Wow. That title ought to get me some hits on the Google –  doncha think? But really this post is about …

How to Treat Your Customers Right

And about how I got get free drugs from people who are doing it wrong. I have rosacea, a disease that makes my face  break out like a teenager with acne. One of the treatments is a low dose of antibiotic. So they make one that’s time released so I only have to take it once a day. (It doesn’t help much but my doctor says we have to give it a year.)

The drug is basically tetracycline. You can buy 300 capsules (250 mg) of tetracycline for $30. Mine is time released (a common process that I can’t believe adds that much cost) but which cost $311 for 30 capsules of 40 mg each. You do the math. Never mind. I did the math. Mine cost 25.9 cents a mg. The other cost 0.04 cents per mg. Mine cost 648 times as much. Six hundred and forty eight times! Just for making it time released.

But that’s not the story of treating your customer’s wrong. That’s the story about the health care in the US and I already wrote about it. I don’t actually pay $311.00 each month for my drugs. Yes I have health insurance, but the deductible is so high ($10,000 per year) because it’s an individual plan that unless something catastrophic happens I’m paying for my health care myself.

No, the reason I don’t pay $311.00 is that the doctor gives me a card which allows me to get 30 pills for $25. So maybe if every one pays that much the real cost is 2.08 cents per mg – only 52 times  as much as non-time released. Go figure.

It turns out the pharmacies in my area all want new customers. So it’s easy to find a coupon that gives you $25 in savings, gift cards or whatever if you bring a new prescription  to them. And many places in my area do this. So guess what I do? Each time I get a refill, I bring it to a new place and get $25 off of a $25 prescription  so I get my drugs for free.

So what are these pharmacies doing wrong?

Mistake #1 – They are treating prospects better than customers.

That’s a very stupid thing to do. Your existing customers are the cheapest ones to market to. Not the ones you should be forgetting about. It’s not as easy to measure your results with existing customers. You don’t know if they would have bought anyway. And this leads me to suspect the reason these pharmacies are doing is wrong.

Mistake #2 – Measure the right things.

Somebody at corporate probably figured every new prescription  customer was worth $XXX because they would keep their business for a while, they would buy other things while they are in the store etc. So they figured it was worth $25 to get them in.

And you know what? They might be right. I’m not like most shoppers.  So maybe the $25 they didn’t make on me is just the cost of doing business. Maybe the whole promotion does pay off. Maybe. I doubt it. But even if it does make money for them it’s probably not the right thing for you. Why?

A Small Company is not a mini-Big one.

You can’t take what works at a $500 million dollar company, scale it back 100 fold and expect it to work at a $5 million dollar company. The scale doesn’t work like that. These big pharmacy chains are faceless companies to me and probably most of their customers (and employees). You aren’t – or you shouldn’t be.

Takeaways:

• Measure the right things
• Treat your existing customers better
• Be a face people can have a relationship with