American Express Will Focus on Retention and Upgrade Offers in 2021
American Express has been very generous in recent months with big welcome offers for its credit cards. We saw bonuses as high as 125K points for the Platinum Card, and also big offers for the Gold and Green card among others.
But next year we might see less of these big welcome offers from American Express. The company will focus on refreshing many of its most popular cards in 2021 as it tries to retain fee-paying customers and persuade more of them to upgrade. The push will come amid expectations that card-fee growth will slow in 2021. The information comes from a conference with investors that took place on Tuesday.
American Express hopes that new benefits that will be introduced next year and the big offers that were offered recently, will help it return to double-digit growth in card fees in 2022.
“As we put more value into the products, we have people upgrading from Green to Gold, Gold to Platinum and Platinum to Centurion,” Squeri said during the conference. And in fact we have seen a big push with upgrade offers that have been emailed to cardholders in recent months.
“I think from a card existing cardholder perspective, we’re going to be very focused on retention. We’ve had retention levels that are you know probably better than we’ve ever had. And we will continue to do that through […] product refreshes,” he said.
American Express cardholders have been adding points to their accounts and they keep spending but are not redeeming as usual. The company expects this to change in 2021, as people have not given up on travel, but have just delayed their plans for now.
You can read the full transcript of the call here.
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A little late for me. When my Platinum card AF came due, Amex offered only tokens against the $600 AF. I had the card for 25 years, and cancelled it . . . and in hindsight it would have been completely wasted money given the amount of travel I’ve done since.
I got 30K points with no spend for renewing the personal Gold last month. The points posted within 3 days. One question I have is if you can get multiple retention offers on cards in the same year? Ex: an offer on Gold and an offer on Platinum?
Yes. I had retentions of 50k on a plat & 30k on a gold within a few weeks of each other earlier this year.