Solved: Re: Text message instead of e-mail for marketing? - Page 3

onceandagain216 · ‎04-26-2016

Can we use text messaging for marketing instead of e-mail? Most of my customers give phone # only.

Howard · ‎12-02-2020

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.

You can get started by visiting Text Message Marketing on on the Square Dashboard.

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?

Feature	Current Limitation
Texting: General	No two-way texting (You cannot yet respond to Buyers by text, Sellers will not see Buyer responses)
Texting: General	No picture message (MMS)
Opt-in: List Building	No phone number list upload
Opt-in: Loyalty Consent Specifics	Due to the current Loyalty consent language (which permits ‘loyalty-related communication’), Loyalty sellers will be able to send automated messages to nearly all of their Loyalty enrollees.
Seller Use Case	Sellers who sell adult products, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, or CBD/cannabis are subject to a standard called SHAFT. This a self-regulation by mobile carriers that can block messages around these topics.

What is the pricing?

Pricing is tiered pay-as-you-go: at the end of the month, a seller will be charged the tier corresponding with how many messages they sent. They will not be charged for months where they did not send any messages. We do not have established custom pricing eligibility or rates established for launch.

Howard
Beta Team Lead, Square
Join the Beta Community
Evaluate | Influence | Engage

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jeffhe · ‎04-13-2018

I keep on receiving emails form SQ regarding this topic. OK. Here's my feedback. We couldn't wait for SQ, so we went on to use Smiley(www.joinsmiley.com) to collect marketable cell phone # and do SMS campaigns.

SolidCoffee · ‎03-30-2018

Hello. It looks like a discussion started about two years ago on text message marketing. Square needs to have this feature. Please provide us with an update.

katieand · ‎04-02-2018

Hi @SolidCoffee - Unfortunately, we don't have any updates for this yet. I've merged your message back here so you can receive an update when we learn more and so we can keep the community organized.

Can you share a little bit more about your business and use case so I can share that with our team in charge of marketing?

SolidCoffee · ‎04-05-2018

Sure. We are a specialty coffee shop.

SolidCoffee · ‎04-11-2018

Any update on this SQ? This feature needs to be added. Are your teams REALLY looking into this?

SolidCoffee · ‎04-11-2018

@katieand Is there really a plan or action happening at SQ to look into this as an option? What's up?

AFLEMING · ‎04-11-2018

any update on this

katieand · ‎04-13-2018

Hi @AFLEMING & @SolidCoffee - no updates as of yet.

@SolidCoffee I know you shared that you're a coffee shop, but can you give us a little more insight into how you would envision using text message marketing as a feature with your Square set up? That helps the team when planning features or deciding to add them to the road map. Same for you @AFLEMING!

PineBrosCoffee · ‎04-13-2018

Square- you can limit the characters, limit the number of times we can send a message, and you can send out a notice to all of the folks we have their cell phone and give them the chance to opt out first.

SolidCoffee · ‎05-16-2018

It's pretty simple. We'd run similar campaigns that are offered with email marketing, but with SMS text.

Crashmasters · ‎05-11-2018

I'm new to square and I'm kinda disappointed that I cannot figure out a way to let all of our old customers know that we've moved to a new location. I didn't gather email addresses for the firs 10 years of business. I've already imported a lot of my customers into square but how can i text them?

katieand · ‎05-11-2018

Hi @Crashmasters - Welcome to Square!

Currently, the ability to text customers is a feature request. I've merged your request to this thread so we can track it. We'll update it as we learn of any new information from the team.

Chad · ‎05-12-2018

Hello @Crashmasters, welcome to the Seller Community!

Currently we do not offer the ability to communicate with your customers via SMS messaging at scale. Typically I would recommend Square Marketing to communicate with your customers, but this feature requires you to have customers emails.

I will make sure to share your request for SMS messaging with our Marketing Team, but I don't have a timeline on when this feature might be available.

Crashmasters · ‎05-12-2018

Thank you but this post is over 2 years old. How come it's taking so long to be implemented when clearly there's a huge demand for it?

AFLEMING · ‎05-12-2018

It sucks that they don’t offer text messages.. you think they would improve and move with the times.. I’m going to have to reconsider this square thing

SolidCoffee · ‎05-16-2018

Maybe ask again for an update?

vp1 · ‎05-14-2018

I'm with everyone else here. I want to switch, but there is no way my customers are going to accept email as the marketing option. I currently pay $250, which may seem high, but my customers use the text marketing feature, and the few that opted for emails are few and far between. FiveStars allows us to create weekly or monthly campaigns and I was really looking forward to switching, but without the text option it is a hard pass, I would probably be paying $175/monthly through square, but it isn't worth saving 75 when most of my customers would never see my campaigns. Huge opportunity being missed out on here.

lxds · ‎05-16-2018

ClickSend.com I currently use Click Send for text marketing it works pretty well and there’s an app so you can send messages directly from your phone

mream · ‎05-27-2018

There are a ton of companies that do this. Not sure why Square can't figure it out or why they don't want to implement it. There's definitely demand, the technology is widely available, and it would add significant value to a currently mediocre marketing offering.

All you see in this thread is "I'll give this to the product team" or the "marketing team." No real action.

I'd love to get a straight answer from square about where this is in the product roadmap (if it's there at all) and why this isn't being implemented.

cupzcoffeeaz · ‎06-20-2018

This reply was created from merging an existing thread: Marketing to Loyalty customer text campaigns

Hi all,

i recently started using square. I was going to sign up for loyalty but then I realize it just offers the counter for stars.

I am not sure if square is planning to expand to make the phone or email collection useful.

For example, if you use fivestars loyalty, you don’t only track customers rewards but you can also increase customer acquisition and loyalty by sending text campaigns to different segments of customers.

1st visitors, frequent and VIP customers

Signing for loyalty would be a no brainer for business owners.

I am considering signing up for fivestars or some other loyalty program that would allow me utilize the phone numbers collected to mallet to my customers. The drawback is that we have to have a separate device , manually add coupons in the POS and then have the person on the register manage two devices. So it is quite a bit of overhead.

square PM team hope you can get something done soon or let me know of it is in your roadmap.

if it is I’ll just wait for the release

edwardwb · ‎06-22-2018

Hi @mream and to everyone who’s taken the time to share their thoughts on this feature request. To kick things off, I’m Edward and I’m a Product Marketing Manager for Square Marketing and I work very closely with our Product Manager, engineers, and a number of our sellers.

It’s very important for us to keep a pulse on what’s top of mind for our sellers, so please continue to provide feedback on Square Marketing and Square Loyalty and the improvements you’d like to see! As for this exact feature, this is definitely something that comes up regularly when we talk to and survey people (as well as a number of other key improvements). Since we only have a limited number of resources, prioritization is challenging but we’re giving SMS functionality a lot of consideration, and are planning to offer automated SMS triggers through Loyalty as a first step. While I can't commit to any specific timeline at the moment, I can definitely commit to reaching back out to share future updates, as well as to solicit help when we’re ready to test things out.

While on the topic, I’d love to hear if any of you have used SMS marketing tools in that past and what your experience was like. What were your open, engagement, and redemption rates (if you offered discounts)? What made you believe this was a useful tool for marketing your business? I would definitely appreciate hearing more of your thoughts on the topic! If you’re interested in chatting further, please sign up for a 30 minute conversation here.

Can we use text messaging instead of email for Square Marketing?

Re: Can we use text messaging instead of email for Square Marketing?