The Square POS is a great tool for upgrading your retail strategy- from the way you manage customers to how you collect data. It works well out-of-the-box, but it provides the most value when it’s upgraded with additional systems that let you build out your marketing strategies in new ways.
With upgrades like Square Marketing, you can leverage your customer info, brand promotions, and data analytics to identify marketing opportunities and support stronger revenue.
What Is Square Marketing?
Square Marketing and Customer Engagement subscriptions are supplementary tools you can use to upgrade your Square POS.
These subscriptions help you create campaigns targeted towards your Reachable Customers—the people in your Customer Directories.
Square Marketing helps you create personalized email campaigns and promotions you can use to market to these subscribers:
- Campaign creation tools
- Customer segmentation
- Email marketing automation
- Analytics and performance monitoring
As users know, the Square POS automatically captures customer data on every purchase made. And as we’ll review, Square Marketing is the easiest way to put this data to work and drive more value from your existing campaigns.
Learn more about Square Marketing Pricing.
Unlimited Campaign Creation
Square Marketing offers a user-friendly selection of templates and designs you can use to create your email campaigns.
Users choose between different themes, layouts, and colors—complete with a searchable stock image gallery—to build email communications from the ground up. Each of these options is customizable to align with the brand’s specific voice and style.
While these tools are available on a pay-as-you-go basis for Square users who haven’t subscribed to Square Marketing, those with a Marketing subscription have access to unlimited monthly emails at no extra cost.
This means that subscribers can create as many different email layouts as needed to find the ones that resonate best with their target markets. With unlimited campaign creation tools, you can A/B test different aspects of each email and find which styles, themes, images, and color layouts produce the highest email engagement rates.
Non-subscribers who send limited amounts of email may do fine with the pay-as-you-go approach, but companies that want to push their email marketing revenue need the flexibility and freedom to create as many campaigns as they need to find the ones that perform best.
Customer Segmentation Tools
Square Marketing also lets you segment your customers based on their level of engagement with your brand:
- New customers
- Existing customers
- Customers subscribed to loyalty programs
- Return customers who haven’t visited in a while
And so on. Customer segmentation isn’t an optional aspect of effective email marketing; it’s a necessity. Segmentation is required for email personalization, but without the right data management tools, it can be hard to keep track of your growing customer database.
The Square POS streamlines this process and gives you a simple system to categorize and sort your customers based on whatever parameters make sense to your business. From there, you can generate targeted email communications that encourage specific actions from each segment.
For example, your company may define an “existing customer” as any customer who has made a purchase within the past 90 days. If you notice that more and more of your customers are falling out of this group, you can create an email campaign that encourages them to come back with a specific discount code.
This type of outreach is personalized to certain groups of customers, and as such, tend to resonate better than regular email blasts that lack specificity. If your current segmentation strategies are lacking, Square Marketing is the perfect way to get a handle on the approach.
Email Marketing Automation
Square Marketing lets you set up campaign automation tools that do the communication work for you.
These automation triggers are based on the data included in your Customer Directories and can be set to create customer-specific promotions based on their behaviors or personal info:
- Create automated promotions for customer birthdays that offer them free items;
- Track the progress of loyalty programs, and automatically inform customers of when they’ve earned a new reward;
- Monitor how many purchases a customer makes over a given time period, and reward your power users with special promotions;
- Set up referral systems that automatically sends discounts and perks to customers who get their friends to make a purchase.
The list goes on and on. Each of these use cases encourages repeat business and are powerful tools for driving brand loyalty. With Square Marketing, you can set up these triggers with minimal effort and reap the benefits for as long as you need.
Analytics and Performance Reporting
Another key benefit of the Square Marketing subscription is the wealth of data and performance analytics you receive.
For every email campaign or promotion you make, you’ll receive real-time data on its performance and how well it was received by your customers:
- Email open rates (based on a percentage of total emails sent);
- Total promotion redemptions across all customers;
- Sales attributions that show you how much profit was gained from each promotion;
- Timelines of when customers redeemed the promotion.
Naturally, this data is incredibly helpful when assessing the effectiveness of different promotions.
For example, knowing more about your email open rates can tell you what types of subject line copy is most effective at grabbing a user’s attention, while your sales attributions can indicate which discounts are most enticing to your customer segments.
Use Square Marketing to track this information each promotion lifecycle.
See below for an example of a Square marketing campaign (Valentine’s Day) and the return on investment from it:
Digital Receipt Promotions
With Square Marketing, you can send your customers promotions—even when they aren’t subscribed to your mailing lists.
Square Marketing lets you include promotional offers on each customer’s digital receipt. This is a great way to connect with new customers or returning customers who haven’t actively entered your marketing funnel.
By sending these customers promotions, you’ll give them a taste of what types of discounts they’ll receive by signing up to your mailing list or rewards programs. If they’re a fan of your products, this can encourage them to visit more often or sign up for your other email communications to see what other deals they’re missing out on.
In essence, this strategy turns your receipts into a lead generation tool with minimal effort on your end—exactly what small businesses need to build out their marketing strategies.
Advanced Marketing Through Square
The Square Marketing subscription lets you market to both new and existing customers in ways you may have never considered. And alongside these new strategies, it provides great data that any business can use to drive more revenue from its existing marketing tactics.
And these benefits will only increase over time. As your database grows from dozens to hundreds to thousands of consumers, you’ll get more data on what works, what doesn’t, and what you can do to encourage more customer engagement with your store.
In addition to Square Marketing, be sure and check out Why Your Business Needs a Square Mobile Order Ahead App Now.