Sam's Club is getting personal with its members. Plus card members, who pay an added fee over regular Sam's shoppers, are able to go to an in-store kiosk and pick up deals created based on their shopping history.
"This is really the holy grail in a sense, pricing to the individual," Willard Bishop, chairman of Willard Bishop, told The New York Times.
Angela Otero, who shops at a Sam's in Secaucus, NJ, recently printed out four pages of deals from the kiosk and said it contained "the majority of things I want." Ms. Otero told the Times, "It's basically my own grocery list."
While normal coupons may have a redemption rate of a point or two, Linda Vytlacil, vice president for member insights and innovation at Sam's Club, said the company's kiosk program, called eValues, has a rate of between 20 and 30 percent.
"There's no clipping coupons," Ms. Vytlacil told the Times. "All they have to do is purchase the product, and the savings are automatically applied at checkout."
Sam's program is interesting because it finally delivers personalized offers while so many other retailer loyalty programs continue to use a scatter shot approach.
"You've got hundreds and hundreds of loyalty programs out there, and I would argue that only a handful leverage it like they should," Stuart Aitken, chief executive of Dunnhumby USA, told the Times.
Discussion Questions: What do you think of the Sam's personalized offer program? Why do so few retailers seem to leverage shopping data to create individual relationships with their customers?