The retail membership model has long been a powerful tool for fostering member engagement and loyalty. It’s what enables Sam’s Club to offer its members exclusive benefits ranging from item discounts to curated assortments. Now, the unmatched first-party data that comes with the membership model is transforming the retail media industry.
Sam’s Club uses the membership data it has collected over the last 40 years (and counting) to gain a deep understanding of its members. Almost every purchase, search, and club visit maps to an individual membership number, giving Sam’s Club near real-time visibility into its members’ shopping and purchase behaviors. As a result, Sam’s Club can quickly surface the items members are looking for and help them discover new ones.
These comprehensive member insights enable Sam’s Club to enrich the shopping experience. It also fuels the evolution of retail media through Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP), which allows advertisers to engage with members meaningfully and effectively by tailoring their shopping journeys with content and offers that match their interests.
Sam’s Club MAP uses sophisticated targeting driven by membership data on purchase history, demographics, recent purchases of similar items, and basket size—data not available on other platforms. Advertisers can layer display, search, video, and programmatic capabilities with this advanced targeting to reach the right audience with the right message at every stage of the shopper journey.
In fact, Sam’s Club data shows that its members stay engaged longer and show stronger click-through rates when video is added to their shopping experience. Sam’s Club MAP offers full-funnel video capabilities including Connected TV Ads, Sponsored Videos, and Interactive Videos to allow advertisers to reach members with highly engaging and relevant product information to help drive purchase decisions.
In addition to creating engaging ad experiences for members, membership data delivers measurement and accountability to advertisers by closing the loop on omnichannel ads. For example, Sam's Club MAP is among the first and possibly the only retail media platform to connect Search and Sponsored Product Ads to offline sales. This unique ability to attribute in-club purchases to digital ads provides advertisers with complete visibility into the effectiveness of their omnichannel campaigns.
Sam’s Club MAP understands the power that analytics can have on driving efficiencies in ad spending. The recent launch of the Media and Sales Performance Dashboard allows Sam's Club MAP advertisers to see which ads generate what revenue. This level of visibility enables advertisers to refine targeting and optimization on active campaigns to help increase return on ad spend (ROAS) and sales in a truly omnichannel way. Advertisers have seen ROAS increase by an average of 36% since in-club sales were added to the attribution mix.
To ensure accurate measurement, Sam’s Club MAP offers incrementality measurements such as incremental ROAS and sales lift based on Circana’s methodology to track media impact on business outcomes. This third-party validation allows advertisers to confidently drive in-flight optimization decisions without anyone “grading their own homework.”
The undeniable power of first-party retail data lies in its ability to help advertisers reach specific audiences efficiently and effectively. Insider Intelligence forecasts that US retail media ad spending will experience a minimum annual growth rate of 21% through 2027, making it the fastest-growing ad spending channel across all of media. Sam’s Club’s membership model can help marketers capitalize on this surge by offering unique opportunities to deliver additive ad experiences for members while simultaneously improving results for advertisers.
—Lex Josephs, Vice President and General Manager, Sam’s Club MAP