Square Marketing - How does Square know my customer's emails?

[charsue]

I've started perusing Square's Marketing tools and saw the I can mysteriously contact hundreds of my customers through it.  My question is, how does Square collect their emails?  I never collected or inputed anything.  Have all of these customers opted in?  The last thing I want is to send an off-putting email to my customers.  I know I personally get annoyed at unsolicited emails.

[jfyh]

at some point the customer gave their email address to Square... proabably in response to another merchants offer email...

[Tom]

Thanks for surfacing — @jfyh is on the right track! 

The contact list combines customers you may have imported or added that have email addresses, profiles created with email collection tools, and customers that Square has added based on their engagement with your organization.

Learn more about collecting emails and available options with Square Marketing in our Support Center: Get Started With Email Collection Tools.

Hope this helps clear things up a bit more — let us know if you have any other questions!

[saimah]

So do I need to sign up for square marketing to capture customer emails to build my customer list? I am going to a tradeshow and would like to capture customer emails with my POS reader. When I purchased something at this trade show last year I don't specifically remember signing up or giving the vendor my email address during check out but I do now get email marketing from them. How can I do the same with my customers?

[puka]

Hey @saimah - You would only need to sign up for Square Marketing if you wanted to send out Campaigns to your existing customers. If you simply want to build your Customer Directory, you will just need to Add Customer to the sale while you check them out and have them enter their information. You could also do this before or after the transaction. For more information, I recommend checking out Get Started With Your Customer Directory.

[saimah]

Thanks. I can do that for customers whose emails don't automatically populate when sending them a receipt. So now I have 2 questions.

1) For customers whose emails automatically populate in the field when sending them a receipt, how do I have access to those emails? Most customers do not want to re-enter their email address when square already has it

2) For customers whose emails automatically populate is there any button that they can say "yes" to or "opt in" to get added to my customer database in my dashboard when checking out on a POS when at trade shows?

If you dont have this feature, can you please add it? It will make life sooo much easier for the customer and your users because they dont have to keep entering their email address and we dont have to keep pestering them about getting their info. A simple opt in button will do.  

[Chad]

Hello @saimah! 

So when a customer provides their email address for a digital receipt they will be automatically added to your reachable customers group. You won't have access to view their address because our digital receipts agreement outlines, when a customer provides an email address it will only be used for receipts and marketing materials from businesses they frequent. 

In short you can reach these customers with marketing emails, but if you want to view their email addresses you'll have to add them to your directory. You could enable the Email Collection feature on your app under settings. If a customer does not have an email address for a digital receipt the email collection page will allow a customer to opt in for marketing campaigns. You will be able to view email addresses entered using this method. 

I hope this helps!