Membership Acquisition with Nift and BJ’s Wholesale Club

Introduction to Club Plus Memberships

0:00increasing Club Plus memberships. It's kind of like an upgrade. Do you know how you want to upgrade your customers? There's something to be said about if we can bring them in at that level and we trust that our experience and our product is good enough and sticky enough, they'll renew. Once someone joins, we can try to upgrade them and upgrade them and upgrade them. But primarily that's happening like in the club with a human sort of selling you.

0:20So in that moment of acquisition, if we can tell that story as to why higher tier, that's huge. Another way that this

Reactivating Lapsed Customers

0:28is becoming really effective is with laps customers because it's all about how do you get your subscribers and you have your existing subscribers but what happens eventually is they unsubscribe. They don't stay forever campaign to reactivate subscribers. It's a different creative instead of saying hey buy me again for $20 off. What they're saying is thanks for buying from me in the past. Here's a $30 N gift. Literally this 3x the sales volume they get off their normal lapse campaign. So the customers are opting in and driving it.

0:58The customers that don't select Scent Burn, they're actually getting a revenue share. So we're cutting them a check every month for thousands of dollars that pays them money, but they're also activating at a higher rate. I have I have slides. So I'll be in charge of where this goes. Lovely.

Meet the Speakers

1:18Who am I speaking to today? My name is Danny Kelly. I'm the director of member acquisition for BJ's Wholesale Club. Anybody familiar with BJs at all? Yeah. Okay, hold it. How many BJs fans out there? BJ's BJs, come on. Not a trick question. BJ Wholesale Club fans. Okay, there we go. And Pat, good friend of mine. Who are we talking to? I'm I'm Pat. I'm with Nif Networks. Networks. What's Nif Networks? Networks is an acquisition platform. We help brands like you acquire new customers, but we also help brands like you reacquire and monetize your customer base in different ways. This is We talked about this briefly before, it's not a subscription platform. No. Why? What's the difference between a subscription platform and something like this? Well, according to you earlier, a subscription platform is when you're getting the same thing over and over. BJ's is a membership, and we're not direct to consumer so much.

Understanding BJ's Wholesale Club

2:12So, we're a little little different here, but it's a membership. So, it's a 12-month membership to be able to shop at a wholesale club. Okay. Now when I sit and try to understand like how this sits in the ecosystem of how many of my brands I I would want to chest this or or run with this. What was this ever should we do this or we have to do this situation? Where was this on the level of tools to use for acquiring new customers?

2:38both I'd say. So I would say tra I mean BJ's has been around for a bajillion years. it's a big company. There's 255 there's one opening in Staten Island today. of 255 clubs. Gez. So, historically, we acquired most of our members through like direct mail, like literally the pieces of paper coming to your house or just through word of mouth, right? So, you're a members of BJ's wholesale club, you tell your friend, they come and they drive into a BJ's parking lot, they get out of their car, they go talk to a human at a membership desk and transact there for many minutes and then walk away with with a membership. That's obviously

Digital Acquisition Strategies

3:17changed a lot. one of our big goals is to continuously acquire younger members. so to increase that lifetime value and we got to meet them where they're at. So part of it was we should I've only been there for about two years, but the share at which we're acquiring people by channel has shifted tremendously even in the last two years. So we just got to go to digital. Do you think that's been exacerbated because of COVID because of other experiences? Yes.

3:43I mean yes. Yes. and just the macro environment shifting. Is this what we're looking at on the actual screen right now? Is this like a a pretty consistent experience of how someone would come in Pat? Yeah. What are we looking at? Left or right? So, if you think about it, first of all, we don't have an audience where, you know, apploing what a great presentation they did and it's interesting because they really don't have an audience either. They insert themselves in between. So, we have partners that send NF gifts out. So, one of them is Trip Adviser, also based out of Boston. So we have partners like Ticketmaster, Trip Advisor, Park Mobile, Planet Fitness. Remember Swipe right, swipe left earlier? Yeah. All right.

4:20Tinder, they're one of our partners. They share Nif Gifts. They share N gifts when they were surprised, thank or delight their customer. Okay. So this is a case where somebody left a review on Trip Advisor and Trip Advisor said, "Hey, thanks for leaving a review. Here's a $30 NIFT gift." Okay. Okay. And I want to kind of double click on that for a second. How many of you get a

The Power of Nift Gifts

4:41coupon or a discount? Probably in your email you got five just in the last hour, right? How many of you get a gift though every so often? Like a gift card. Rare. All right. But when you get a gift card, it's special and you buy differently because of it. Okay. That's why we position these as gifts. They're unique offers that are unique to the platform. So when you come through the system, okay, you give us your name, e, email address, and zip code. And the key thing is the zip code here because that's a targeting piece that takes place. We target at the zip code level.

5:10So BJS while they have 200 plus stores, we target within a radius around each store. So it minimizes wasted coverage. The other thing that happens is before that next panel shows with BJs as a category option. We have a database of all BJ's customers. We make sure any of their existing customers never see a gift. So we're 100% new incremental. Okay. So then the consumer literally can pick the category. They drive the bus. They see six categories. They might pick two if they're interested in the wholesale club. Then they see that offer from what the gift value is for BJs and we take them to the BJ site to convert.

5:46That's a common user experience. And about 50 million of these go out every month from our partners. Because it's positioned as a gift, is this LTV of this consumer better or worse than the other ones that come in naturally? I mean, it's any any prospect who comes in not by driving physically to a club is going to behave differently, right? the intent is different there within our digitally acquired space. They're they're pretty on par. But like if you look at the whole mix of our customer base, those those folks who do drive there and join and pay, you know, the full $60 or $120 for the membership fee as opposed to getting a discounted spur-of-the- moment offer are going to behave differently. Okay. Because I would that's my my worry is like I don't like putting discounts. I don't want to run that anywhere. And so the the usage of gifts is something that we've been considering. Yep. And if you think about it, the neat thing with this is the consumers asking to give you their

6:40attention. So the way we merchandise this, this is not an ad, okay? We handle 100% of the creative. So there's no creative lift for any for BJs or anybody. They approve it. But we're doing is we're merchandising the value of a BJ's membership and what they're getting for the value. And then really educating them on what's about to happen when you take this gift and go to their website. We want to make it easy for the consumer to know what they're about to get. make it easy for them to go and buy then after they select that gift. So we merchandise it a certain way to take the interest of oh I might be interested in DJs to intent and then drive to conversion. Now the majority of our traffic takes place on a mobile phone though. Yeah. So that's always a challenge where 90% of the traffic comes on a mobile phone. So how do we drive conversions? Does that on the design side of things? Do you have to design for the age in which most people are

7:25using this? Our partners distributed. So about half of our NIF gifts are distributed via email and half are distributed in app. So maybe you're making a payment on a block app or on a firm or a CLA app or you're doing something on Tinder or in Park mobile. It's coming up in the app but life takes place on the mobile phone. So literally what we do for our brands is this is a perfect example. We'll actually email after the gifts been sent to everybody who doesn't convert. And our emails get a click-through rate. We do this on behalf of our brands. Okay? Our emails get a click-through rate of three to 5% on the email. So, we know there's an interest and an intent. So, the consumers are clicking through these emails because we want to get them back to the BJ's page to eventually convert.

8:07Do we get to play with those audiences? Like, do we re can we retarget on other channels? It depends. Are you saying can we BJs or can they retarget for us? Both. the lawyers would tell me that there's a can spam issue with some of these things depending on the size of it. that we try not to directly send unless we have someone coming to our site and giving us their email address. So the example there would be they come in, they start to join, they fill in their email address, we will yes send them some retargeting. and then obviously like within Facebook, we're doing retargeting on Facebook and stuff like that. But that's what I say is even if I can't email them again, I still get audiences basically pixelled audiences from what's happening here. You can pixel them. BJ's is a little different because like Danny alluded to the lawyers get involved. for most of other brands, we actually have integrations with Clavio, List Track.

8:59We're literally taking that name and email address and piping it at 6 a.m. this morning of all the selections you got yesterday, and you have permissions to remarket to them. Now, the only caveat on that is our partners that come from a finance space, okay? We can't push those emails to you, which is why we've started to do this for our clients because we can send them all out. So, I'd say about a third of our audience we can't share, but twothirds of our audience we end up pushing right in. So, we're building first-party data for our brands as well where they get it in their email platform and they can send emails to them and build that first party. Yeah. Because I think that that's the part where us on the very digitally focused, we'd be wanting to get those audiences as much as possible because we can't get them back.

Increasing Club Plus Memberships

9:39I think one of the interesting things because a challenge that Danny came to us earlier this year was increasing club plus memberships. It's kind of like an upgrade. Do you know how you want to upgrade your customers? Yes. All right. You want to give a little color around that? Yeah. I would love to give the pitch on why I why everyone should join BJs at the club plus membership level. yeah, I mean these folks they renew at a higher rate. We get more MFI which is member fee income. Member fee income is 100% Ebida. So, this is like how wholesale clubs exist, right? Like, you get cheaper prices because we charge you a membership fee. If you join at this higher rate that's $120 and renews at $120 every year and we renew you at a 90% renewal rate, like that's fantastic, right? Whereas, if we join you at the lower level, we know we're going to see less spend, less renewal rate, and obviously less of that initial MFI. There just less more there

10:33just not as valuable. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we do everything we can to upgrade throughout the customer journey, right? Like, we don't need everyone joining at the club plus level, but there's something to be said about if we can bring them in at that level and we trust that our experience and our product is good enough and sticky enough, they'll renew. So, I think we've found like yeah, we can once someone joins, we can try to upgrade them and upgrade them and upgrade them, but primarily that's happening like in the club with a human sort of selling you. So in that moment of acquisition, if we can tell that story as to why higher tier, that's huge. So that's been something we're tackling across all channels, but Nifty has been a great partner there in terms of playing with us in that game.

11:15Is that heavily email? It's more driven by the landing page. So when you get to the landing page, we lead with their entry- level offer, but you can see here on the landing page, we're then upselling them to the Club Plus membership. So while they got the gift for the entry level, about one in four of the members when they get the landing page, the interest are converting at the club plus level. And I mean for us it's I'm doing an entire work stream on how do we improve our like our our flow, our UX so that it makes it more intuitive because it's that constant tension between like friction. You don't want to give them too much information and too many friction points that you lose them.

11:51True. But you want to give them enough that you're getting the right people to sign up there. So it's, you know, we're doing that in our own platform and our membership flow and then we're doing it with them on these sort of interstitial pages that exist where we try to give them the right amount of information to click through. Well, and everything's This is the part where I'm feeling it could have been on the web experience, but it doesn't have to be web. It's all all digital on the phone. Yeah. Exactly.

12:17Cool. Exactly. You know, if we can take a pause, if you guys are interested in experiencing it, if you scan that QR code, you all get a $30 N gift. All right? So, you can go through the flow, claim a gift, and see how the platform works. All right? But I want You should all use it for BJ's membership. Use it for BJ's membership. All right. How How many stores do you have in the Miami area? A bunch. A whole bunch. Yeah. We have a lot of locals, too. Yeah. There you go. but I think one of the

Effective Email Campaigns

12:44things to double click on because I want to go back to the omnis presentation with Jimmy earlier today. How many of you use email? How many of you are using email today? Okay. So, like what's what you guys remember the average click-through rate on the emails this morning on from the Omnis presentation? About 1%. Right. Yeah. Is that what do you typically see on an email send for a breeze? sometimes less than this, like maybe two two% of the on like an incredible one. And I think that's one of the things that we're uncovering with this is it starts with the partners because when the partners send the N gift out, typically the subject line is, "Thanks, here's a $30 gift for you, gets a very high open rate, a very high click-through rate." This actually came about from one of our partners, Planet Fitness. They wanted to take people from a low-level membership to a higher level membership. and they said, 'Well, what would happen if we put a black card membership in the gift flow? Could we

13:41get a basic $10 member to upgrade? And we're like, God, that's an interesting thing. Let's try it. Okay, so literally, that's what we started to do with sending emails out on partners. And this is eligible to all the brands where now they're getting a high click-through rate and they're reactivating laps customers or thanking existing customers and driving it that way. So, I'll give you an example if you wouldn't mind going to the next one. Yeah, this is a thank you. No, go ahead. You're driving.

14:06this is a thank you email. Okay, this email 30% click-through rate and it increases the RPU for that brand. This is a Splash Wines. They're pulled to Full Glass Wine. Okay, Full Glass Wine owns Wink Wine Insiders. They own about a half a dozen brands. They're rolling up a bunch of wine brands. This is an RPU play and a customer satisfaction play. Gets about a 30 30%. This is another They get about 12 cents extra per customers. Laura Geller's another brand, As Beauty Group, out of New York.

14:37They own about four different brands. It's just a thank you email. Now, this is a loyalty play for them. The top two things Laura Geller's customers are buying through their N gift, wine and athleisure wear. So, it's a loyalty play where they're making money, we'll write a significant check to Laurel Geller on a revenue share, okay, on these. And they're thanking and surprising their customers and getting an incredibly high click-through rate on a post-purchase email. Another way that this is becoming really effective is with laps customers. Okay.

15:10And this plays into subscription kind of where you're at. And when Brian went through the subscription talk track this morning, which was great from 100 degrees Celsius, right? That's where he's at. It because it's all about how do you get your subscribers and you have your existing subscribers, but what happens eventually is they unsubscribe. They don't stay forever. Doesn't mean they don't find value anymore. They might have enough of whatever they're buying from you and the cabinet in the fridge and they're there, but now they want to do it later on. This is a campaign to reactivate subscribers.

15:41Literally, the average click-through rate on this email, 7% is the average click-through rate. 7%. It's part of their flow. It's a different creative. Instead of saying, "Hey, buy me again for $20 off," what they're saying is, "Thanks for buying from me in the past. Here's a $30 N gift." Then what we do is we put them as the number one item in the flow. Literally this 3x the sales volume they get off their normal lapse campaign. Yeah. All right. So the customers are opting in and driving it.

16:11The customers that don't select scentb bird they're actually getting a revenue share. So we're cutting them a check every month for thousands of dollars. For those that don't select sent bird that pays them money but they're also activating at a higher rate. So it's a way to reactivate subscribers. And this is another example here of reactivating post-purchases. All right, we all have sunglasses. How many sunglasses do you lose during the summer? You need another pair. Great campaign that blenders put on. Literally, instead of saying, "Hey, we'll give you $20 off of sunglasses."

16:42They're saying, "Hey, thanks for being a past customer. Here's a $30 NF gift." Literally, the result on this 4x the sales volume than offering $20 off and they make some side money on it. So, it's different ways of how do you thank, surprise, and delight your customers while you can generate revenue and increase your sales. And I'd love to say we thought of these ideas. This all came off of Planet Fitness, also based in Boston, with the idea of saying, "Hey, what if we did this?" And we're like, "Gosh, there's something here. We can do more of this."

The Importance of Reviews

17:14And this is another one with reviews. Again, you guys are looking for feedback. Literally 5x the review volume for Vita. Normally to get the review volume they're looking for, they'd have to send four emails. Literally, they exceeded their target with one email and basically saying, "Hey, give us some feedback. Thanks. Here's the $30 from buying from us." It's not quidd proquo. Thanks. Here's a $30 gift. Oh, by the way, give us some feedback. The volume of feedback 5x from when their normal flow. Gotcha. Okay.

17:39So, it's worth it. I mean, I get I get the reasons why. And I think especially as we come into the summer season where like a lot of the travel and spend starts to pick up. Yeah. Makes total sense. Yeah. any anything else you want to add in? No, I think that makes sense. I mean, it's interesting with the review thing because you guys are probably experiencing this like so much of the brand is built from that userenerated content, that authenticity, those reviews. So, it's not something that like we have at BJ's because it is a retailer, but it's super interesting to think about as you're building that brand up. It is. And we we not even just on a video review, but on the site, we need as much as possible because people live and die about the the way that other people are going to feel about it.

18:17So that is and normally we just get the normal flow of three emails sent, please give us your review overall, but it's just not as effective. And having that volume is so key, too. Now I think everything I look at now, the reviews are all AI generated, right? So it's like it feels that way at least. And I love that. I was like I went to a restaurant last night and I knew exactly what to order based on the fact that AI like took all the reviews and told me exactly what I should be ordering, which is a benefit. And the the interesting thing about it is we're getting to the point now where we can actually monetize at the review level. We know every review is making the brand a dime or a quarter. So it's building and accelerating the volume, but it's also creating another income engine for that brand of knowing, all right, now I've got revenue coming in for every review I get. So it's kind of two-sided. I'm building content for my site while I'm

19:02getting some money. Amen. Pat, thank you

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

19:05very much for everything. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks. We're going to take a two second break. I'm going to pull everybody back in. One second, guys. [Music]