Loyalty Participants customer group

[bobbyg]

Hello,

We are considering using Square and Loyalty as our primary POS system at our shops. (Right now we just use Square for mobile.) I understand that there's an option for customers to associate an email address with their Loyalty Phone Number, and that the email address gets added to a group called "Loyalty Participants" in the Customer Directory.

Are the email addresses for Loyalty Participants available to be downloaded or pulled out in the API? Or does Square protect them and require that emails be sent through Square Marketing?

We have 17,000 loyalty members on our MailChimp email list currently so we're trying to figure out how it all would mesh together.

Thanks.

[EJ_]

Hi there. 

You can export your CSV from MailChimp and upload the file to your Customer Directory.

Once your customers are all uploaded, you're able to export the Customer Directory from your Square Dashboard Customers Tab. 

So long as the customer information was given to you and manually added at the time of the sale, the information will be available to you. 

[CanneryMarket]

Hello from another merchant! 

We love Square and have used them for 2+ years as our POS (and 2 years before that with a separate business). The POS interface is great, and as a small business it gives us just about everything we need.

However, if you're looking into Square for the marketing and loyalty programs be careful! The customer groups on the merchant side of the marketing and loyalty programs need serious work. The limits on conditional logic for customer groups and search filters combined with not having the ability to export groups of customers unless you've manually added them yourself (NOT what the register collects automatically) to sort, analyze, and re-import to a set group to target for marketing makes it challenging to analyze trends and accurately target specific marketing efforts. 

If all you are looking for is a solid POS and access to a general email blast type marketing program (with A LOT of potential for growth) we highly recommend Square. However, if you're looking for a marketing and loyalty program you can export, analyze, segment, and target for different promotions Square isn't quite there yet.

Here's to hoping this is a PRIORITY for Square updates. We still love the POS, and want to love the marketing feature. Sadly without some kind of search, grouping, targeting, or export control, it just doesn't work for our business - yet. 🙂

[Sean]

HI @CanneryMarket and welcome to the Seller Community. Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback. I'll definitely pass your thoughts along to our product liaison team. We're constantly working on ways to improve the effectiveness of the features we offer our sellers. 

[bobbyg]

Thanks for your detailed message! It reinforces what I've come to understand while monitoring Square's evolution and reading through the help files.

I don't think we're going to be able to switch until Square allows the merchant to access and export all profile info for customers who enter their phone number for loyalty purposes. They could even do this through the API. I suspect many other larger small merchants with robust customer engagement programs are in a similar situation.