A Simple Tactic to Getting More AmEx Offers

AmEx Offers are one of the many valuable perks of having an American Express card. Cardmembers can enroll AmEx cards in targeted offers to earn bonus points or a statement credit for making qualifying purchases at select retailers.

Even cardmembers familiar with AmEx Offers may not realize that you probably aren’t seeing all of the offers available to you. But there’s a simple tactic to get more AmEx Offers to show on your account.

How to see what offers your card has

To see which AmEx Offers are currently available to you, log in to your American Express account and go to the AmEx Offers dashboard. If you haven’t enrolled in many AmEx Offers, you may notice that your card has 100 available AmEx Offers.

But that doesn’t mean those are the only AmEx Offers you can add to your card.

How to get more AmEx Offers to show on your account

The trick to getting more AmEx Offers: Enroll in AmEx Offers. Because AmEx shows only 100 at a time, you’ll unlock new offers by enrolling in ones you can see. You will need to log out and log back in for the new offers to show up.

For example, my The Platinum Card® from American Express has 100 available offers with 16 offers already added to the card.

By enrolling in 10 additional AmEx Offers, the number of available offers drops to 90 as the number of enrolled offers increases to 26.

However, after logging out and logging back in, the number of available offers increases back to 100. In the logout and login process, AmEx added 10 more offers to this account.

» Learn more: Should you spend AmEx Membership Rewards points at Amazon?

Unlock offers you want

This move is especially valuable when you know there’s an AmEx Offer out there that you want to add to your card but it doesn’t show up in your account. This can happen when you have more than one AmEx card: You see an offer for one credit card but not another. That’s a problem when you want to use that particular credit card — perhaps because it has a higher earning rate or some other card benefit you want to take advantage of.

For example, my The Business Platinum Card® from American Express has a couple of dining offers.

You can only enroll one card in a particular AmEx Offer, so I'd rather enroll my American Express® Gold Card to earn 4X Membership Rewards points on these dining purchases. One solution: add AmEx Offers to my American Express® Gold Card in hopes of unveiling these dining offers on this account.

Of course, doing this may lead to adding a bunch of AmEx Offers that you don’t want and still not getting the offer you do want. For example, I tried to get these dining offers to show up on my Amex Gold. At the start, the card had 11 enrolled offers and 100 available offers.

After incrementally adding 60 AmEx Offers — logging out and back in every 20 offers — unfortunately, these dining AmEx Offer never showed up. This card ended up with 71 enrolled AmEx Offers and 84 available offers — but not the ones we were looking for.

More on the card-per-offer limit

The rules of AmEx Offers state that each cardmember may only enroll one card per offer. So if you have multiple AmEx cards targeted for a particular AmEx Offer, choose the one to enroll wisely.

Some offers may be different on different cards. For example, one card may be targeted for a bonus points offer.

While another card may be targeted for a cash-back offer from the same merchant.

Although the reward is different, American Express treats both of these offers as the same offer for the one-offer-per-cardmember limit. So you must choose whether you want to earn points or cash back when deciding which card to enroll. If you know how to maximize Membership Rewards points, you’ll prefer the points to cash back.

» Learn more: Which American Express card is right for me?

Be courteous when enrolling in AmEx Offers you don’t want

American Express limits the number of cardmembers who can enroll in a particular AmEx Offer. So by adding an AmEx Offer to your account, you may be preventing another cardmember from getting that offer. As a courtesy to others, consider enrolling in AmEx Offers flagged as "expiring soon" if you're trying to enroll in offers to unlock more offers. After all, if an offer has been around for a while and hasn’t been fully claimed, it’s probably not going to be missed by other customers if you happen to claim the last one available. AmEx recently added a filter just for expiring offers that makes it easier to find and enroll in these offers.

The bottom line

AmEx Offers can be a valuable benefit of AmEx cards. Cardmembers can potentially earn hundreds of dollars in statement credits or tens of thousands of bonus points by enrolling and making purchases.

However, AmEx Offers are only valuable when used. And before you can use the offer, you need to see it. Now that you know how to get more AmEx Offers to show on your account, you can save and earn even more through this feature.