Office Hours: Q&A with Anne Harris about Loyalty & Marketing

[tranguyen]

Hello Seller Community!

Join us on Thursday, October 7th at 3PM BST for an office hours with Anne Harris, our Product Marketing Manager who oversees the launches for our two newest features - Loyalty & Marketing!

Ask us about Square Loyalty and Square Marketing!

As Product Marketing Manager, Anne helps sellers to understand the benefits of Square’s features and product. She’ll be online on October 5th at 3PM BST to answer all your questions about Square Loyalty & Marketing!.

A few example questions:

• How can I optimise Square Marketing for my retail business?

• Is Square Loyalty suitable for my restaurant?

• What kind of insights or reporting can I generate from Loyalty & Marketing?

Regardless of whether you are already using Square Loyalty & Marketing or not, this will be a great chance to get your questions answered about the products and see if they are a good fit for your business!

How does this work?

Ask your questions ahead of time below and we’ll answer every question on Thursday, October 7th, 2021! 

Please note: There will be no recording of the event as it is text-based. All the replies can be read and discovered on this thread after the event has ended!

Note on account-specific questions: For your privacy and security, we are not able to address issues related to specific account status details in our public forums. If you need account assistance, please contact our Customer Success team and they'll be able to take a deeper dive.

Q&A: Ask us anything about Square Loyalty & Marketing!

[Valleycraft]

Hi, can you tell me if customers have to use a mobile phone number every time they want to claim reward points if they're not using a linked credit/debit card?

Some of my customers don't have a mobile phone so I can see that being a potential problem. Thanks!

[Anneharris]

While Square Loyalty is designed to take UK mobile phone numbers, we have seen customers successfully enter 01 landline numbers, too - it’s hard to guarantee a landline number will work since UK landline numbers can vary in the number of digits, but it’s worth a try!

The mobile experience is definitely best since that’s how customers can get automatic text messages saying they have earned points from a purchase, or that their points with you are about to expire. 

Also, if a customer does get a mobile phone later and wants to change the phone number associated with their Loyalty profile, you can do that for them in the Customers section of your Square Dashboard.

[Valleycraft]

Thanks Anne.  A follow-on question to that - I've started using the Loyalty program and it seems to be going well so far. Most people know their mobile number but sometimes they take too long to find it and I have to manually add their number to their loyalty profile and adjust their stars manually too.  However, as they haven't consented to receiving text messages yet, they don't receive the automatic ones when I add them and add their stars.

So, my question is - when they come in next time, will it prompt them to consent to receiving messages or is there any other way of doing it as if I try to send them their status, it says that they haven't consented to receiving text messages and won't send?

Thanks, Gavin

[Wecancantwe]

Hello 🔲

Quick background on why I'm here - I'm currently developing an online booking system for a Bar/Sports venue using Webflow / Paperform and Square so very interested in both Loyalty and Marketing as well as Appointments. Initially, the client will only be using online payments but I'm very intrigued at how the full suite of Loyalty + Marketing + particularly Cash App can make a really compelling case for them making a full switch to Square. 

Across the club there are a vast number of payment scenarios from players paying subs to play in sports teams through to drinks payments at their licensed bar. What's possible with it today and what's the vision / roadmap for Cash App in the UK in the future?

Thanks

Matthew

[Anneharris]

We don’t have any insight into Cash App’s roadmap but I would encourage you to check out our Beta Community to potentially know about any new features we’re testing.

[Valleycraft]

Me again!  If I set up the Loyalty programme, do I have to have it on both the till system and my online webstore?  I only really want it for customers that come into my shop initially, not for orders on the website.  Thanks.

[Anneharris]

If you have Square Online, the loyalty programme will be available both in the shop on your point of sale and on Square Online. Right now, there’s no way to keep the Loyalty programme in-store only, BUT there is a small workaround: if you set your Loyalty point earning and/or rewards to be category-based (ie ‘earn a point for every drink purchased’ and ‘get 20% off on all drinks’ or similar), category-based rewards do not work on Square Online so sellers would be able to enrol online, but NOT earn points or redeem for rewards online. 

If your online storefront is not Square Online, your Loyalty programme will not automatically appear.

[Anneharris · Accepted solution]

Thank you everyone for joining the Office Hour today! Here are some general advices and best practices to help you get setup with Square Loyalty and Square Marketing.

Square Loyalty

Not sure what kind of Loyalty programme you want to offer? The most popular choice is spend based: you decide how much money a customer needs to spend to earn a point (for example, every £2 spent is 1 point). You then can decide what points can be redeemed for: discounts on items/categories/total sale, or free items. 

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After you launch your Loyalty programme, keep an eye on how many customers are enrolling, earning points, and redeeming them for rewards. You can see this all at a glance in the Square Dashboard (Square Loyalty > Reports) A successful programme should show a higher number of Loyalty sales than non-Loyalty sales. If that’s not what you’re seeing, it’s easy to tweak the programme in Loyalty Settings on Dashboard, too. Try adding a new reward, or reducing the number of points needed to redeem a reward.

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Square Marketing

The easiest way to build an email marketing programme is to start with setting up automated campaigns. Square Marketing lets you create birthday emails, welcome emails, and even ‘we haven’t seen you in a while’ emails that will automatically send to the right customers at the right time. These automated campaigns often perform better in open rate and coupon redemption than manual campaigns, too. 

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Looking to drive more customers to sign up for your email marketing programme? Beyond creating a custom poster with your enrolment QR code in Square Dashboard (Marketing > Settings > In Store Signage) and putting it prominently in your store, you can also take the link that QR code directs customers to, and put that link on your social media and website. 

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Square sellers sometimes ask how to think about using Marketing versus using Loyalty for their business. We keep the two products as separate subscriptions partly so sellers can decide if they need both. Both Square Marketing and Square Loyalty help you to connect with your customers - Marketing gives you an easy way to send business updates, newsletters, and coupons, while Loyalty lets you reward regular customers by directly tying their purchases to exclusive perks. Personally, I think they enhance each other - nurturing a customer through Marketing to become a Loyalty subscriber, and keeping Loyalty subscribers in the loop about new events and products through Marketing emails. 

[phillipsrw]

Hi, I'm subscribed to Square Loyalty. I see the US system has an option in the dashboard settings to allow emails to be captured at POS, ie you offer points for the member to supply an email address. Is this something that you will be enabling on the UK loyalty programme.

Email capture is very important to our business and think it would be a positive step to enable this during enrollment at the POS and via the member account login link. Capturing members emails needs to be made as easy as possible at POS preferably.

Loyalty is great for rewarding returning customers but it would be great to communicate with the loyalty members by email ie offers, new product updates, we can't communicate with loyal customers without an email address.

Can you let me know if the enrollment option in the dashboard is coming to the UK loyalty programme?

Many thanks.

[Emma_]

Hi @phillipsrw, thanks for your post. The current Loyalty sign-up flow requires a phone number and I am not sure about any workaround. I'm asking our team and I'll get back to you with more information soon. 

The best way in the meantime is to create a customer profile for any new customers and ask them their email addresses if they wish to sign up for your Loyalty program. You can then manually apply the points. This is not ideal but it will help collect your customer's email addresses during in-person transactions. 

[phillipsrw]

Thank you for your help Emma. 

We have been doing this manually as you suggest, but it would be a lot slicker if we could have the email option enabled. Also when the shop is busy it would make checkout and sign up a lot easier as we stop collecting loyalty sign ups when busy.

Not sure I itsjust our business but a strong email list is a good revenue generator, seems a shame not to be able to capture loyal customers and communicate via email promos and offers.

Thanks. Look forward to hearing back on the possibility of Square activating email signup I the dashboard as part of loyalty. Thx 😊