fwfdan

I received email with a targeted offer for 60,000 miles for a new card. Problem is that I applied for the card and got a bonus a little over two years ago and closed the card a bit over a year ago. The offer said bonus miles not available if you received them in the last 48 months.

So I am pretty sure I am not eligible for the miles, but wondering if I am reading something wrong. Why would they send it if I am not able to get the miles?

mia

Does the offer include a unique code to enter during the application process? If not, I think it is just an advertisement, not a targeted offer.

fwfdan

Yes, it does contain an offer code. Which is what really baffles me... If it is really targeted they should know I am not eligible due to the 48 month limit on bonus miles.

sdsearch

Does the offer mention the 48 month limit? The 48 month limit is not necessarily universal, it applies only when using offers which mention it.

fwfdan

Yep - I put that in the original post - the fine print says 48 months. I am just wondering why they are "targeting" someone who is clearly not eligible.

sdsearch

All sorts of companies "target" people for something they are not eligible for. It's a different department that does the targeting than the one which determine your eligibility. As another example at another bank: A couple months ago I was ready to cancel my Amex Delta Gold card, and I got targeted online for a Amex Delta Blue card, click on the link and it said "you are not eligible since you have or have had another Delta card in the past NN days". So they knew I was not eligible at that step, but didn't factor that in when deciding what cards to show that I was targeted for.

Yet another possibility is that Citi used to have no "months' language in their mailers but now have added it, and they decided to target you before they made the change to the mailer wording. Targeting often happens months before you actually get the targeted notice. I have had many cases at different banks where I got a targeted offer that was mailed a while after I had applied for a public offer for the very same card; that's because the targeted offers are put together well before they're mailed, so they decide to target me before I applied for the public offer, and they didn't check again when they were to mail me the targeted offer.

The point is, banks do lots of things which can make certain targeted offers make little sense to you. The banks only care about the aggregate, that a certain percentage of their targeted offers work. They don't care that much whether some subset of their targeted offers made no sense to the applicant. They don't care whether it wastes your time or my time, if it saved them some time in the back office to do less checking.