Targeted Offers – Junk or Treasure?

One of the benefits of working from home is that I get to lie in wait for the mail.  Yep, you read that right.  Every day I race outside as soon as I hear the telltale rattle of the mailbox lid.  Yes, really.  (Luckily our mail delivery person has a great sense of humor, because he often sees me before I’m ready to present myself to the world at large, if you know what I mean).  

Why am I frantic to get my hot little hands on a stack of bills?  Two words: targeted offers.

Before I discovered Points and Miles, I would promptly deposit all of  our “junk” mail into the recycling bin without a second look.  Every so often a large number with many zeros attached would catch my eye, but I wouldn’t pause long enough to read the fine print.  I shudder to think of all the free travel I dumped into the garbage!!

A targeted offer is a marketing technique used by banks to entice certain people in a desirable demographic to become customers.  For example, the highest recent publicly available offer for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card was 50,000 points, while there was a targeted offer of 75,000 points sent to a select few.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a surefire way to receive a targeted offer.  Sometimes, banks are looking for people in a certain age group; sometimes they want folks at a certain income level; sometimes they’d like to attract customers in a particular zip code.  You can increase your chances of getting a targeted offer if you “opt-in” for a mountain of marketing lists, but we all know that is a rough game – you will definitely end up with a mountain of “junk” mail to boot.

The main takeaway here is to take a moment to sift through your junk mail and see if you’ve hit a targeted offer jackpot.

Because that old cliche is true in this case : one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.