How American Express Could Make Amex Offers Better – and More Efficient

For years, American Express has offered the awesome Amex Offers. Some of these have been huge with offers that were basically free money and points! However, Amex has been really tightening things up with Amex Offers over the last month or so. This includes things like limiting the offers to one card per member (instead of being able to save that offer to all your cards) and even clawing back some statement credit offers!

How American Express Could Make Amex Offers Better – and More Efficient

So, where does American Express go from here? With the offers for many of the retailers (like the $5 back on $25, etc), retailers work with Amex to offer a particular number of those offers to the Amex customers. American Express has a system that rolls out some targeted offers to only specific individuals while more funded accounts are available to all members.

Last month, Amex began limiting these offers to only being one per account/cardholder instead of allowing us to save them to multiple cards. The reasons for this was likely one of two (though there could be another) – they are either facing problems with getting partners with the numbers they want to offer or  (and more likely) Amex wants to market these offers to new cardmembers (or, at least cardmembers new to Amex Offers) and they don’t want us sucking up all the offers available.

American Express Could Make More Amex Offer Changes – Here Is One Way They Could Make Them Better

But, I believe that American Express kind of need to overhaul some of the Amex Offers system to make them more attractive to people like us and new cardmembers. No longer are these offers scaleable so that makes a $5 back on $25 (for a retailer where we could buy gift cards) quite a bit less attractive.

I mean, I like saving $5 but I am not going to jump on that unless it is something for a retailer I was already planning on shopping at. This is in contrast to the old way of doing things where I could buy $300 in gift cards and get $60 back to make that very attractive for larger priced items.

Here is what I think American Express could do to make Amex Offers much better – use the spending of customers to tailor offers for the customer based on the partners they are working with. This could be for retailers that we already spend at. Or (and this could be more lucrative for all concerned) it could be retailers that are competitors of the places we already shop at.

Use Cellular Offers to Encourage Customers to Leave Their Carrier

A current offer for AT&T

For example, we have the $200 back on $200 spent with AT&T Wireless Business accounts. If AT&T wanted to attract more spending with their company, offering this to existing customers really doesn’t do anything for AT&T (but it does draw spending to the Amex card instead of using something like a Chase Ink card).

A better way would be for AT&T to give Amex their budget for this offer and then American Express targets the accounts of people who use their card for Verizon/Sprint/T-Mobile payments. Getting $200 free won’t likely convince a lot of people to change, but bringing back the previous offer of allowing that to be used up to 3X could really help!

Use Airline/Hotel Offers to Persuade Customers to Try Their Provider

What if IHG targeted this offer to Hilton users and upped the offer?

Another example would be with hotels or airlines. If you are using your American Express Platinum card to buy airfare (thanks to the 5X points earned one purchases with the airline), Amex knows what your spending is for airlines and even routes. If Delta delivered their Amex Offer budget to American Express, Amex could take that and target the customers who predominantly book travel with United.

Doing something like that could cause that customer to book their next flight with Delta to save $60-200 on a flight. Now, Delta has brought a customer over for one flight and they can show what they think sets them apart from others. This is better for Delta than offering such an offer to most Amex cardmembers, it could even allow the Amex Offer to be even more lucrative.

This could work with retailers as well. If the customer is using their Amex cards for shopping at Sam’s Club, there could be a very lucrative BJ’s or Costco’s offer to draw some spend over there.

American Express Is In a Great Position To Offer Something Like This

American Express is in the unique position where they know exactly how and where their customers spend money. They could be doing a better job of using this info to secure meaningful customer conversion to their Amex Offer partners while also giving their customers a significant cost savings. Of course, Amex does not know where spend when we use Chase cards, but many people do use American Express cards!

If Amex made a move like this, it could also be more efficient. It could draw meaningful spend with offers that are already out there but targeted to customers that would be most likely to take advantage of the offer – and to possibly even change their spending habits down the road.

What do you think of this idea? What are some ideas YOU have for how Amex could make their offers better?