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Square Community Moderator

Learn from Square’s Super Sellers: Choosing the Best Loyalty Program for Your Business

Hi, Sellers! 😄

 

We are excited to launch this thread connecting our Super Sellers and business owners struggling to choose a loyalty program that supports both your business and keeps your customers happy. 

 

Please ask our Super Sellers any questions regarding their loyalty programs or, if you’re a seller with a loyalty program that works for you, share what type of program you use, why, and if you’ve ever had to update your loyalty program to better suit the needs of your business. 

AshleyK
Community Moderator, Square
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Super Seller

What we use at our garden center is the old punch card system.  Every $20 spent gets you a punch on your card, 15 punches fill a card and you get $15 off your next purchase.  The reason we have stuck with this and not transitioned to digital is for a few reasons.

1. the card is in their purse/wallet and is a physical reminder of where to go next year, most of our customers come in one time a year and do all their shopping and we don't see them again until next year.  

2. Upsell, Many customers treat the card as more important than their driver's license and have it front and center in their wallet/purse. They tell others about it.  they know exactly how many punches they have and will go back to get another item to get them over that next punch level.  That adds up to a lot of $4-$15 extra purchases.

3. There are many many purchases that do fall in the spot of being $22, $76, $267, or $35 etc that fall short of getting the next punch, we do play semi-fast and loose with the punches and will pretty much always round up if it is within $2, and tell them that we are doing that so they realize they got "special" treatment.  We'll say something like you're pretty close so don't tell my boss but I'll give you 5 punches instead of 4 and it is like you gave them an ice cream cone and they remember the special treatment.

4. People like bringing in their collection of cards they have saved over time.  People bring in 2-7 cards and we combine them all together and they may get one to 4 cards off their bill for saving them.

5. the card is in the customer's possession and gets lost.  There isn't a way to track it but a large percentage either gets lost or thrown away and therefore makes the system payout far less than the perfect card percentage of 5%.

 

this year we paid out on 1,532 cards or $22,980

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Super Seller

I have been using Square Loyalty program in the shop since it’s inception. I wanted to keep it simple so what I did was set it so that the customer gets 1 star for every 20 dollars before tax of their purchase. When they have 10 stars they can redeem them for 10% discount off their entire purchase. Few things that I have noticed over the years with the program.

 

1: the customers really like it because it just lives in the system so they don’t have to keep track of punch cards.


2: it helps drive up ticket averages because customers will add to their purchase in order to avoid missing out on a getting a star. As an example if their purchase is 35 dollars they will grab something else in order to hit 40 dollars and get 2 stars

 

3: it also gives the customer the incentive to make bigger purchases when they find that they do have a 10 star discount available for them to use

 

4: it’s simple for me also since the customers just enter their phone number and the system automatically keeps track of stars and discounts available while letting the customer decide if they want to redeem them or not on each purchase 

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Super Seller

I would be happy to share with others how we use the loyalty program.  We have been using the Square Loyalty for probably at least six years now.    

 

Right out of the gate we changed the Stars to Butterflies to be more cohesive with our business.  We LOVE that this was an option in the settings!  

 

We have not changed our rewards structure since the start and have always based it on per dollar rather than per item.  Our guests get one butterfly for every $15 spent and when they reach ten butterflies, they get 20% off their next purchase. 

 

Our rewards customers love racking up their points, and we love that the Square display tells them how many butterflies they have after every transaction.  It makes it super easy for everyone.

 

Since we use the Add Customer option to every transaction, it is easy to see when they have rewards and for the system to automatically apply their newly earned Butterflies at the end of each sale.  

 

We love that Square gives the option of adding/removing points in the customer record.  This gives us the opportunity to offer bonus butterflies for certain events.

 

Square makes it very easy to redeem rewards (although it would be nice if there was an alert message of some kind for our team since sometimes the customer has a reward to redeem and doesn't realize it).

 

Guests are more likely to purchased more items or higher ticket items when they know they have a reward to redeem, and that works very well.  We do cap our max reward amount, and that is another setting that we love.

 

 

 

~Cheryl!
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Cheryl! Tisland
Burst Of Butterflies Create & Paint Studio

BurstOfButterflies.com
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Actually there’s an alert of the employees side of the screen during checkout. Once the customer checks in if you glance right above the charge button you will notice it says “ redeem reward” if the customer has one available 

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Super Seller

We don't see that on Square For Retail.

~Cheryl!
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Cheryl! Tisland
Burst Of Butterflies Create & Paint Studio

BurstOfButterflies.com
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Super Seller

I switched from square for retail over to using the regular square pos on the Square Register just because I wanted the customer to do the check in at the beginning of each sale. Much better experience overall on it for using loyalty features 

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Super Seller

Well, I have regular Square POS installed as well.  I will test it tomorrow.  We use standard Square Stand and love it and switched to Square Retail from Square POS in January of this year.  We used regular Square POS for six years prior to that and it also didn't have an alert that I recall, but I am going to test it tomorrow.  

 

Perhaps it is just on Square Register?  We are not really wanting to switch to Square Register because of the other features we have read about that are still in development that we use every day and cannot live without.  

~Cheryl!
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Cheryl! Tisland
Burst Of Butterflies Create & Paint Studio

BurstOfButterflies.com
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Super Seller

Ah, I thought you were using Square Register when you mentioned the customer display. I have a square stand setup also so I will check both regular pos and Square for retail on it tomorrow 

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Super Seller

So I tested it with my customer account which has rewards available. I use this account for testing. And so here's what I found and hopefully I can attach the screenshots here. We have to proactively and manually click on the three dots on the right hand side to view any rewards that the customer has. It doesn't alert at all that there are rewards.

IMG_20210910_123124.jpg

IMG_20210910_123149.jpg

IMG_20210910_123201.jpg

IMG_20210910_123206.jpg

   

~Cheryl!
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Cheryl! Tisland
Burst Of Butterflies Create & Paint Studio

BurstOfButterflies.com
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Super Seller

Yeah I just tried it in both Square for Retail and regular square on the IPad in the stand and it doesn’t give the prompt like it does on Square Register. Would definitely be nice if it did

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