3 Tips for Leveraging Your Fish Ticket Premiums & Bonuses
Alaska fishermen can deliver their catch to anyone. But, you don’t want them delivering to just anyone, you want them delivering to you. To make that happen, leverage your Fish Ticket Premiums and Bonuses to make fishermen want to fish for you. In other words, leverage them for loyalty. Here are our top three tips to do just that…
1. Communicate What You Offer Before They Fish
Here’s the deal, just as offering premiums and bonuses isn’t required of you, providing fish that has been chilled in ice or cold water and bled to prevent bruising isn’t required of fishermen, they do it because they want the extra money. With that in mind, it’s essential that you communicate how fishermen that fish for you can earn as much as possible by sharing what “extras” you’ll pay extra for – AKA: the premiums and bonuses you offer. And here’s the thing, we understand you may not know how much you’ll offer before they fish but you can communicate the types of premiums and bonuses you offer. By doing this, you’re allowing your fishermen the chance to know what you want so they can focus on giving it to you while also motivating them and making sure you’re on the same page to avoid any frustrations regarding a misunderstanding between a fisherman thinking he/she is going to get paid extra for something you don’t offer extra for.
2. Offer What Your Competition Offers
To even compete with your competition, you have to be competitive. That means you have to at least offer the same types of premiums and bonuses as they do. In order to be competitive, you have to not only know what premiums and bonuses your competitors are offering, but how much they’re paying for certain premiums and bonuses. For example, are your competitors offering bonuses based on the amount of fish processed by the boat? What about quality bonuses? Are they offering 15 cent bonuses for iced and RSW or 25 cents? Are they paying an extra 8 cents or 12 cents for bleeding? What about late-season fishing, are any of your competitors offering per pound bonuses for that? If so, how much? Only by keeping up-to-date on what your competitors are offering can you make sure you’re staying competitive and at least meeting the competition. Beating the competition is a whole other story.
3. Offer What Your Competition Doesn’t Offer
Speaking of beating the competition, other than offering better prices and higher bonuses than your competition, you can also offer different premiums and bonuses that they aren’t offering. Or, maybe they’re offering something similar but your bonus is specific to you, enticing fishermen to keep coming back to you and only you. Maybe it’s a unique bonus you offer by ranking your fishermen based on their delivered weight and pay out more to your top ranked fisherman. Or, maybe it’s offering assistance with fuel costs by providing fuel bonuses during times of high fuel prices for fishermen. Or, maybe it’s offering a loyalty/retro bonus where you pay a certain price for the fisherman’s catch today, but if you’re able to secure a better price when you resell it then you pass some of the profit back to the fisherman the subsequent year, motivating them to return.
Whatever method you choose to leverage the premiums and bonuses you offer, you need to incentivize your fishermen after you’ve established the relationship with them to keep the relationship strong and keep them fishing for you and not someone else.
Learn more about how to keep your fishermen happy by downloading our eBook Guide to Serving Your Alaska Seafood Fishermen.