While applying for a new credit card is typically the fastest and easiest way to rack up a meaningful number of points and miles, sometimes the first bonus offer you see for a given card isn’t always the best.
Before applying for a new credit card, it makes sense to take a few minutes ensuring you’re getting the best deal possible.
This is important because you can often only get card welcome bonuses once — or at least only once for several years. Sometimes, targeted offers are available to lucky individuals who can get a higher sign-up bonus than just by going with the publicly-available link.
Targeted offers can be sent in the mail, via email, might be lurking in your online bank or loyalty account, can be sent to you by friends who make referrals or might sometimes even live in the CardMatch Tool. It’s important to say upfront that we’ll never know the full answer to how to get a better credit card bonus offer as companies spend a lot of money developing proprietary methods for generating and targeting these offers.
Still, we’ve been around card offers enough to make a few educated guesses on how this works — and how to improve the chances you find and notice these offers.
Related: These credit card offers are worth $1,000 or more
Use the CardMatch tool
Let’s start with a tool that is an obvious first stop when seeing if you have special offers available to you.
By using the CardMatch Tool (offers subject to change at anytime), you sometimes gain access to enhanced welcome offers on cards like The Platinum Card® from American Express or the American Express® Gold Card that’s available to a select group of individuals. In the past, we’ve seen CardMatch include an up to 125,000-point welcome offer for the Platinum Card and up to 75,000 points on the Gold Card after meeting minimum spend requirements.
The CardMatch website explains that after you input your information, a soft credit check will be performed.
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This means CardMatch accesses the information on your credit report, but this won’t show up on your credit report or affect your score in any way (i.e. it’s not a new inquiry on your report). Of course, if you go ahead and actually apply for one of these cards, then that will be a regular new account on your report.
CardMatch partners with several banks, including Chase, Amex and Capital One, and based on the information they obtain from your credit report, they use a proprietary algorithm specific to each card issuer to generate offers for you.
Anecdotally, we’ve seen some of the best CardMatch offers with American Express, specifically often available to those who don’t have any other open accounts with that bank. And while we didn’t find an especially high offer today in our searches, it has happened and is a place worth checking.
Related: How to use CardMatch to potentially get better offers
Check your pre-approval offers
Sometimes, you have better offers — or perhaps even better eligibility terms — available to you via some pre-approval offers.
These offers may arrive in your email inbox or physical mailbox, but you can also go looking for them. While a pre-approved offer doesn’t guarantee you’ll get approved, you likely have solid odds — and potentially access to better offers.
When logged into your Chase account, you can scroll to the top and select “Open an account” and then click on the “Just for you” option to see if there are any special terms or offers available for you based on your existing Chase relationship. While it’s not an exact science, the more accounts you already have open with Chase, the smaller chance a new account will be dangled in front of your face.
Related: All about the Chase 5/24 rule
Refer a friend
Sometimes, a bank decides that the best way to find cardholders similar to the ones they already have is to let their current cardholders do the ‘work’ in referring their friends. There’s usually a set number of bonus points or miles given to the one who makes the referral if someone gets approved with their links, making it a potential win-win.
These friend referral links can be the same, better or occasionally worse than the common public offer.
However, on the flip side, there are sometimes referrals that are better than the public offers either on their own or at least once you factor in bonus points you’ll get for referring someone like your partner to the card.
AMEX
Ask in person
There are some increased card offers that you can only get in person at the physical bank. For example, we’ve seen the Chase Sapphire Preferred have a 10,000-point higher bonus in the physical Chase bank than online.
Pay attention to your inbox
Sometimes the best offers will come directly to you and aren’t available via shareable links. When you get a credit card mailer in the mail or in your email, it’s certainly worth taking a look at it and comparing it to the publicly available offers, which you can often see on this page.
We’ve seen individually targeted offers as high as 200,000 points for some cards when public offers are just at 100,000 or less, so always keep your ears and eyes peeled when something is addressed directly to you and don’t opt out of marketing emails and sends from banks unless you really don’t want to receive anything.
Bottom line
While we’ll never know exactly why one person receives a targeted offer and the next person doesn’t, it helps to put yourself in the mind of the companies sending out these offers and think about what they’re trying to achieve: new business.
When it comes to new card openings, banks are looking for responsible and valuable long-term customers, while airlines and hotels are simply looking to attract new customers away from their rivals. If a targeted offer succeeds in getting even a few years of loyalty, it’s likely done its job perfectly.
Once you see an offer, it’s worth comparing it to the offer history for that card in one of the guides below so that you can be confident that you are maximizing your points and miles:
Additional reporting by Ethan Steinberg and Summer Hull.
For rates and fees of the American Express Platinum Card, please click here.
For rates and fees of the American Express Gold Card, please click here .
Source: thepointsguy.com