@erinreyehair Obviously I can’t tackle all of your questions satisfactorily. But before I try to speak to a few of them, let me add one more thing. The points I made initially actually came up when I was a Constant Contact and, then, a MailChimp customer. I’ve used all three (including Square) in my nearly 13 year run with my current business. I noticed these issues with MailChimp and reached out to their support team. It was then that I learned how these email marketing folks track opens. Most of them either add a piece of tracking code/tracking dot that is a macro triggered when emails are read. Unfortunately, with the rise of email pre-scanning bots to filter/categorize our emails for us, these macros are triggered before a human actually opens the emails. This can often lead to false positives. Another issue occurs when email clients filter out images (like Outlook does) so as to protect us from malicious code that could be lurking in them. In this case, even when humans DO read the email, if the images aren’t loaded, the tracking macros aren’t triggered. So, this leads to false negatives.
Now, even with all of this, the tracking statistics for email opens is still a reasonable metric, as long as one doesn’t put too much into it. By comparing one campaign to another — especially with email lists that are more or less constant even if they grow — we can see trends in how our marketing emails are being opened.
One thing I NEVER do anymore is worry about whether Customer-X opened and email and then quit, or Customer-A never has opened an email. At the individual level this will always be tricky and probably irrelevant. But, when looked at in the aggregate, the metric is pretty sound and can tell us a lot about how our emails are being received.
Of course, metrics like unsubscribes are highly accurate and should always be watched because if we are getting lots of unsubscribes, that means that we might need to tweak our messages. It also might mean that we are sending too many emails and people are getting tired of hearing from us so much.
Just remember — look ONLY at the trends for open rates. Don’t get too bogged down in the individual customer details there. They won’t always make sense if you do. But they average out to a helpful number over time.
Now, to the topic of new vs. returning customers. First, understand that that is not a number I care about in my business — at least not overall. If I care about that, i care about it with my Loyalty Program customers. Knowing how many new customers signed up and how many are coming back regularly is vital and speaks to the health of my Loyalty Program. But overall, it is meaningless to me.
Having said that, here’s a scenario.
- A customer pays cash and does not ask for a receipt. Are they new or returning? There is no way that Square (or any POS) can say for sure.
- A customer has a wallet full of cards and picks one at random for each visit. Are they returning? Sure. Can Square tell? Not at all, since there are thousands of people with my name. All of those cards could be me, or none of them. It’s impossible.
- A customer pays with a card most of the time, but chooses to use cash a few times a month. Can Square detect the returning customers in those cases? Maybe, but only if the customer chooses to get a receipt (to a number it has seen before) or to add the sale to their customer directory entry on file.
Again, new vs. returning customers is a great metric, but it becomes less so if you try to get too granular. If you look at high level trends, it is very useful and can speak to the health and the vitality of your business. If you get bogged down in the details and minutiae, you will get frustrated quickly because these kinds of metrics are not meant to be that specific. As you can see in my examples above, it would be impossible to do so without every human being having a microchip implanted at birth that we scan for every sale.
That’s what I’ve learned after decades in business. Square is neither better nor worse than all the others in this arena. It is — as they say — what it is.
Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)
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