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Learn More Must Die

Learn More, you have been good to me and I appreciate you. You have helped me tremendously over the past years, especially early in my web copywriting career. When I didn’t know what to call my link, you were always there for me. But like all good things, our relationship must come to an end.

In the world of content marketing, the produced content over the last five years has improved and evolved to fit the changing Internet landscape; content on the web is more centric toward SEO, providing users with the right keywords so it can be found, and has become more information rich and helpful, not the filler content for content sake (like the Top Ten list, a content pandemic that must also be eradicated).

However, there is an exception to this progress and it concerns one of content marketing’s most critical components: The Call To Action (CTA). The CTA is arguably is the most important component of any landing page, article or blog post; its sole purpose is to convince visitors to take the next step and complete a specified action. Yet most CTAs are totally lame and uninspiring, and one CTA in particular is as old as the Internet itself but still in widespread use: Learn More.

To all copywriters and content managers: it’s time for Learn More to die. We can do better. Not only is Learn More tired, it’s deceptive and without detail: the very phrase infers that by clicking it, you will learn something you did not know before, you will be provided with more detailed information. But in reality, this is very rarely the case. Often, it’s a link to something completely unrelated, a cop-out by the writer who didn’t know what else to use.

I say it’s time to start using our imaginations to come up with better CTA’s; no more can we rely on the old cop-outs like Learn More, Sign Up, Buy Now, or, shudder, Click Here. We as web professionals have done our jobs well; the Internet user community has bought into what we have sold and consequently have become more smart and savvy, but also demanding, and are less-likely to click on the links we provide unless they are interesting and enticing.

So what can be used as a good call to action instead of tired old Learn More? Google “Good CTA examples” and you can find literally hundreds of examples; blogger and designer Christian Watson has a list of over 30 CTA’s that you can substitute for Learn More. Hubspot has a PDF with over a 150 CTA suggestions.

As writers, the descriptive CTA is our secret weapon; an enticing action that leads our readers and users where we want them to go. With such a powerful weapon in our arsenal, why waste using something as lame as Learn More? Be creative! Who knows, as a writer you might even….learn more.

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An Open Letter to Employment Recruiters: Please Suck Less

Dear Employment Recruiters,

As much as I can appreciate how hard it must be to try and match jobs with the thousands of people in the job market, I believe the way in which many of you conduct your business could be be doing a much better job. That is why I am putting out this request to all employment recruiters on the Internet (should they be reading this): Please suck less.

You know who you are: You cold-call and send out mass emails in desperate attempts to fill a position with a company that has engaged you, without regard to the people that are looking for a job. You are noncommutative, masters of the slick salesman talk and dishonest in your intentions. Not all employment recruiters are like this, but 99% of you are and the other 1% are about as common as Bigfoot sightings. To aid you in becoming better, I am providing a few items that when addressed, I believe, will help you and your way of conducting business with job seekers suck less.

  • Communication: When I am filling out the information for the position that you have me in mind for, you are great with the phone calls and emails encouraging me to send it over so you can submit me ASAP. Usually, this is where the communication ends. After you have what you want, I rarely hear from you again. To get a status, I often have to reach out to you to find out the job has already been filled. A phone call or an email would be nice.
  • Be Honest: Don’t tell me that you really care for me and my career goals when you don’t. It’s like having a waiter in a restaurant telling me he really cares about my diet. Like they said in The Godfather: It’s not personal, it’s business. If you have a position open with a company you are working with and you are trying to get me into this position, just say so. But don’t feed me the line about trying to match me with a bunch of positions, because you ain’t, and that you care about me getting my dream job, because you don’t.
  • Don’t make me do all the work: A firm that I worked with recently had me re-do my resume, write a new cover letter, take a personality quiz, write up a few success stories and then input all this information into their custom system. Job leads from all this work? Zippo. Calls back from the agency on my search status? Bupkis. If you are working for me, why am I doing all the work? To return to the restaurant analogy, it’s like telling the waiter what I want and then having to go back to the kitchen and cook my own steak. You have all my information, you fill in the forms.
    On a personal note: Please stop sending mass emails about a position with the caveat “If this isn’t a match for you, can you please forward it to any of your friends who might be interested?” Yeah, right. Why don’t I wash your car while I’m at it.
  • Research my background: The positions you send over to me often are a reach for my skill set at best. Recently, I got an email from a recruiter about an accounting position. Look at my profile: do you see the word “accounting” in there anywhere? I am guessing that a more focused search on my skills would gain you more positions filled than the Johnny Appleseed approach: “He knows how to use a computer, I’ll send him a job for a Analytics Intelligence Director!”

Job recruiters, these are simple fixes; a little courtesy and effort on your part would go a long way to sucking less. Gain a good reputation and these job seekers will beat a path to your door: I guarantee it.

Yours,

Michael.

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My First 90 Days: Establishing the Tone

In this series, professionals share how they rocked — or didn’t! — the all-important first 90 days on the job. Follow the stories here and write your own(please include the hashtag #First90 in the body of your post).

It’s never easy being the new guy in the office; adapting to the way that people do things, learning the business and the people, and getting your arms around the work that you have in front of you. As much as some of these things seem out of your control, there are a few things you can do in the first 90 days that are in your control, and they will go a long way in establishing the tone of the employee that you are and reaffirm to your new employer that they made the right choice in hiring you.

1. Solicit Feedback. Ask your new colleagues for their opinion of how things are being done in your situation – good and bad – and how you can make the good better and improve on the bad. Include them on being part of the solution. Keep an open mind on how your company does things and how you may be able to contribute to that.

2. Make Partners. It’s always more beneficial to have friends and allies than adversaries; this no more true than in the workplace. Identify the movers and shakers, the influencers, and make them a partner in what you are doing. Chances are, they will have good suggestions and will help you get where you need to be, and their opinions and suggestions carry tremendous weight in the organization. Give them a stake in what you are doing; they will be more willing to help you and share in the success, and they will give you an opportunity to contribute to what they are doing as well.

3. Go Above and Beyond. Going above and beyond means more than just coming in early/staying late and working hard at your job; these are givens. Aside from just working hard, you have to be willing to do anything that helps the company, even if the task is not in your wheelhouse. In a position I had previously, the company was late in getting their collateral done for an important convention and only had 1 day to get all the convention packets ready for the mail. Even though I was working in digital marketing, I re-arranged some things in my schedule and stayed until 9:00 PM stuffing envelopes. I did so because it was a major priority for the company and nothing else I could have been doing would have been more important. It also gave me a great reputation as a worker who could be depended upon.

4. Don’t Complain. As a supervisor, one of the red flags I watched for in a new employee is how much they complained about things in the first few days on the job: their chair, their cube, their software, their hardware, meetings they had to go to, etc. No situation is going to be perfect, and most of the time you are just going to have to make do. They gave you a job you asked for, so not complaining is a symbol of gratitude. Take this opportunity to show how you can work under adversity, in any conditions, and still produce great work.

5. Don’t Bad-mouth your old employer. You may not have liked your last job or boss, but that opinion is one you should always keep to yourself. Griping about how horrible your old boss was and how much you hated working there is a major red flag; it usually signals that eventually you will be turning your venom towards them. Really, there is no reason to complain about an old job in a new job; you got the new job at the new company, the bad job is in your rear view mirror, you WON. SMILE.

5. Follow the Rules. Companies don’t make rules for rules sake; there is a darn good reason the rules are in place. Your task here is simple: follow the rules. Don’t think that a dress code you don’t agree with doesn’t apply to you, because it does, and don’t think your bosses will let you skate on on it, because they won’t. These are the guidelines that everybody – from the CEO down – must follow. Understand and follow the rules without exception and don’t try to make shortcuts. My father used to tell me: “Shortcuts are the short road to nowhere.” He was right. The company you work for pays your rent and feeds your family. Following the company rules is a sign of respect.

In your first days in a new position, your supervisors are looking for affirmation that they made the right decision in hiring you. By making a point of being the model employee, coupled with your super work ethic and mind-blowing contributions to the company, will set the table for a productive and happy relationship.

Michael Dillon is a content management systems (CMS) expert, digital strategist and web project manager. He reads and writes alot. Check out his website.

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The One Skill That Beats Talent Every Time

I’m going to tell you a secret. There is a skill you can master which will guarantee everything you do will improve by at least 50%, but probably more like 100%, and more over time.

The best part about this skill is that it’s easy. Anyone can obtain it. You don’t need to have any particular natural talent. You don’t need any resources or teachers to master it. Once you have it and it becomes a part of your every operation you will begin to achieve at an accelerating rate. Your success will compound and your reputation will bring you more opportunities.

In the words of Morpheus, “Do you want to know what it is?”

Getting sh*t done.

That’s it. Read it again. Let it sink in.

What does it look like in practice? Responding to emails immediately, and never taking longer than 24 hours to do so. Showing up for everything you’ve said you’d show up for. Finishing everything you’ve said you’d finish and on time. When you say “I’ll read that book,” or “I’ll check out that website,” or “I’ll send my resume,” doing it. Immediately. If you can’t or won’t, don’t say those things. Every time you say you’ll do something and don’t, you’ve missed an opportunity to be better than the majority of your peers and build social capital.

In 90% of situations I’d take someone with coherent same-day responses to all communications who always delivers as promised and when promised over someone with mastery over just about any skill I can think of. I’m not alone in this. The desperate need for hard working, reliable people who communicate immediately all the time is off the charts.

If you make people wait for responses or wonder if you’ll ever follow through, you’ve cost them, even if only psychologically. People don’t tend to want to work with people who cost them — they want to work with people who they never have to expend any mental energy worrying about. They want to work with people who pleasantly surprise them by over-delivering.

Anyone can be the person who always follows through, always communicates, always delivers, and never leaves anyone hanging or in the dark. It’s only a matter of will and discipline.

Just get stuff done.

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A Terrible Idea that is Great: Kill All Meetings

A few years ago, I was called into a meeting with my supervisor and two of my management colleagues to discuss a lack of productivity on our teams; deadlines were being missed, work was not being checked and was shoddy, and projects were off track and disorganized.

She suggested that everybody come prepared with a few items that we could implement to help get this production issue under control.  My first colleague came up with the idea of a “committee” that would hold weekly reviews of all the work going on, to ensure that work was up to standard.  Excellent!

My other colleague came up with a series of forms that would have to “signed off” by both the person doing the work, the supervisor and the client, to ensure that the work was being done and on time, and that it was up to our standards.  A paper trail! Greatness!

I came with one suggestion: Stop having meetings.

Gasp.  They looked at me as if I had lost my mind.  Stop having meetings?  How will we ever know what is going on?  How will we ever communicate to our teams what we want!  Terrible idea!

When the collective panic subsided, I stated my case:

The reason that work was being done late, missed or turned in under-standard wasn’t because our employees were incompetent or did not understand their jobs, it was because they weren’t spending enough time at their desks doing actual work.  I laid out some of the calendars of some of the members on my team and showed them that on the average, each member was spending at the minimum, two hours a day in meetings; 10 hours of prime productivity every week.  I was spending 4-6 hours a day in meetings; even though myself and my team members came in early, stayed late and spent time in the office on weekends, there still wasn’t enough time in the day to concentrate on the work at hand with all the meetings on our calendar (the meetings were often scattered throughout the day). Any communication could be handled by email, or if urgent, a phone call. I concluded: If you want production, timeliness and quality to go up, cancel these meetings unless it is an emergency; a very last resort.

We went with the committee option. Things didn’t get much better.

When I began with my current employer, they were faced with many of the same problems: shoddy work, missed deadlines, etc.  I suggested cancelling meetings and to my delight and surprise, they agreed to try it out for a month. Also to my delight, something started to happen with the members of my team:

They stopped missing deadlines and started getting shit done.

As a result of this, we have perhaps 1-2 meetings a month, and the results continue to speak for themselves.

Meetings, in a word, suck. They are like the office dress code: a business dinosaur of another era. They are the killers of innovation and creativity.   In this day of enhanced communication, there is really no reason to have a meeting unless you absolutely must.  Meetings should be the absolute last resort.

As Peter Drucker points out in his book The Effective Executive, “one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.”

Nobody wants to go to them anyway

Cancelling meetings, while seemingly a radical idea, is in reality what all workers secretly hope for; everybody hates going to meetings.  A recent survey by Microsoft of roughly 38,000 people worldwide found that U.S. workers spent 5.5 hours in meetings each week—and 71 percent said those meetings weren’t productive.  This non-productive time ain’t cheap either: some estimates put the national cost in lost time and wasted talent as high as $200 billion every year.

For management it is even worse; according to the same Microsoft study, some CEO’s and upper-management spend about 60% of their time in meetings. Because of this, they are unavailable most of the time during business hours to make key decisions, or monitor the work their employees are producing.

So, we have established that meetings are a waste of time, nobody wants to have them and nobody is getting any work done, yet it begs the question:  Why are we still having so many meetings?

The answer seems to be for the same reason your company has a pointless holiday party every year: Because that’s the way it’s always been done.

Culture changes, especially with an old rock like meetings, are hard to change. Some methodologies, like the darling of development Agile, are based upon having (gawd) daily meetings (even if they disguise it with terms like “Standup”, it’s still a meeting). People will resist this approach, but in order to show that killing meetings is a good idea you will have to produce:

– Hand in that report early

– Be on time with every assignment

– Have your work be flawless and beyond expectations

– Add some extra items to your task list

-Get your emails to inbox zero.

An increase in productivity at your job and not on Facebook is the goal here: the chance for showing that your time is being better spent at your desk instead of in a conference room is in your hands.  Change is hard for people to accept,  but you can’t argue with results.

Oh sure, you’re thinking: “This sounds great, but how do I keep from being dragged into the countless meetings that bombard my inbox on a daily basis?”

For starters, you could use this powerful word: No.

“No” is tough for most people to swallow, but it goes down a lot easier if you follow it up with options: Let everybody know you are not having meetings, even project status meetings,  but let everybody know that you are available for them to come see you, call or email.  Communication through email means you are going to get tons more and you might actually have to answer it in a timely manner,  but it is still a more efficient option.  For your projects, send out a status report with action items to get done.  If anybody has questions, they can reply back.  For your direct reports, have them make a brief status report or fill out a status on the items they are working on in some online tool like Asana (free), Basecamp or AtTask.

Or you could negotiate, as Leo Babauta demonstrates in his great book The Power of Less: always ask people if they really need you for a meeting. If they say yes, ask if you couldn’t give your input via email, via telephone, or in a 1:1 talk. Or maybe they only need you for 10 minutes during that 4-hour meeting, so how about you only show up to give input during that slot?

Whatever works for you, make sure it ends with the same goal: no meetings unless it is an absolute, unavoidable crisis.  And even then, keep it short (I’m not going to waste bandwidth on tips for holding meetings; Google is saturated with suggestions).

So there you have it: hold less meetings and get shit done.  Seems simple right; well, it is.  After all, I was able to find time to write this article because…I have no meetings.

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A corporate benefit all companies can afford: Get rid of the dress code

I have a confession to make: sometimes when I have lots of work to do and I am going to be at my desk all day, I take off my shoes.  It’s just more comfortable for me and allows me to think more clearly then when I have dress shoes on.

Can you guess how many people in my office know this?  Zero.  Unless I walk around my office, or have somebody stop by my desk, nobody sees me for the entire day.  Many people I know are in the same sort of position as myself: they do not have many face-to face contacts with other workers or clients and yet they are still being forced to adhere to a dress code that is simply out of touch with today’s workforce.

When I began in the workforce in the late 1980’s, the code of dress was even stricter: Men had to wear jackets and ties and the women had to wear skirts and hose.  “Casual Friday” meant we got to ditch the jacket and tie for what we commonly wear to work now.  We could wear jeans to work a few days out the year but they were usually centered around some corporate event.

I remember there being a shift in the dress code around the middle 1990’s, but it wasn’t without a great deal of apprehension from the senior management of the company: What if somebody dresses inappropriately?  What if the employee’s start acting less professional?   What will our clients think?  After much hand-wringing they decided to change the dress code from suits/tie/skirt/hose to the casual Friday wear and jeans on Friday.  You can probably guess what happened next:

Nothing.

Business went on as usual: people wore the appropriate attire (the people who crossed the line on their choice of clothes turned out to be people the company didn’t want anyway), productivity continued and eventually the clients (and almost everybody else) changed their dress codes too.  The world did not end.  With this in mind, I say to the business leaders of the world: time to take the next step and get rid of the dress code completely.

I loved the show Mad Men.  It was like watching a live time capsule: set in 1961, the men wore suits and smoked and drank in their offices, demeaned their employees and delegated women to minor roles such as secretaries and hostesses (until of course, they got married and quit their jobs).  I asked my father if that was accurate and he confirmed it for the most part: he had never seen someone with a bar in their office where he worked, but he knew of others that had, yet otherwise it was spot on.  It was, he explained, the way it had always been.

As modern-day office worker, how many of the things from the Mad Men era survived?  Practically none (women still are not equal to men in business, but that’s another column).  Smoking is banned, nobody drinks in the office or at lunch any more, management is trained on how to get the best out of their employees without belittling them and there are much more opportunities for women.

Did the American economy collapse?  Of course not, the times simply changed and business changed with it; this is what I am suggesting should happen now.  With easy access to the internet, email and wifi you don’t even have to be in an office anymore, much less dress up, and the relationship between corporate workers is more virtual (the majority of people I interact with every day aren’t even located in my state).  So we are we holding up this pretense of wearing slacks equals productivity/professionalism?

According to an article on the Inc. website, the trend against work dress codes is coming and there is little anybody can do about it.

“Formality is breaking down–just think of Mark Zuckerberg in his hoodies and the explosion in flat organizations. Is this all for the better?  Formality is like a virus that infects the productive tissue of an organization.  When did you last hear a programmer or designer clamor to wear a suit to work? The order always come from the executives (followed shortly by a request for those TPS reports!).  In other words, it’s all about posture, not productivity.”

Case studies on successful organizations such as Google, Facebook, Apple and top creative agencies that have eliminated their dress code show they have not missed a beat with their productivity.  In a profile on Google by Fast Company, it noted “The search giant’s lack of a formal dress code means employees’ clothing choices run the gamut of buttoned-up button-downs accessorized with pearl earrings to jeans and T-shirts. But that hasn’t hurt productivity. In fact, while some staff liken its Garage innovation space to a cross between kindergarten and a classy law firm, Google is consistently ranked as one of the top best companies to work for.”

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban takes it a step further by stating that a casual dress code policy could be a benefit that their employees will love and does not cost them a cent.

“If you are a CEO, are there not better things your employees could spend money on than multiple suits, ties, dress shirts, dress shoes, dress socks, dry cleaning, and all the other associated costs ? Gee, no suits would be the same as giving your employees a tax free raise. Think that might make them happy ? Or do employees consider having to spend money on suits a perk?”

Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of Vayner Media, believes the issue of a office dress code and professionalism comes down to context:

“To say that professionalism is one way or the other is complete insanity. To a twenty-five year old startup guy or gal, professionalism is a hoodie and jeans. To a fifty-three year old Madison Avenue executive, professionally dressed is, at the bare minimum, a dress shirt and jacket. Context. And as these two worlds collide, you start getting a mix. Some people are wearing hoodies on Wall Street, and we do Formal Friday at VaynerMedia.

Over the next decade as these worlds come together, they will become all one and the same. Professionalism will be agnostic.”

There is no real reason for us to keep this up: if Steve Jobs could transform society by wearing jeans, a black turtleneck and Nikes everyday, why can’t people at other companies?  Is the wrapper on the gift more important than the gift inside?

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They don’t work for you: Why your customers aren’t filling out your contact form

Recently, a client came to me with a problem on his website: they were not getting much customer feedback or leads.  This client had been very careful in the construction and marketing of their website: they had selected a good design, had made sure there was on-page SEO and had also ensured there was enough CTA’s to point people to their contact form.  They were mystified as to what was keeping people from reaching out.

I took a look at their site and was able to decipher what the problem was almost immediately: their contact form had 28 fields. The form scrolled on forever, and asked too much personal information not relevant to their inquiry.  A quick check on the Google tags for their form confirmed this: their users were abandoning the form after filling out a few fields.

My recommendation to them was this: cut out the information and fields you do not need in order to help; keep it to what you feel is the bare minimum.  Once you have done that, make that version half as long.  Once you have completed that, you will begin getting more feedback.

They were skeptical to this request.  The fields they included came from their support group: they needed this information in order to better answer the requests that came through.  Without this information, it might take twice as long to accommodate their customers’ request.

I countered: The support group don’t need all this information, they want it.  It will make their jobs easier, and perhaps make the resolution quicker.  However, the burden of having to do all the work for resolution of the problem by filling out the form  is being put on your users; they don’t work for you and this is why they are not filling them out.

We agreed to a test: We would reduce the number of fields on their form from 28 to 5: First Name, Last Name, Type of Problem (Drop-down), Email and Comments.  In 2 weeks we would revisit the feedback and analytics and see if that helped their problem.

The results were spectacular: Their feedback through the forms had gone up over 130%, and their abandonment rate had dropped to 20%.  The time for resolution had gone up slightly as the support team had to do more leg work in contact with the customers, but that time was inconsequential to the stream of feedback and leads they were getting from their users.

It’s always amazing to me that we, as digital marketers, tout the sophisticated study of usability and the urgency for companies to apply it to their websites, yet many sites feature forms that are too long and ask for too much information, the antithesis of usability.

The data and studies are very clear: People do not like filling out forms or giving too much personal information no matter what the reason.

Marvin Russell writing on the website http://mysiteauditor.com/, echos this sentiment: “Have you ever left a store without purchasing anything because the checkout lines were too long? That’s because you are human and humans are impatient, especially on the internet. We use the internet to make our lives easier, not more complicated and definitely not more difficult. A long contact form can be very overwhelming to look at and scare your potential customer right off your website.”

Courtesy of Hubspot

So this begs the question: We know that long forms suck and customers hate them; why do we keep making them?

Much like the client I assisted, the idea that the “more information I get up front the better I can serve you” is old-school thinking, yet a common argument for putting many fields on a form to gather as much information as you can.  It’s only as our users rebel in the form of non-communication do we begin to understand how dysfunctional a practice this is.

And it’s not just the amount of information you are asking for, but also the type of information you might be asking for: according to Hubspot, users are less likely to fill out a form that has “phone” or “phone number” as a required field. While email filters may help against you getting spammed if you enter on a form, many users are wary of getting endless telemarketing calls on their phone, as well as the specter of identity theft, if they give out their phone number.

So what is the best rule of thumb when creating contact forms that users will want to fill out?  The team at QuickSprout have come up with an infographic that lays out some very simple, and useful tips:

  • Keep it simple and easy: 3-5 fields maximum
  • Don’t ask for stuff you don’t need (phone number!)
  • Don’t ask them to “Submit”. This is how Google defines “Submit”:Try something more action-oriented and positive such as “Go!” or “Send!”
  • A/B Test: Try moving the fields around and see what flow works best: let your users tell you how they want to communicate not the other way around.  Another clever test: try putting your (short) contact forms on pages other than the contact page.

All these things can be done very simply, in about a day.  You may have to do more of the work for your customers, but be honest: did you make the web site for your company or your customers?

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Where’s the Love? Why companies need to invest more in loyal customers

Last night I cancelled my DirecTV service.  I had been a customer for 7 years; I had bought special services and packages from them. The decision to cancel them was based upon several factors: spending too much time watching TV, other cost-effective entertainment options, not enjoying the channels that were available to me, but the largest factor came down to my experience with DirecTV themselves: They never did anything for me; they just didn’t seem to care.

I never seemed to get any incentives from them for being a good, loyal customer.  I got fliers in the mail all the time for them advertising specials like low cost packages or free HBO, but when I called to ask them, it was always the same answer: incentives were for new customers only.

I can understand the need to gain new customers, but why was there no incentives for customers who kept the lights on?  Customers who paid their bills in full on time?  Why once you are in the door, are you forgotten?

The problem of customer loyalty isn’t just with the cable entertainment industry: Airlines, Grocery Stores, Retail Stores, Hotels are all suffering the loss of customers through either poor, non-realistic programs or no customer loyalty at all.

According to consumer advocate and journalist Christopher Elliott, loyalty programs “are not in touch with reality because their judgment is clouded by money. Pay attention to the affiliate links on their sites and you’ll see that their rewards don’t come from the programs they promote, but from the generous bonuses they receive when someone signs up for an affinity credit card they hawk.

The cheerleaders will continue pushing these programs until the bottom falls out of them. A vast majority of them don’t care about you. They are the emperors fiddling while Rome burns. They are like the last men standing at the top of the pyramid scheme, insisting that everything is fine. But everything is not fine.”

Loyalty just isn’t what it used to be

One theory about why there is decline in the incentives for customer loyalty is there is lack of loyalty not just with the companies, but also with the consumers.  According to Forbes, 46% of consumers believe they are more likely to switch compared to 10 years ago. Accenture conducted a study entitled “The $6 trillion opportunity: How digital improves customer experience” which noted “Consumers continuously evaluate providers and have become nonstop customers. The tangible result is a growing “switching economy” that accounts for an estimated $6.2 trillion in revenue opportunity for providers across 17 key markets today—up 26 percent, from $4.9 trillion, in 2010.”

Another reason some loyalty programs are being shunned by consumers is the rewards being offered are not really rewards at all.  Elliott notes that many rewards programs do not offer rewards as much as they give you a currency you must spend;  and even that isn’t really worth it to the loyal customer.  Speaking specifically on the travel industry: “For most travelers, loyalty programs are not worth the effort anymore. That’s because, as I’ve previously explained, they have a negative value. Put differently, by the time you’ve collected the points, and gone through the effort of redeeming them, you will have spent more money than if you’d just bought the product without any consideration for loyalty.”

Spending on the 20%

So what’s the solution?  It maybe simply to change the mindset of the company from to how to milk more money from their current customer base to offering real incentives.  According to Pareto’s principle, 80% of your sales come from only 20% of your customers; so why not spend more on the 20 %?  An infographic from the B2B community website shows that the benefits for spending on the 20% are literally endless.

Or how about the radical idea of eliminating the loyalty program altogether and give the savings to all customers – old and new?  Time magazine writes about the supermarket company that runs the Albertsons, Shaw’s, Acme Markets, and Jewel-Osco brands announcing the elimination of all loyalty programs.

“Shaw’s, for instance, has been pushing the change as “Card Free Savings,” in which “Everybody gets a low price,” regardless of whether the shopper is a loyalty program member or can produce a card to get zapped at the register. “The card isn’t so special anymore,” the grocery company announced via its website. “Everyone has one. So we want to take the special step of not requiring one anymore.”

DirecTV lost a loyal, good customer in me.  It was never about the money I was spending as much as it was about the company not really caring about me and the investment I had made.  Even a little incentive might have kept me there.  As they are learning, as well other companies, in the digital age when there are hundreds of more options to choose from, consumers may start voicing their dissatisfaction and letting their large companies know they are there by hurting them in the place they will notice: the bottom line.