Maximizing Amex Sync offers. Part 1: sync multiple cards

A better way to register multiple Amex cards!  Read on… 

American Express has been on a tear lately with many awesome sync offers.  One of the best, in my opinion, is the offer to get $25 back when buying $75 or more at Amazon.com.  If you buy Amazon gift cards for exactly $75, then using those gift cards is equivalent to getting 33.3% off everything at Amazon.com.

Here are a few other terrific offers going on right now:

• Walmart spend $79, get $20 back (>25% discount)
• BP spend $25, get $5 back (20% discount)
• Sony spend $100, get $25 back (25% discount)
• Kohls spend $50, get $10 back (20% discount)
• Costco spend $115, get $15 back (13% discount)
• And many more.  You can find a full list on this SlickDeals wiki.

The Amazon promotion was unusual in that American Express provided a page (now expired) that let you register multiple cards at once.  Usually, it’s a bit trickier than that…

Which cards are eligible?

Some offers are targeted, but most are available to anyone with an American Express card.  Excluded Amex cards are prepaid cards (other than Serve cards) and corporate cards.  Personal and small business cards are fine.  Authorized user cards are fine.  Amex cards issued by other banks (Citi, Fidelity, etc.) are eligible via social media channels, but not via “Offers For You”.  Amex Serve cards are eligible via FourSquare, Facebook, and Twitter.

Registration options

You will not get money back with these offers unless you register first.  There are a number of ways to register for most promotions:

• Offers For You: When you log into your Amex account, scroll down to the bottom of the Account Home page and you should see a tab named “Offers For You”.  Click the tab and you’ll see offers that can be added to your account.  Once you’ve added an offer to your account, it will appear under the sub-heading “MY OFFERS.”  Don’t do this yet, though!  If you want to register multiple cards, please read this entire post first!  Once you add an offer to your account, the offer will disappear from other credit cards linked to the same Amex log-in.
• Sync card to Facebook: You can go to this page and “Connect with Facebook”.  You can connect one Amex card to one Facebook account.  Once connected, go to the Amex Sync Facebook page to add offers to your card.
• Sync card to Twitter: You can go to this page and “Connect with Twitter”.  You can connect one Amex card to one Twitter account.  Once connected, go to Twitter and tweet the hashtag for each promotion you’re interested in (you can find a full list on this SlickDeals wiki).  Examples: #AmexAmazon, #AmexBP, etc.
• Sync card to Foursquare: You can go to this page and “Connect with Foursquare”.  You can connect one Amex card to one Foursquare account.  To register for promotions, open the Foursquare app on your smartphone and check-in to participating merchants.
• Sync card to TripAdvisor: You can go to this page and “Connect with TripAdvisor”.  You can connect one Amex card to one TripAdvisor account.  To register for promotions, visit this page.

Note that not all promotions are available through all channels.  Also note that you cannot register for the same promotion twice through different channels if they are tied to the same Amex card.

Registering multiple Amex cards

If you have more than one Amex card and want to register for the same promotion with each card, there are several ways to do that:

• Multiple Browser Tabs
• Multiple Amex sign-ons
• Multiple Twitter accounts (or Facebook, Foursquare, etc.)
• Sync, register, un-sync, repeat
• Multiple channels

Of these options, I think that the “Multiple Tabs” option is by far the easiest, so I’ll explain that one first…

Multiple Browser Tabs

I have to thank a reader named Jonathan who pointed out this approach in the Frequent Miler Laboratory.  Usually, a new offer will appear under all (or most) of your Amex cards in the “Offers For You” tab.  Once you add an offer to your account, though, it will disappear from the other cards.  The work-around here, is simple: Open your American Express account in multiple tabs on the same browser.  Within each tab, pick a different credit card and navigate to the Offers For You section.  Once all browser tabs show a different credit card, but the same offer, then go one by one to each tab and click “Save Offer”.

Multiple Amex Sign-ons

When you get each new Amex card, you can choose to add the card to your existing Amex online account, or create a new online account.  If you choose the latter for each new card, you would need a different sign-on ID for each card.  Personally, I would find this extremely difficult to deal with, but it would have the benefit of allowing you to enroll in all of the “Offers For You” promotions with each credit card.

Multiple Twitter Accounts

Another way to enroll all of your Amex cards is to create a separate Twitter account for each one.  When Twitter asks for your email address, if you use GMail, you can use the plus sign to make your email address look unique even though all mail will go to the usual place.  For example, I could create a new Twitter account called FrequentMilerSPG and give Twitter the email address: frequentmiler+spg at gmail.  All email will still go to my usual frequentmiler at gmail account.  Once you have a Twitter account for each Amex card, make sure to sync your cards to these twitter accounts and don’t forget to Tweet the appropriate hashtags to enroll in each promotion.  I have a full explanation of how to do this easily with TweetDeck here: “Create an Amex Sync Machine.”

Of course, this approach can also work with Facebook, Foursquare, etc.

Sync, register, un-sync, repeat

Once you’ve registered for a promotion via a social media channel, you can un-sync your card without losing your registration for the promotion.  So, if you want to enroll multiple cards in one Twitter promotion, for example, you could: 1) Sync a card to Twitter (here); 2) Register by tweeting the appropriate hashtag (e.g. Tweet #AmexSony); and 3) Un-sync your card here.  Repeat for each Amex card.  You may have to change up your tweets slightly each time to avoid getting the message “Whoops! You already tweeted that!”  Simply add different text to your tweet each time, but keep the hashtag the same.  For example, you could tweet #AmexSony 1, then #AmexSony 2, etc.

Multiple channels

Another option for registering multiple cards, is to sync each card with a different social network.  For example, if you have 3 Amex cards, you could sync one with Twitter, one with Facebook, and use the “Offers For You” tab for the third.  The problem with this approach is that not all offers appear in all social networks.

All questions answered

There are lots of confusing things about the Amex Sync promotions.  Luckily, you can find answers to almost all of your questions on this SlickDeals page.

Tomorrow I’ll follow-up with ideas for maximizing points and savings with some of the current Amex Sync offers.  Because, you know, 20%, 25%, 33% savings is just not enough .

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