In the recent weeks it has been reported that American Express is now hard limiting offers to one per person. As a group the Manufactured Spending group, caused AMEX to close the loop hole. Money was bleeding out for all the cards. Unlike Citigroup, who were fined for poor IT protocol, AMEX took this opportunity to save money for themselves and their partners. Obtaining AMEX cards as an authorized user were given out like it was going out of style. It was far too easy.
What Caused AMEX To Kill AMEX Offers?
Abuse. Manufactured Spending. I’ve been in a fortunate position to be on the side of a company where an AMEX offer was solicited and can give high level details.
AMEX have a category managers seeking out partners who are interested in a promotion. The retail partner will target specific customers within their database and send to AMEX. Together, they may potentially add a marketing partner for even more specific targeting.
Once the companies figure out the marketing purposes, like new customer acquisition, retention, loyalty, or whatever they are trying to achieve the retail partner and AMEX figure out the budget and who pays for what. AMEX knows their customers very well with all the personal information and adding a retail partner they can narrow down the subset. A third marketing company is added to narrow the focus to have a high impact marketing. As an example of an AMEX offer could be target all customers who have never shopped with a particular retailer before and the marketing company and AMEX will coordinate a list for approval. Another AMEX offer could be you have not shopped at a particular retailer in a long time and the retailer wants to bring you back again.
All of the AMEX offers cost a lot of money and there has been enough analysis that there has been too much abuse of the offers and enough weight has been pushed from AMEX and retailers to save everyone marketing money. This also gives the stores a better analysis of who uses the AMEX offer and who they can target in the future instead of the wild outliers from MS.
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