Bonus bucks busted?

Are bonus bucks really worth it?

Name withheld

SANDI MCDONALD: We at Hillermann’s had used Bucks for 10 years. It was a very popular program amongst our customers. We have since moved away from the traditional Bonus Bucks program and have started a Garden Reward loyalty program.

We look at it is an improved program. It is a paperless program since we capture all transactions electronically, which helps us promote going green. Our customers now are happy, but it did take some selling on our part to make the change and for them to give us their information.

How it works

Our Bonus Bucks program (and most are) was a cash-and-carry-type program. We were not capturing the customers’ information at the time of sale. Our new Garden Reward program, however, offers our customers many new benefits.

Used more frequently. We went from a two-times-a-year redemption of Bonus Bucks to a four-times-a-year certificate redemption to our customers. Instead of a 10- to 14-day window of redemption, we now give them six weeks. This has helped our labor distribution and we do not have to staff the store so heavily for a shorter period of time. Sales are spread out more evenly.

Can capture data. This new electronic Garden Reward Club captures all transactions of our customers. It was very surprising to us who really were our better customers. Now we can put a name to the face. It has truly helped build relationships.

* We can make comments on our customer computer screen about kids, pets, likes and dislikes, making the program much more personal.

* We can tell who only shops us for bargains and who really enjoys gardening and decorating.

* We are able to recognize them with a $10 birthday card (very popular) for their birthday month.

* We can look up all transactions done in the past, so it has helped with plant replacements.

* If they do not have their receipt, we gladly look up their purchase.

* If they wish to purchase the same rose bush for Aunt Lucy as they did for Grandma, we can tell them what that was.

* It has also made us aware of one customer we may want to fire this spring -- too many returns!

Club-only rewards. We offer Garden Reward Specials that change every two weeks and are only given to Garden Reward customers. This makes them feel special. We have these marked throughout the store and they can be found on our Web site as well.

Look up by phone number. Our customers are given key tags, even though we can look them up by phone number, and this has helped twice this past year. The key tag has our name and address on it. Just this week we received keys in our mailbox that were found two states away  in a duck blind and returned to us because of the key tag. Even though he had replaced some of the keys already, the Garden Reward customer was more than grateful when we called and said we had his keys! He thought for sure they were lost forever. He truly appreciates our loyalty program.

More focused marketing. Garden Reward provides the list of customers we use to invite to our special preview events. We are looking at doing even closer target marketing this year with this group of people. We are having a program written so we can extract and send special e-mailings to our customers when specific purchases are made, or to notify a select group of customers when we are putting on a special which is an area of interest to them.

So in a nutshell, I do believe that these types of programs are very beneficial. They do need to be worked to keep up the excitement. We train our staff to ask every customer about the program. Word of mouth and signup has become very easy.

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Any questions, don’t hesitate to e-mail me at sandimcdonald@sbcglobal.net.

- Sandi McDonald, Hillermann Nursery & Florist, Washington, Mo.