Don’t Limit Customer Access

American Express (AXP) boasts over 78 million cards-in-force worldwide, one of which has belonged to me since 1996.

Last week I received a customer email from American Express offering me a free music album download if I signed up for the Entertainment Access email list.

Since the new Alicia Keys CD As I Am was 1 of the 6 I could choose, I signed up without hesitation. All I had to do was log into my American Express account online and enter my email address and the customer service number on the back of my card. Easy-peasy. I was very excited and presumably I would begin to receive email alerts when American Express had ticket offers for entertainment events near me.

If I lived in 1 of these 10 cities, that is:

Atlanta
Boston
Chicago
Houston
Las Vegas
Los Angeles
New York
Philadelphia
San Francisco
Washington D.C.

Suddenly I had a flash back to 8 years ago when I first checked out the Entertainment Access benefit with my Gold Card. Same 10 cities. In 8 years American Express had bothered to only add 2 new self-segmentation categories for subscribers: “Florida Cities” and “Other Cities”.

Do you have any idea how much data American Express has on me? Enough to write my biography, surely.

My three points:

1. Don’t ask your customers for data that you already have. If your marketing database is not sophisticated enought to handle the information you have collected, that’s your problem, not theirs.
2. If you need to limit your number of segmentations, choose something other than geography. The world is our oyster. And besides, if you’re a credit card company, isn’t it to your advantage to encourage a customer living in Raleigh, NC to hop on a plane to New York City for the weekend to see a concert?
3. If you indeed have tons of demographic data on your customers, you are in a perfect position to leverage dynamic content in your email messages (and of course I’m talking about more than simply personalized salutations). Be sure to select email marketing software that enables dynamic content insertion.

-Melissa

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Tags: Alicia Keys, American Express, As I Am, dynamic content, dynamic content insertion, email alerts, email marketing, email newsletters, Entertainment Access, entertainment email, Gold Card, marketing database, segmentation

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