re:member group’s Rewards Program Helps School Librarians Stretch Dwindling Book Budgets

MINNEAPOLIS (May 5, 2010) – How about this for a challenge? Your customer’s needs are nearing all-time highs as budgets are at historic lows. Add to that the fact that your company’s primary constituents are not necessarily the purchaser of your products, or the ones controlling those tight budgets.

So what do you do? If you are Capstone Publishers, the leading publisher of children’s books in the U.S. school library market, you create Capstone Rewards, with the help of the loyalty marketing pros at re:member group.

“We’ve taken a loyalty solution that works in the airlines, that works in automotive, and works online, and applied it to the publishing industry,” stated Paul Long, President, re:member group, who helped build the award-winning WorldPerks frequent flyer program at Northwest Airlines. “No less an authority than Fred Reicheld, who wrote the seminal book on loyalty marketing called “The Loyalty Effect,” says as little as a five-percent increase in customer retention can boost a company’s bottom-line profitability between 25-percent and 85-percent.”    

Here’s the specific scenario for the school library market. The world is changing quickly, as we all know, and school librarians need to constantly update and round out their book collections to keep pace with those changes. However, they are also faced with dwindling dollars to accomplish this. Enter a rewards program that stretches those dollars and creates loyalty and incremental sales for the publishers.

This is the way it works. For every title they purchase from Capstone's imprints, librarians are awarded points toward future purchases that can be used to buy more books, effectively stretching their strained budgets.  Once they are enrolled, orders are placed directly through the publisher and points will automatically be credited to their accounts. If they order their products through a distributor, they just need their packing slips to earn points. Librarians are then driven online to view point balances, track awards and stay up-to-date on the latest Capstone news.

-- Insert Captsone quote here? --

“That librarian has an affinity towards the publishers because they are offering a little bit more, they’re offering the ability to expand the budget because of the points they earn,” continued Long. “Say, for example, a librarian has a $2,000 budget and they were planning to spend $1,000 of that with Capstone Publishers. But now they might spend $1,200, because they can use the points they earn towards even more books to complete a collection, or perhaps get the rest of the books in a series that they might not otherwise have been able to afford.”

Capstone Publishers is part of the Coughlan Companies, a Mankato-based, family-owned organization with varied business interests that can be traced all the way back to 1885. The company’s relationship with re:member group doesn’t date quite that far back, of course, but Long hopes it will be a prosperous partnership.

“Like a lot of other people, we believe loyalty remains one of the great engines of business success,” says Long in closing. “After all, as Peter Drucker often said, ‘The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.’ Profit is a natural byproduct of loyal customers. The ROI on keeping current customers and clients returning to your business is always going to be better than constantly having to develop new customers.”