Chocolate frogs create membership loyalty

By David Eedle |

My favourite blog post for the day is on Dosh Dosh “An Essential Marketing Principle: Give Before You Try to Get”. Maki’s post is all about how, as a marketer, you need to give to your audience before expecting something in return.

It’s a big, bad confusing world out there online. Scammers, many masquerading as ‘internet marketers’ abound, propagating get rich quick schemes that use high pressure, guilt driven sales tactics to extract a quick sale from you – with little or no ongoing value or return.

“They don’t want to be lied to. That’s why they are hesitant to believe what you say or claim. They don’t want their feelings to be exploited. That’s why they are wary about trusting you with their true thoughts. They have been fooled before and no one wants to feel stupid again.”

Maki hits the nail on the head when she says you need to ‘be known as a giver’. Maki’s right, people are cautious. Any customer with half a brain will do their online research before handing over their hard earnt cash. They’ll Google you, talk to their friends (never ever underestimate peer referral and pressure), they’ll want to make an informed, sensible decision.

Many years ago I used to teach a Relationship Marketing workshop, the kernel of which was about establishing a dialogue with your customers, a feedback loop of ideas and support that encouraged businesses to forge an ongoing, value driven relationship with its customers. My workshop was targeted at arts organisations, because that was my specialist field, but the princples were and remain universal.

At our subscription business Arts Hub we used to try and find ways to surprise our customers, to surpass their expectations. And so often it was the cheap and easy tactics that bore the most fruit.

Two that come to mind are chocolate frogs and loyalty recognition

Chocolate Frog Surprise

I was reminded about chocolate frogs by Fiona’s post the other day about the coffee mug she received from a subscription website she’s been a member of for years. We used coffee mugs to great effect at Arts Hub as incentives for people to renew their subscriptions. So they knew a mug was on the way, but when they opened the box we always ensured there was a little surprise – a chocolate Freddo Frog tucked into the mug. Cost us virtually nothing but amazing feedback. Interestingly Fiona and I were at the @tweetupmellers getogether of Twitter people here in Melbourne and met Phil Leahy who says he used to do exactly the same thing when he was running his extremely successful eBay seller business – he used to add a frog into each parcel they sent out.

Loyalty Recognition

It’s a human trait that we all like to be liked and recognised, the most powerful attribute of an individual is being recognised as an individual. Which is one reason why personalised online services can work so well – they cater to the individual not the mass. At Arts Hub every few months we’d dig into the database and find a bunch of members who’d renewed recently and who had been members continuously for several years. Bear in mind Arts Hub started in 2000, and there are still people subscribed today who joined nearly 10 years ago. We’d pull a list of people who had 3, 4 or 5 years or more under their belt and send them a ‘thank you’ email, and tell them we’d add a bonus few months of membership onto their subscription.

Both of these tactics cost little, took only a few minutes to implement, yet between them yielded some of the most positive, recurrent feedback out of all our marketing efforts.

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