I’m working on a presentation for a Financial Institution  – we’re looking at examples of  campaigns that are doing well, examining what they are finding hard, and presenting ideas that they might take from non-FI email marketing successes.  All BAU, and collecting great examples to discuss is a part of this, so it was coincidental that I was interrupted by the arrival of an email from American Express a few minutes ago.

Last year when AMEX ran a digital promotion, we checked it out and found some things were amiss.  You can read that post here.

This year, there are some improvements (the personalisation is correct) but the key issue is still the same:  it uses the same techniques that phishing scams do. AMEX ask you to enter your credit card number into their form despite the fact that they already use several digits of it in the email as a personalisation field:

My inbox receives phishing spam a lot, and many are hard to tell.  I get messages looking like they are from my own bank, and sometimes they seem to arrive right after I’ve been online banking… spooky but unrelated.  Less experienced customers get caught every day.   To help, there are Govt organisations and sites dedicated to protecting people from scams, like antiphishing.org – who’s article Consumer Advice: How to Avoid Phishing Scams leads with the advice to never enter your account or credit card number…

I just don’t understand why AMEX are playing this again…  Do you?  Here’s the landing page:

Love to hear your comments.