We know you've been asking for it, and we're excited to announce Text Message Marketing (SMS) in the US, which is now available as an a la carte subscription that allows you to collect customer phone numbers and send them marketing-related text messages.
Included are automated campaigns and ‘manual blast’ campaigns, where you can offer coupons, announce sales, promote events, and more.
While Text Message Marketing can be found and used within Square Marketing in Dashboard, you DO NOT need to be subscribed to Square Marketing to use Text Message Marketing.
Square Marketing users will likewise need to onboard to Text Message Marketing, and will be billed separately for text message use.
What does the Text Message Marketing do?
Opt-in Collection
- Build a list of customers to text BEFORE you pay a cent for the product
- Collect opt-ins via your point-of-sale (or via Loyalty enrollment)
- Text customers from a phone number unique to your business. This number will also allow customers to sign up via Text to Join, and can be promoted via in-store, online, or wherever else you’d like
Manual Campaigns
- Draft a message and send to customers, instantly*
- Offer a coupon, or include a link to an announcement, event, or online sale (which we automatically shorten to save characters)
- Send up to 600 characters per message, or 250 if emojis are used. This will separate out into up to 4 texts, BUT we’ll only be charging for one ‘message’ per customer per campaign.
*Note: Texts are sent in 15 minute increments, so if you draft and send a text at 2:05pm, the text would go out at 2:15. Texts can only be sent during business hours in the merchant's time zone (i.e. 9-5). After 5pm, merchants can schedule for texts that will be sent the next day.
Automated Campaigns
- Automatically text a customer with a qualifying event (similar to automated email marketing)
- General campaigns: birthday collection + birthday reward, lapsed customer.
- Loyalty-related campaigns like reminding about Loyalty rewards, and celebrating Loyalty anniversaries
What are the limitations?
- No Picture Messaging is currently available (MMS)
- No two-way texting (You cannot yet respond to Buyers by text, Sellers will not see Buyer responses)
What is the pricing?
Pricing is tiered pay-as-you-go: at the end of the month, you will be charged the tier corresponding with how many messages you sent.
You will not be charged for months where you do not send any messages.
Square Beta would like to thank all of our participants that helped to test this product for release. We are so thankful for all your feedback and patience. Interested in testing more products like this before release and actively giving feedback for products before launch? Please join our Beta Community, where testing opportunities are available for you.