Live Q&A: Ask Us Anything About Email & Text Message Marketing For the Holidays!

[Tom]

Hello Sellers!

On November 1, 2022 the Square Marketing team hosted a Q&A focused on helping sellers get the most out of Square Text Message and Email Marketing this holiday shopping season.

Our hosts were @kcapps (Product Manager) and @faiza (Product Marketing Manager) who are not only experts on Square Marketing products & services, they have extensive experience within the marketing field itself!

A few example questions:

• How do I set up automations with Square Text Message Marketing?
• What's the best way to build a list of potential customers for an email marketing campaign?
• If I could do "________" with either text message or email marketing, it would greatly improve my customers' experience.

[kcapps]

We recommend using Square Marketing instead of Weebly Promote. Weebly Promote is considered a legacy product that is no longer being supported, meaning Square is maintaining this service for existing users, but is not building new features or integrations for it. We will be migrating Weebly Promote services to Square Marketing and Text Message Marketing in late 2023.

[IceCreamWP]

thoughts about adding the capability of putting gifs/videos in your emails? 

[phillipsrw]

We currently use gifs in our newsletter emails, but not video. For our business I'm not sure if video would be of benefit, would have to weigh up the time and effort yo generate video content, but gifs certainly help. 

[kcapps]

Thank you for so much engagement in our Seller Community @phillipsrw - we are actually adding easy ways to add GIFs and Videos to your marketing campaigns in Q4 2022, to be released sometime this December!

[kcapps]

Your wish is our command! I'm excited to announce that we are adding these features in Q4 2022, to be released sometime this December.

[Seasons2]

Hello and thank you for allowing us to ask questions!! So I just started using your text messaging feature. My customers are receiving an autogenerated coupon code. I don’t have a square-based website (I have Wordpress). How do I make sure each customer can use their code if it’s not connected to my website?

thanks!

[kcapps]

Thank you for your question. We're grateful to have you as a Text Message Marketing subscriber!

If you are not using Square Online Website or Square Online Checkout, then the coupon code will not work online for online purchases, but it will still be usable in-store, if your business has the ability to take in-person payments. It is possible to use Square Online Checkout in a non-Square website builder, to ensure that Square is still processing the sale. If you were to set up your e-commerce website that way, then the coupon code would be viable both in-store and online.

[Alena]

Is this feature something customers have already signed up for? I'd hate to send out ads to those who didn't subscribe to this feature? Also, how do I activate text subscription for customers to sign up? Ex. In person check out, the app use to quickly pop up email subscription but now it fairly slow and by then the customer is already on their way. 

[kcapps]

Square Email Marketing and Text Message Marketing would only send messages to customers that have opted in with their email address, phone number or both, so only customers who want to receive marketing from your brand would receive this.

There are many ways to collect marketing opt-ins. For Email, we collect marketing opt-ins during the Email Receipt flow. For customers that choose a Text Receipt or No Receipt, you can turn on the Email Collection feature in Settings > Customers > Customer Sign Up/Email Collection. This will prompt a screen after the transaction and receipt that asks the customer if they want to opt-in to email marketing.

If you use Square Online or Square Online Checkout, you can also collect email opt-ins during a customer’s online checkout, and via website contact forms which can be found in your Square Online dashboard in Website > Form Submissions and Communications > Pop-Ups > Collect Emails. 

For Text Message Marketing, once you subscribe to this product, you can set up a Text to Join program with a QR Code that is printable to place in your store or otherwise share with customers. This option is great because they can scan the QR code to sign up after they have walked away from the register. You can also email your customers and ask them to subscribe to your Text Marketing program by texting JOIN to your Square assigned phone number.

If you have a Loyalty Program, when a customer signs up for Loyalty, they consent to Text Message Marketing as well, this allows us to send promotional messages related to their Loyalty program via SMS.

[AlexanderMK]

I have never used the Square marketing tools, but would like to start. I see square has lots of customer data from every time a card is used. How does one differentiate between those who opt in to emails and texts/can your team provide visibility into general rules of thumb and ethics behind using the data gathered by Square?

[kcapps]

While Square does create a customer profile based on a credit card transaction, Square Email Marketing and Text Message Marketing would only send messages to customers that have opted in with their email address, phone number or both, so only customers who want to receive marketing from your brand would receive this.

There are many ways to collect marketing opt-ins. For Email, we collect marketing opt-ins during the Email Receipt flow. For customers that choose a Text Receipt or No Receipt, you can turn on the Email Collection feature in Settings > Customers > Customer Sign Up/Email Collection. This will prompt a screen after the transaction and receipt that asks the customer if they want to opt-in to email marketing.

If you use Square Online or Square Online Checkout, you can also collect email opt-ins during a customer’s online checkout, and via website contact forms which can be found in your Square Online dashboard in Website > Form Submissions and Communications > Pop-Ups > Collect Emails. 

For Text Message Marketing, once you subscribe to this product, you can set up a Text to Join program with a QR Code that is printable to place in your store or otherwise share with customers. This option is great because they can scan the QR code to sign up after they have walked away from the register. You can also email your customers and ask them to subscribe to your Text Marketing program by texting JOIN to your Square assigned phone number.

If you have a Loyalty Program, when a customer signs up for Loyalty, they consent to Text Message Marketing as well, this allows us to send promotional messages related to their Loyalty program via SMS.

Square cares deeply about customer data privacy, so all methods described above are fully compliant with data collection laws, and a customer can easily opt-out of marketing with one click from an email or text at any time.

[olijebodycare]

How can I add a subscription (recurring purchases for fee) to my campaigns? What is a good way to introduce monthly subscriptions to my clients?

[kcapps]

If your brand now offers a subscription, you can promote a subscription by sending a one-time marketing campaign any time that links your customer to the subscription. For automated campaigns based on subscriptions, we do not currently offer this feature today but greatly appreciate the product feedback.

[KayJaseLemon]

 is a way to send a message to those who walk up in store order (register) when their order is ready? 

[kcapps]

This would be considered a transactional message, as opposed to a marketing message. We've definitely received this same request before - our Restaurant POS and E-Commerce teams are actively looking into this capability. I've passed your feedback onto those teams. Thanks for your question!

[sugarlab]

Love square marketing so far! I have been wanting to get into more email marketing. I would love to see more personalization options, something similar to what mail chimp and other email marketing companies offer. LIke being able to segment customers based on what they buy. Ohh! A great thing for both customer management and email would be to allow them to input important dates. Then we can send them a marketing email a month before that date to tell them "oh hey, it's little bobby's birthday next month. If you want a custom cake, get in touch with us now" or something like that. 

[kcapps]

Thank you for the valuable product feedback! You can already currently create marketing audiences today based on what they buy. To do this, go to your Customers Directory, click Filters > Items, from there you can customize what kind of purchases (item, item category, etc.) you’d like to filter for. Once you have the audience created that you want to message, you can select this customer group and then click Send Campaign.

Adding important dates is excellent feedback, which I've passed on to our Customer Directory team.

[GourmetOnWheels]

I have too many questions about this subject. So I start with two of the most important ones.

1) Email Marketing - When will be able to delete images from marketing currently I have to click through about 18 pages of images via Load More, I have about 40% of images that I no longer need, and sell. 

2) I imported my list of valid customers from Mailchimp before I closed my Mailchimp account and the numbers I see in "custom"

When I create an email, I get this Imported 272, Online 12, Benelux (Mailchimp) 380 Loyalty 164, Meat 97, email subscribers 389,  Instant  Profile 71, Lapsed 15, Reachable Customers 389. But it only sends the email to 376

And all the categories in bold are ignored. How is that? To me, it looks like it is 850

René

[GourmetOnWheels]

Hello @kcapps and @faiza 

Looking forward to the answers

René

[kcapps]

1) To delete images you have previously uploaded, click on the image tile, and you will see a small “X” appear on the top right corner of the image. Click this “X” and confirm that you want to delete the image, and it will disappear.

If you’d like to delete a Free Photo offered by Square, unfortunately these images are provided by a third party and cannot be deleted at this time, however this is excellent product feedback. Your issue is very understandable if you’ve already used the majority of the images for a given keyword.

2) Each of the groupings you are seeing are actually subsets of your total count of reachable contacts. Your group “Email Subscribers” and the total reachable contacts for a campaign (389) matches because this is the actual total count.

The other groupings you’re seeing are different kinds of audiences, essentially sub-groupings of your total (389) with different labels. For example, 164 of your total reachable contacts are also Loyalty customers. 12 of your total 389 reachable contacts have purchased Online. 15 of your 389 reachable contacts are also considered Lapsed. And so on.

If the campaign only ends up sending to 376 out of 389 potentially reachable contacts, it is likely that 13 of those reachable emails bounced, or were invalid in some way when Marketing attempted to deliver the campaign. You can see which emails bounced by clicking on the completed campaign to see the detailed reporting view, and clicking Customer List at the top. In this list you’ll be able to see which contacts the campaign successfully delivered to, and which bounced (if any).

It's not clear to me where you're seeing 850 reachable customers - it's possible not all of your 850 customers are opted-in to marketing.

If you still have questions, please reach out to Support so that we can help dig into this issue with you!

[GourmetOnWheels]

@kcapps That is still a lengthy and tedious way to delete pictures as every time you delete one it goes back to page 1

René