1-888-353-5012If you’ve ever attended one of our live events, you may have heard our Success Facilitator, Timothy Paulson, tell a story about ‘Acres of Diamonds’. It originated not as a story, but as a speech given by Russell H. Conwell, and we want to share it with you here. The following excerpt comes from the Nightingale Conant website, referenced at the end of this article:
“The Acres of Diamonds story “a true one” is told of an African farmer who heard tales about other farmers who had made millions by discovering diamond mines. These tales so excited the farmer that he could hardly wait to sell his farm and go prospecting for diamonds himself. He sold the farm and spent the rest of his life wandering the African continent searching unsuccessfully for the gleaming gems that brought such high prices on the markets of the world. Finally, worn out and in a fit of despondency, he threw himself into a river and drowned.
Meanwhile, the man who had bought his farm happened to be crossing the small stream on the property one day, when suddenly there was a bright flash of blue and red light from the stream bottom. He bent down and picked up a stone. It was a good-sized stone, and admiring it, he brought it home and put it on his fireplace mantel as an interesting curiosity.
Several weeks later a visitor picked up the stone, looked closely at it, hefted it in his hand, and nearly fainted. He asked the farmer if he knew what he’d found. When the farmer said, no, that he thought it was a piece of crystal, the visitor told him he had found one of the largest diamonds ever discovered. The farmer had trouble believing that. He told the man that his creek was full of such stones, not all as large as the one on the mantel but sprinkled generously throughout the creek bottom.
The farm the first farmer had sold, so that he might find a diamond mine, turned out to be one of the most productive diamond mines on the entire African continent. The first farmer had owned, free and clear … acres of diamonds. But he had sold them for practically nothing, in order to look for them elsewhere.
The moral is clear: If the first farmer had only taken the time to study and prepare himself to learn what diamonds looked like in their rough state, and to thoroughly explore the property he had before looking elsewhere, all of his wildest dreams would have come true.”
What does this mean to you? Earl Nightingale said it himself: “You are, at this moment, standing right in the middle of your own acres of diamonds.” And one of your most valuable ‘diamonds’ is your Royalty Rewards® Database.
With your database, you know WHO your customers are, you know WHERE they live, you know WHEN they visit you, and you know HOW MUCH they’ve spent at your business. And you can communicate with them when and how you like. How many other Business Owners have this power at their fingertips?! Your database puts you MILES ahead of your competitors. And that’s what we want to focus on today: Mining the Power of your Royalty Rewards® Database.
Your database isn’t something that is ever ‘Finished’. When you reach a significant member milestone, it’s easy to sit back and think you can take your foot off the pedal a bit. But you couldn’t be more wrong. Whether we like it or not, we are always losing good customers, sometimes at no fault of our own. People move, they get new jobs with new commutes, they have lifestyle changes or experience illnesses (and even death), their disposable income changes, they don’t have incentives to return, and they even forget about you.
Take us for example. We used to live in a community that had a fantastic restaurant right around the corner. It was so easy to visit we ended up there every week. They knew us as soon as we walked in and treated us well. A few years later we moved, just a 10-minute drive away, but we have not been back since. Not because we had a bad experience, or the food took a turn… we simply forgot about them. Our routine had changed and we became ‘Lost Customers’. The worst part is, they had NO IDEA where we had gone or why we stopped coming and they had no way to contact us to lure us back.
Thankfully, YOU aren’t in the position of that Restaurant Owner. YOU have the power of your Royalty Rewards® Database. When your active customers don’t visit after a certain period of time, they too become ‘Lost Customers’, but YOU have the power to prevent that situation, and when it can’t be prevented, incentivize them to return.
Getting a brand-new customer to visit your business is HARD, requires significant effort, valuable incentives, and comes with high marketing costs. But reactivating a Lost Customer, is MUCH easier.
These are significant milestones (noted on the left) in the customer relationship, and you can leverage that to your advantage.
Once a Lost Member is reactivated, they go directly back IN your marketing bucket. They’ll receive surveys, be asked to share positive reviews, and will receive birthdays and other campaigns – all encouraging more frequent visits and more spending.
References:
Acres of Diamonds Article by: Earl Nightingale. © 2023 Nightingale-Conant Corporation