McCormick Paints Builds Loyalty With Professionals

Rewarding DIY and retail customers is crucial to building a solid customer base, but retailers can’t forget about professionals and contractors, who for some, make up a large percentage of their customer base. For McCormick Paints, which has 28 locations in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Washington, D.C., professionals account for more than 70 percent of their customer base. 

To help these customers build their own businesses, the company started the Painter Rewards Program in 2017. The Painter Rewards Program is open to the company’s residential painters and home improvement service contractors, says marketing coordinator Mike Long. He says the motivation for starting the rewards program was simple. 

“We wanted to help our residential painting contractors, who are often small businesses and don’t have big marketing budgets,” he says. “The Painter Rewards Program solves that problem for them, giving them the opportunity to redeem co-branded promotional materials for their everyday purchases.”

For every $1 a rewards program member spends in a McCormick Paints store, they receive one point. Points accrue on a yearly basis from January 1 through December 31, and members can redeem points at any time during the year. Long says most members let their points build up and spend them all at the end of the year. 

Those points can be used for co-branded promotional materials including t-shirts, signs and more. McCormick Paints partners with a local promotional and print vendor in the area, which handles all the orders locally. Reward program members receive monthly and quarterly reports showing how many points they have. When they are ready to redeem, they reach out to McCormick Paints’ contact person at the vendor and put in their order.

“We have a great relationship with our vendor and they do a terrific job of packaging, handling and shipping all the orders,” Long says. “It’s a seamless system for our painters, especially after they make their first order and see how the system works.” 

Signing up for the program is also an easy process, Long says. Contractors can sign up online or in the store, or with their representative, and memberships last for a lifetime with no yearly renewals necessary. 

“There are certain requirements customers have to meet that are confidential to McCormick Paints, but generally they just have to be a residential paint or home improvement contractor and have an account in good standing with us,” Long says. 

The program currently has 450 active members. While the program is currently only offered to a portion of McCormick Paints’ customer base, in the future, the company hopes to expand this program or start a similar one for all of its customers.

Overall, the program has achieved its goals of helping customers with their marketing, and it has also been beneficial to McCormick Paints. Long says the value-added program has been a helpful tool for the company’s sales representatives to attract new customers and build loyalty with current painters.

“The materials that contractors receive are co-branded with their logo and ours, which helps increase the visibility and exposure for our company too,” Long says. “We pride ourselves on being a local and family-owned company, and this program is another way to connect with other local businesses and our community.”

Learn more about attracting customers with high-end loyalty perks here.