Membership + Retail + F&B: Best Practices?

[RobertMcKayIV]

Let's say a bookstore/bar also runs a members-only co-working space in the back. They want to track member visit rates, average order value, purchase frequency, F&B attach, etc. to assess the value of the member program in driving LTV vs. non-members.

What are some best practices to collect these data with high fidelity? For context, members do not currently have to check in for co-working sessions digitally, and although this could probably be implemented it would be frictional, take staff time, and would probably not be implemented consistently.

Ideally staff would look up a customer in the directory every time they make a POS sale (whether of books or food & beverage). However, I'm not sure this is currently done. Ideally, a credit card would be recognized or every sale would trigger a prompt to sign into a Square loyalty program, as at many cafes. Then if the loyalty member is also a co-working member, would the purchases be associated with their profile? If so, that would basically solve the issue, as you could query the purchase database to compare member and non-member purchases. I don't think they have loyalty implemented at present though.

What else don't I know about membership programs in Square? For instance, can you implement member discounts that are auto-applied when the member purchases? Would this be through the same mechanism as loyalty sign-in?

Excited to hear ideas from other sellers, and to help this awesome business monetize me better!

[RobertMcKayIV]

Should’ve mentioned there’s an old thread from 2016 that vaguely touches on a similar use case but I don’t know how current the information there is.

[RobertMcKayIV]

More recently, it appears there are some issues with memberships and subscriptions struggling to fit this use case. Worth reading and thinking about.

[maxpete]

Tagging in some sellers who run memberships to potentially weigh in with more! @LukeNieuw and @DinaLRosenberg 

[LukeNieuw]

Using Square Loyalty solves the spend tracking and LTV question. If you haven't experienced the Loyalty sign up flow at point of sale I would recommend testing it out. It's super fast and easy by entering a phone # right after the transaction.

Then you can get every transaction tied to their phone # and a bonus is their credit card can connect to their loyalty so it auto recognizes their account at each transaction without having to go through the entering of a phone # post purchase.

For tracking visits without a transaction occuring you would need to have another solution. How do people currently book the co-working space? @RobertMcKayIV 

[RobertMcKayIV]

Thanks for replying! Yeah, I was thinking Loyalty would be easiest for that. The question is whether you can tie loyalty and memberships together somehow, if the customer IDs are shared between them. The check-in is less important because non-purchase co-working sessions are not important to track at this point; there is more space than they need and booking digitally is not a thing yet. So yes, Loyalty would solve the LTV issue, assuming they can segment the purchase data by members vs. non-members based on joining the Loyalty data with the Member data (though this would miss any member purchases with a card not enrolled in Loyalty, so it might be good to train staff on manually associating a known member's order with their customer profile--is this possible?)

[DinaLRosenberg]

Ooofff- this is a tough one. I was thinking that you'd have to "check in" - there would really be no way to track what members were doing without them checking in. Even if you were monitoring their purchases via CC- there still could be multiple CC they use- and often customers forget to associate their loyalty with their purchases which causes us to go backwards.

I am not sure if Square has a system that can manage quite what you're looking for.

[RobertMcKayIV]

Thanks for replying! As I mentioned in my other reply above, checking in without purchasing is less the issue. I'm also wondering how Subscriptions feature might work here, in terms of repeat billing of the membership. They are not currently counting co-working sessions as there is plenty of space and not many members yet, but I know this may be an issue in future as Square does not have a way to tie Subscriptions to usage-based things like "X number of sessions per month included."

Another question is whether there is a way to do discounts, other than the Loyalty program, by associating an order with a member and an automatic discount with that membership. My guess is not, but honestly this is not a big deal. I think Loyalty would do the trick in terms of driving repeat purchases for members an non-members alike. Loyalty emails / texts could also be used to segment users and upsell into the membership.

In terms of future need to book co-working sessions, I guess that might be done by adding the Square Appointments module. So maybe the Membership could be sold as a bundle of Appointments rather than a Subscription? Or could you see appointments as the subscription product? Thanks for any further steer you can give!