AmEx Deals Go Mobile, Social with Foursquare and Facebook Links
In recent months, credit card issuers have gotten much more proactive about hooking their card members up with local deals and discounts. Retailers want to use mobile to reach and entice nearby prospects. Issuers—who are very well versed in local business– want to help small merchants get found and also to offer exclusive real-time rewards to cardholders and perhaps appeal to a younger generation of users.
AmEx, which started the trend with a pilot partnership with Foursquare last March at the South by Southwest Festival, has taken down the fence and is taking that test national. Users can sync their American Express account to their Foursquare membership. Doing that will unlock special AmEx-holders-only offers the next time users log in to Foursquare via mobile. They can then load that special deal into their account, pay with an AmEx card, and receive a credit on their card statement within a few days.
Retailers such as Sports Authority and H&M are the first partners in the geo-local arrangement.
“Our overall strategy is to go where our cardmembers are,” says David Wolf, vice president of global marketing for AmEx. “Both our cardmembers and our merchants are using location-based services. So that’s why we’re focused on developing strategic partnerships with the leaders in these industries.”
For AmEx, the targeted deals don’t stop there. At press time the company announced it will also let Facebook members sync their accounts to the “Link, Like, Love” app on AmEx’s Facebook page that will let them receive discounts offers based on their likes, those of their Facebook friends, and their Facebook Places check-ins– in effect, a kind of “social targeting”, using their publicly available data.
Users will be able to find the deals in Facebook Places, load them into their accounts and redeem them when they swipe their cards in-store. As with the Foursquare program, discounts will be applied as AmEx statement credits. Account information for American Express cards synced in both the Foursquare and Facebook programs will remain on AmEx’s servers and will not be vulnerable to interception, the company says.
The effort may have benefits for local merchants, but AmEx has a roster of national brands that have already created “Link, Like, Love” offers, including Dunkin’ Donuts, Whole Foods Market, Lord & Taylor, Virgin America, Lenovo, 1-800-FLOWERS and Sheraton Hotels & Resorts. Sports Authority’s Facebook page published an offer of a $20 rebate on a $50 AmEx sale to the first 5,000 users who synced their cards to the AmEx app.
