hasn’t heard praised many times before shows that you’re really paying attention, not just repeating what other people have said.

4.Praise people behind their backs The person you’re lauding usually hears about it, and behind-the-back praise seems more sincere than face-to-face praise. That’s why I make an effort to repeat any behind-the-back compliments I hear.

5. Match the quality of the praise to the difficulty of the task If a job was quick and easy, a hasty “Looks great!” will do; if it was protracted and challenging, be more lengthy and descriptive.

6. Remember the negativity bias The “negativity bias” is a psychological phenomenon: People react to the bad more strongly and persistently than to the comparable good. For example, within a marriage, it takes at least five good acts to repair the damage of one critical or destructive act. So when I praise someone, I remember that one critical comment will be far more memorable than several positive ones. If I want someone to walk away feeling great, I skip any negative remarks.

7. Praise the everyday as well as the exceptional When people do something unusual, it’s easy to remember to give praise. But what about the things they do well all the time without any recognition? I try to point out how much I appreciate the small services and tasks that someone unfailingly performs. Something like, “You know what? In three years, I don’t think you’ve ever been even an hour late with the weekly report.” After all, we never forget to make a comment when someone screws up.

By Leo Jakobson
June 7, 2011

Summer is the time to reach out to others and join forces stretching your marketing dollars through collaborative projects. Organizations like the Boy or Girl Scouts are wonderful for a Community Project Day and blood donation drives. Donors can immediately see the benefits of a cleaned up park or beach while being reminded by t-shirts worn by blood donor recipients who participated in the day’s events that blood donations are crucial to saving someone’s life. An organization can really find many non-competive partners that compliment each other while getting the word out. These partnerships also provided an added interest for advertisers donating their time or space attracting donors who hold mulitiple charities close to their heart. 

Seek out Incentive Brokers who understand your donors and know how to answer their “What’s in it for me” question. An incentive is not an incentive if it is the wrong one, at the wrong price. The newest incentives combine benefits and rewards for the entire family at a deep discount that only Incentive Brokers can provide. An organization should also incentivize their marketing staff, telemarketers and blood donor appointment setters with a program that provides prescription discounts, fitness, doctors online, theme parks, nationwide golf and travel to enhance their medical benefits at a fraction of the cost. Each program offers a selection of 70 different benefits and incentives to choose from to create your own customized donor incentive program.

Make it as fun for your employees as it is for your donors with energetic Fun Fridays, BBQ’s, Bring Your Dog to Work Day, staff meetings in the sun and contests. Don’t forget to share your  amped up energy on your website with beach scenes and summer themed games for the entire family. Games that are fun for the entire family will help you develop an interest in your organization for the next generation and many summers of giving ahead. Dedicate a section or entire page to helpful summer time menus, tips, community events and lots of pictures of donor fun.

Reach donors at the beach, park or in the parking lot with SMS text messages containing coupon codes for movies, restaurants and more! Thrill your young donors by delivering incentives in modern unique ways using technology and create delivery. Send popcorn by mail and ask them to make an appointment receiving a movie ticket for their donation.

This summer get those creative juices going so you too can have a more carefree vacation.

Your employees succeed more often on stretch assignments when they are encouraged and provided with an incentive. While these types of assignments provide great opportunity for growth and notoriety they can be perceived as risky. It is uncomfortable to step out beyond the normal day-to-day responsibilities of our position. Your employees must plan, step up their courage and carefully jump into the challenge. Employees should seek out Expert Advisors, corporate resources and research the risks. They should be made to feel supported by you and that the assignment is well worth their efforts.

Don’t forget that stretch assignments are not only for your shinning star employees, they are for those on the fringes of greatness. Not everyone is meant to be a leader however you may just have your next Vice President amongst your team. Most high potential employees are eager to learn, are savvy, have a strong work ethic, are decisiveness, accountable, passionate and possess a pioneering spirit. These employees appreciate some level of uncertainty, excitement, view differences in people as an asset and foster relationships within all levels in your organization to accomplish the task at hand.

Some of the phrases that may help you motivate and encourage employees as they work to succeed on their stretch assignment are:

At all levels of within Corporate America there is a feeling of discontent and wonder for the future. Everyday business is challenged to make money also trying to get by with less while consumers demand more from them.  One case in point is the battle of the banks, one bank charges a fees then all of a sudden everyone is charging a fee. After a long hard lesson from the recent banking crisis consumers are wounded and are no longer being patient putting up with less than average service while being charged a fee.  The winner in the game? The winner is always the bank with the best service ratings, ease of day-to-day business transactions and most importantly, customer edification and incentives.

Benefits and incentives should be obvious and attractive demonstrating the company’s interest in your customers. Within the first few pages of a website, a savvy company will pepper deals and incentives throughout knowing that it will peak interest extending visits to the site.  These companies know that within the first 30 to 40 seconds,  a customer makes a quick decision to continue shopping or move on.  Below are a few tips that you may find beneficial to your company’s Internet storefront:

• Display your telephone number frequently on each page of  your website for customer convenience
• List discounts and coupons on your home page and contact page
• Provide buyer and referral incentives that build motivation with bigger rewards
• Update your website using search words found on Google Adwords reporting the most popular words used
• Contextual targeting displays your advertisement  to consumers on sites featuring content related to your business type
• Behavioral targeting  specifically displays your ad to consumers who have shown recent online behaviors and interests that are relevant to your business type
• Blog about interesting topics at least once a week attracting more visitors who will become followers. Those site owners who have not blogged in months or sometimes even years, may appear to not concentrate fully on their business
• Manage wholesale & retail customers in one convenienet online store that serves both their needs of product pricing and availability
• Use SMS messaging sending text messages from one cell phone to another  about your featured product or service
• Make coupon code promotions avaiable providing instant discounts or free items
• Don’t be shy. You are a benefit to your customers,  make it known throughout your website
• Survey your customers and sales staff every quarter looking for trends and customer desires

Demonstrate appreciation while making an  impact continually ask for business, you are the customer’s Expert Advisor.

Get employees and customers to do what you want by giving them what they want.

When I am feeling especially honest, I admit that success in business depends in large measure on one’s ability to influence others-to get them to do what we want. Customers need to be convinced to make a purchase. Employees need to be convinced to make a sale or build a product or whatever their job may be in order to make that sale possible. They may even need to be convinced to pack up their things and leave peaceably when a termination or layoff is appropriate.

As a business leader, you often find yourself in a position of having to exert influence over others. Businesses succeed by getting hundreds, thousands, even millions of people to behave in desired ways in order to help accomplish the business’s goals. And this means the owners and managers are in the wholesale business of modifying human behavior.

A scary thought on a number of levels. First, changing human behavior is a difficult thing to do, and second, it carries with it considerable responsibilities. In my book Motivating & Rewarding Employees, I include a chart that shows a range of ways of motivating people to do what you want them to-from coercive, nasty methods at one end of the spectrum, to friendly, mutually beneficial ones at the other. It is easy to use coercive methods if you think about it. Trickery, sheer force or the threat of physical violence do influence others-but not for good and not in ways that build business or retain employees and customers over the long haul. So for practical as well as ethical reasons, businesses need to be in the business of aligning their interests with those of customers, employees and suppliers.

Jacobellis paid a penalty for pride, yet other people appear to ooze arrogance while thriving professionally. Muhammad Ali’s brash egotism did not prevent him from triumphing in the boxing ring. Charlie Sheen’s sickening smugness may have burned relationships at CBS, but he has never been more popular, selling out several nationwide tour dates in a matter of minutes. The conceit of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been noted by competitors, colleagues, and friends alike, yet he ranks among the world’s wealthiest men.

What can be said, then, about pride? Is arrogance really as dangerous to leadership as some people would insist? On the surface, it seems that pride does not necessarily hinder success. However, I maintain that pride is every bit as destructive to the welfare of a leader as the ancient proverb forewarns.

The True Nature of Success

Along with the propensity to see themselves as superior to others, Muhammad Ali, Charlie Sheen, and Larry Ellison share in common the attainment of enormous “success.” However, each also appears to have left a wake of destruction relationally. While their pride may not have cost them professionally, privately it seems to have taken a toll.

In its truest sense, success involves more than material wealth and career accomplishments. When considering the implications of pride, we must remember to see the whole picture. An individual may be standing atop the world with respect to a career, yet still “fall” to the deepest depths. In my estimation, success happens when the people who know you the best, love and respect you the most. In light of this definition, arrogance is utterly incompatible with success.

Many people with talent make it into the limelight, but those who have neglected to develop humility rarely experience satisfaction that endures. An excess of pride alienates them from connecting with others. Consequently, they bounce from relationship to relationship until the star of their celebrity finally burns out.

Editor’s note: Small-Business Comebacks is a new series about resilient entrepreneurs and their strategies for rebounding from the recession.

For Suzanne Bates, the financial meltdown on Wall Street in 2008 had a quick and painful impact. Bates Communications, her small executive-coaching firm based in Wellesley, Mass., depended heavily on large, multinational companies. But many of those mammoth companies were ravaged by the market crash, and suddenly nervous about paying for comprehensive leadership coaching services. By late 2008, a few big clients signaled they would delay or cancel their coaching plans altogether. The company braced for at least $600,000 in lost revenue in 2009 — a major scare for a small company that had seen steady 25% annual growth since its 2000 founding.

“It was a rude awakening for us,” says Bates, 55-year-old founder and chief executive of the 10-employee company. “I knew things were bad, but I didn’t realize these companies would pull back as much as they did.”

 More Comebacks:

• Bouncing Back After Losing a Big Client 
• Rebuilding Sales After Deep Discounts 
• Fixing a Nearly Fatal Flaw 
• From Rock Bottom to Rebirth
• When Peers Prompt a Turnaround 
• A Reinvention for the Long Hall 

A Low Point
Problems didn’t stop there. The company’s new business manager uncovered bookkeeping errors that Bates says were caused by her outside accounting firm. It turned out her company had $100,000 less cash than she thought and a meager safety net for weathering the economic downturn.

Bates remained cautiously optimistic that business would pick up again by early- to mid-2009. But by February it was clear that wouldn’t happen. Corporation still weren’t spending and the company was so short on cash that it was difficult even to manage monthly lease payments. 

“As CEO, you’re lying awake because you have a payroll and you have people who are depending on you,” she says. 

The Turnaround
Step one was to quickly cost cuts. In early 2009, her staff took 10% to 15% pay cuts in exchange for no layoffs. The company couldn’t afford its lease payments, so Bates negotiated with the landlord to temporarily stop payments for a few months in exchange for tacking the accumulated amount onto future lease payments, plus interest.

Next, she cut the company’s marketing budget and examined every expense — even little things like offering free coffee for employees hit the chopping block.

Despite all the bad news, Bates mustered the strength to rally her employees to be part of the solution. She began thinking about how the company could better reposition itself to help cost-conscious clients weather the bad economy themselves. In regular staff meetings, they discussed how to make their coaching services more relevant and keep current clients engaged in the business. Bates’ coaches stepped up efforts to stay in closer touch with clients, ranging from a quick email once a week to grabbing lunch to sending them an article about leadership. The idea wasn’t so much to sell them on coaching immediately but rather to gather “insight and intelligence about where they were in terms of training and development.”

“We really figured out what was working and what wasn’t,” she says.

As it turned out, many big clients needed leadership training more than ever — they just weren’t in a position to pay a high price for it. So the company rolled out lower-priced options, including $25 teleseminars on topics such as jumpstarting sales in the bad economy. Some clients were also more receptive to group coaching sessions that can cost “a fraction” of ongoing one-on-one coaching, Bates says. For instance, one West Coast client that had previously paid for Bates employees to travel for one-on-one coaching on site switched to a more affordable group-training session via video conference.

On top of efforts to keep current clients, Bates began to expand its market by pitching leadership training to smaller companies, and even some non-profits, that saw the recession as an opportunity to gain market share. Bates coaches started using LinkedIn to make client connections and the company launched a Twitter and Facebook page, where it posted updates and thoughts on leadership topics. 

By early 2010, the company had added several new midsize clients, while bigger corporate clients were improving financially and bringing back more of their business. Though annual revenues fell to $1.3 million in 2009 from about $1.8 million the previous year, Bates rebounded to $2.3 million in 2010 and the company is on track to hit $3 million this year.

Lessons Learned
Reinforcing client relationships in rough times — though not an immediate cash cow — allowed the company to identify other revenue-generating opportunities. Through social media and face-to-face meetings, the company’s coaches also developed much deeper relationships with their clients.

“There isn’t any aspect of our business that wasn’t touched by the experience,” Bates says. “We’ve come out of it a much more focused company.”