American Express (AmEx) has officially entered the daily deal market with an updated mobile phone app that shoots local daily deal offers to consumers’ smartphones. The first-of-its-kind app delivers targeted daily deal offers to American Express cardholders on a real-time basis and just may change the way you do your daily deal shopping.
My Offers from AmEx goes live
The American Express app has been out for some time. Through the free app, American Express cardholders have been able to pay their current bill, monitor account activity and use Membership Rewards points on their iPhone or iPad. As of this week, the American Express app has been updated with an all new My Offers program that aims to compete with daily deal giants like Groupon and LivingSocial.
Through the newest My Offers AmEx app, cardholders can now also view local and national daily deals, in addition to managing their American Express account. My Offers is a targeted app, which means that offers are ranked by relevance in relation to a user's specific spending history and current location. If, for example, you've used your AmEx card to pay for coffee and donuts at Dunkin Donuts in the past, you're far more likely to see daily deals featuring Dunkin Donuts than you would be to see a McDonald's deal displayed. The app uses both the "spend graph" (AmEx purchasing history) and current location to beam the most relevant deals to consumers' smartphones.
To date, the majority of AmEx's offers have been focused on national chains and merchants. AmEx new My Offers will change that. “It’s time now to get into helping more of the local merchants and to make sure that we have the tools that work for them,” said Ed Gilligan, vice chairman of American Express.
And despite being seen as in direct competition to the Groupon Now program, Gilligan insists AmEx is blazing its own trail. “It’s less about trying to say can we do a Groupon Now or replicate what someone else is doing,” Gilligan said. “It’s more of a continuation of what we started, which is connect cardmembers to the right merchant. And help both.”
Though previous versions of the AmEx app had been downloaded more than 3 million times, the app itself wasn't something that users fired up often. The original app's functionality was focused on account servicing and paying bills, tasks which are performed with relative infrequency. The updated app, however, gives AmEx cardholders good reason to try the app again. Those tired of non-targeted daily deals for hair removal or spa treatments or other things that don’t interest them will bask in the time and money saving features of AmEx’s updated app.
American Express expects to launch an Android app in the future but hasn't yet announced the app's release date.
Subscribe