How Loyal Are You? What's your best practices for using Square Loyalty?

[SVLFever]

Hello Square Friends!

We recently launched Square Loyalty after using a different customer loyalty program for 18 years in our previous POS system.   So far things are going really well, with us getting to 1000 loyalty customers in our third month of use.

Square Loyalty has all sorts of great tools and gadgets, such as promotional campaigns and automations, if opted.   This has made us wonder;

• How often should we be reaching out to customers?
• What should we promote, such as birthday and loyalty anniversaries?
• What should we NOT do?
• What successes and/or failures have others had that we can learn from (hence this post)?

It is true that it's a lot easier (and cheaper) to retain a customer, so I recommend using as many of these tools at our disposal to help your business succeed.   So, what's your thoughts?

[TheRealChipA]

Hey there @SVLFever.  Until two years ago, I refused to use Loyalty programs at all.  Mostly that was because as a customer of other businesses I found them to be annoying, clingy, difficult to use or remember, etc.  But I’ll admit that when I tried Square’s, it converted me to the dark side.  LOL. Currently, we have over 2,500 loyalty enrollees with more being added every month.  Anyway, to answer your questions for my ice cream shop…….

We currently don’t use automated text messages.  I’m thinking about it, but I want to weigh the pros and cons of being too “in their face,” as it were.  We also don’t do birthday/loyalty anniversaries, obviously, for the same reason.  Customers DO get messages when they earn rewards and when they earn more points, but we don’t pester them with regular texts beyond that.  Keep in mind that my aversion to “too much communication” is probably a Boomer-related thing, since as a customer I just do not want to hear from businesses that much, I don’t want them to tell me how needy they are, etc, so I extend that same “courtesy” to my own customers.

We DO have regular loyalty promotions.  Usually they take the form of extra points for purchases during some pre-defined period.  Also, we do occasional contests for extra points or freebies.  I’m working on one now that will be a survey allowing loyalty customers to vote on which new toppings we should add next year.  But I’m still working on the specifics of how that will work.  This will be a FB and Loyalty survey with loyalty customers who respond earning stuff.

Since we use a Connected Terminal as our customer-facing payment device, customers have the ability to enroll (or not), as well as to automatically apply earned rewards to their current transaction.  If a customer pays with cash, we do mention our loyalty program so that we can enroll them on our Restaurants POS if they desire to do so.  I’ve found that this “organic” approach has worked well for us — well enough that in two years we have 2,500 enrollees which I consider great for an ice cream shop!

We also mention our loyalty program in occasional FB posts/ads, just in case someone gets the urge to sign up when they see those.

[SVLFever]

FWIW @TheRealChipA , my businses has had great success using loyalty (with my other POS).   I know for a fact that customer drove by other facilities to come to my place because they were being rewarded for their purchases.  When I discontinued the original program last year (as I knew I would be making the leap to Square at some point), my customers had enough faith in me that I would be bringing it back.  Although we had originally planned it would only be gone for about 4 months, it ended up being over a year.    Since the re-launch, I have had multiple customers thank me for bringing it back.

Some of the things that we have done in the past include

• Rewarding out top tier customers (about 50 every year) with a personalized gift at Christmas.   These gifts ranged from our logo hoodie, to a basket with their favorite beverages (including alcohol), our logo beanie filled with scratch off tickets, and other gifts.
• We would offer them the ability to go to our local Single A baseball team games free of charge (we have season tickets as a sponsor).
• Special events that they could bring themselves and up to 5 family members/friends for a free night of food, drinks and play.
• Other "one off" event invites.
• Discounts on certain items based on loyalty level.

The one thing we did not do often was communicate to them.  I feel the same way that you do (as a Gen X'r) that I don't want to be inundated with emails and texts.   What I'm finding interesting is that I have had ZERO customers complain to me about the texts that they are receiving from the purchase automation, and some of them are getting 3, 4, 5 or more each visit.  I think it's actually working out better because they know that they are linked correctly to their purchase (which is important when in a group setting like a bowling league).

Since we are in the busy time of year for our facility, I know we are going to focus on some specific promotions to help drive business when it's slower.   I have a couple months to figure out what that should be.

Thank you for taking the time to share your experience.  If you get any questions, please let me know.

[TheRealChipA]

@SVLFever Oh, I’m a believer now.  It just took me a while! LOL. I forgot to mention that I’m also using loyalty tiers.  I have 4 tiers set up and each one gives the customers point multipliers once they reach that tier.  I really like and so do my more loyal customers!

[ryanwanner]

Hey @SVLFever and @TheRealChipA ! Jumping in on the loyalty tier conversation here!

I also use the loyalty tiers for my business, but I give people the option on things. They can use their points for specific freebies when it's time, or they can allow their points to accrue and level up. For my silver tier, where people have over 30 points built up, they get an automatic 5% discount on all purchases. For gold, they get an automatic 10% discount.

I then set up automatic discounts for the Silver and Gold groups so I don't have to remember who is on each tier (although at that sales volume it's easy to remember their names). The only catch with this is since automatic group discounts aren't available in the online environment I have to remember to give out coupon codes for the tier members.

[TheRealChipA]

Interesting.  I didn’t realize that Loyalty had added the ability to create groups based on loyalty tiers.  I’ll definitely have to check that out.  Thanks @ryanwanner!

[BofBArtStudio]

We have used the Loyalty feature for years.  I love that I was able to modify it from "points" to "butterflies". 🦋

I haven't modified our program for many years other than I did recently create tiers and bonus points.

For us we have it set up that every $15 you spend you get a butterfly. When you get 10 butterflies you get 20% off.  Accumulate those butterflies for the next level to get 25% off. 

Then we have recently implemented double point happy hour.  

We also automatically send out a birthday bonus.

We have automation set also for customers who have not visited us in 3 months I believe. 

I really like the tiers that were recently introduced and I plan on spending a little bit more time fine tuning that and promoting it once we get past the holidays. 

Our customers love it. I believe we switched to Square's loyalty program in 2016.

One of the things that I really love is being able to see the reports that come with loyalty to view the top customers in both total spend and total visits.