Hello Everyone,
Thanks again for taking the time to share your questions and feedback!
We hope all your questions were answered—the experiences you've shared will help us as we continue to iterate based on your feedback.
As we close out this event, we wanted to do a recap on three themes that came up frequently:
- Marketing Opt-ins: How do I grow my list subscribers in the most ethical way?
Square Email Marketing and Text Message Marketing would only send messages to customers that have opted in with their email address, phone number or both, so only customers who want to receive marketing from your brand would receive this.
There are many ways to collect marketing opt-ins. For Email, we collect marketing opt-ins during the Email Receipt flow. For customers that choose a Text Receipt or No Receipt, you can turn on the Email Collection feature in Settings > Customers > Customer Sign Up/Email Collection. This will prompt a screen after the transaction and receipt that asks the customer if they want to opt-in to email marketing.
If you use Square Online or Square Online Checkout, you can also collect email opt-ins during a customer’s online checkout, and via website contact forms which can be found in your Square Online dashboard in Website > Form Submissions and Communications > Pop-Ups > Collect Emails.
For Text Message Marketing, once you subscribe to this product, in your Marketing Dashboard Settings you can set up a Text to Join program with a QR Code that is printable to place in your store or otherwise share with customers. This option is great because they can scan the QR code to sign up after they have walked away from the register. You can also email your customers and ask them to subscribe to your Text Marketing program by texting JOIN to your Square assigned phone number.
If you have a Loyalty Program, when a customer signs up for Loyalty, they consent to Text Message Marketing as well, this allows us to send promotional messages related to their Loyalty program via SMS.
Square cares deeply about customer data privacy, so all methods described above are fully compliant with data collection laws, and a customer can easily opt-out of marketing with one click from an email or text at any time.
- Marketing & Coupon Best Practices
A coupon strategy can vary quite a bit depending on the business. Some sellers may choose not to use a coupon in their campaigns very often (the coupon can easily be removed from any campaign template) while others may choose to actively discount at each stage of the customer lifecycle (i.e. Welcome, Drive Repeat Purchase, Birthday, and Lapsed campaigns). If you’re new to couponing, a good rule of thumb is to consider your average purchase value (average ticket), and determine what kind of discount would make sense. You want to offer enough that it incentivizes a purchase, but not so much that you offset your net revenue. You may need to experiment with coupon types to see which one performs best with your customers.
You can create coupons from within an Email or Text campaign while you’re building it, or you can go to Marketing Dashboard > Coupons > Create Coupon to create a custom code that you can print or share elsewhere.
Other ways to motivate customers is to connect them to your brand with product announcements, compelling product images, brand stories, and so on.
- How do I get started marketing for the Holidays?
We recommend you to start on our Dashboard by creating either an email or text campaign. For email, we encourage you to use our holiday email templates that make it super easy for you to create holiday-themed messaging.
I also recommend you to consult our Holiday Guide which includes relevant Townsquare content to learn how other sellers have used Email Marketing to drive their business.
We appreciate you taking the time to share your experiences and we'll continue to improve Square’s products based on your business needs.
Again, thanks for your participation. For the latest updates, keep watch for announcements of new features in Product Updates.
