Live Q&A: Ask us anything about Square Loyalty 🌟

[cspillane]

On Thursday, February 23, the Square Loyalty team hosted a Q&A (@cspillane, @seiderman, and @lornaz) alongside Square small business evangelist and former Super Seller, @PessoAlumni (former owner of Pesso’s Ices & Ice Cream with 5+ years of experience using Square Loyalty at his business).

We heard what’s working well for your business, as well as ways we can better serve your needs.

[cspillane]

Hi @TSHomeStudio,

Thanks for contributing to the Q&A today. 🙂 In order: 

1. While we have no plans to expand pricing plans at this time, we appreciate your input and will take the feedback into consideration. 
2. Subscribing to Square Marketing allows you to set up automated email and text messaging campaigns including birthday promotions. Check out this support center article for more information on using automated campaigns.
3. Can you help us understand this issue a bit more? Looking at your account, it looks like you’re not subscribed to Text Message Marketing. Sellers using both Loyalty and Text message Marketing automatically get a unified consent (legal) from their buyers when the buyer agrees to the Loyalty terms & conditions. Please let us know your thoughts and we’ll try to figure this out with you!

[JMalatt]

Hi there, so what would be some of your ideas to utilize this kind of loyalty program for a hair salon and spa? 

thank you! 

[cspillane]

Hi @JMalatt,

Thanks for joining today! There are many hair salons and spas using Square Loyalty. 🙂 We see ~60% of Beauty & Personal Care sellers implement a spend-based loyalty program, but you can also choose to implement item-based, category-based, or visit-based programs instead. Once you pick the type of program you want to set up, the options are endless for building it out.

Here are two example scenarios:

1. If you’re selling retail items in addition to hair/beauty services, you could choose to set up a “spend-based” loyalty program (where customers earn rewards based on their total amount before tax and tip). From there, reward allocation correlates directly to how much they spend at your business. 
2. Alternatively, if you wanted to weigh product and service purchases differently, you could go with one of the “item-based” or “category-based” setups. That would allow you to reward points based on specific items (e.g. cut 10 points, color 12 points, massage 15 points, retail product 2 points) or specific categories (e.g. all hair or spa services 10 points, all retail purchases 5 points) more uniquely. 

Hope that helps you think through ways you can get started!

[JMalatt]

Thank you so much, I will definitely be playing around with the reward function this week. 

[JUYBoutique20]

I would love for the loyalty program to be able to exclude items with a sale price without me having to go to each item and exclude it.  Like a toggle on to exclude those items if we choose.

[seiderman]

Hi @JUYBoutique20, appreciate the feedback. Mentioned this above, but additional controls over point accrual and reward redemption are definitely top of mind for the team. While I don’t have a specific timeline to share right now, we’ll be sure to broadly announce any changes.

[thestorehouse]

My customers have been requesting that they see how many points they have on the receipt when checking out in the store.  Is that a feature that will become available in the future?

[seiderman]

Hi @thestorehouse, while total point balance isn’t available on receipts, your customers should be able to access this information through a couple of different channels:

• Loyalty status page: Linked at the top of their digital receipt, your customers should be able to access their Loyalty status page to review their total point balance, available rewards, and any recent loyalty activity. You can check out your custom URL here.
• Cash App. If your customers have linked their account to their Cash App, they can view the information above in Cash App on their mobile device. For more information on Cash App, I’d recommend checking out this article. 

Hope this helps, but let me know if you have any additional questions / feedback. 

[viluc]

Love everyone's feedback and questions so far, which are similar to the questions or concerns I have been having. I haven't seen someone addressing referrals yet. I get a lot of clients from referrals, this is something I wanted to do but I haven't found the right system for this. I feel this would be an excellent feature for the loyalty program. 

Here are some ideas maybe this can work:

- Client sends a link and both people get points

- Client has a QR code

[cspillane]

Hi @viluc,

Thank you for this feedback! Referrals are something we’ve been hearing our customers ask for, and while I don’t have an exact timeline of when we’d roll this functionality out, I can say it’s top of mind for the team and we’ll be sure to announce any changes more broadly. 

[grantlantalawn]

I have a landscape business. is this something that would be useful? 

[PessoAlumni]

Hey @grantlantalawn - that’s a great question!

I would say it depends on what your goals are, what your customers’ spending habits are, and how you run your business. 

Having a loyalty program could be a great marketing and recruitment strategy. I’m sure some potential new customers would definitely be encouraged to sign up if you tell them that after every X services, they can get X for free or $ off. 

If you have a lot of customer drop off and want more consistent long term customers, then a loyalty program could also encourage them to stay on with you and get more consistent services.

If you really don’t have drop off and your customer base is pretty steady, and you’re able to easily convert potential customers to long term steady customers, then you might not need it.

Completely up to you, and there’s always new ways to use loyalty programs! Let us know more about your business and what your thoughts are, and I’d love to talk more about it!

[doc_choc]

Thank you @cspillane for the opportunity to discuss Square Loyalty. We are based in the UK and currently use it and love the functionality it offers. Having said this we have a few challenges using the system and have some functionality we would love to see.

1. We struggle to gain traction for signup both in store and online as our business needs require us to capture both email and mobile and then assign the customer to a group. Can this be done easily with the current signup process online and at POS?

2. As I said our business needs require us to capture both mobile for loyalty and email for direct newsletter marketing in store and online. We would love to see Loyalty and marketing to be fully integrate both online and in store. By this I mean an embedded form at POS and online that captures a minimum of email and mobile and store as a profile in the customer database with statuses or enrolled and subscribed for GDPR marketing compliance in Europe. The signups are all contained in one database (loose the Weebly Promote and consolidate in customer profiles and use Square marketing). Then enable Square businesses the flexibility to use the collected customer data to market direct to customers via text (not yet available in the UK), email or both.

3. mentioned in the thread earlier we would like to see points being redeemable as well as collected on line.
4. We have tried to capture email and mobile number via the Square links provided. One of the links is very cumbersome as it requires the customer to enter a mobile number, then a texted pin to verify, then back to enter more details ie email, name etc not ideal in store at the POS. The other requires email and mobile entry which is good but then does not allow us to modify/save the profile ie add missing points as it does not capture a name and surname which the Square system requires to enable modified profiles to be saved.

5. Are there any moves to capture online marketing signups and loyalty as one? At the moment one goes to Weebly Promote, the other to customer profiles.

[seiderman]

Hey @doc_choc, appreciate you joining the Q&A and sharing some of the pain points you’re currently experiencing. As you know, one of the challenges is that the Loyalty program is based on phone numbers, while Marketing is using email addresses. While we do have a number of solutions in place to help collect email addresses at the POS or Online, there’s definitely some limitations in our current tools. The good news is that this is something the team is aware of and are in the process of exploring a few different options to help businesses like yours collect any critical customer data both in-store and online. While I don’t have a specific timeline on delivering these updates, we’re hoping to start rolling out some of these changes in the coming months. 

[doc_choc]

@seiderman thank you for the update and understanding. The system has such great aspects and functionality and potential, it’s just frustrating that the last few dots need joining as we really would love to maximise the full potential of this. I know things are never as simple and straightforward to adjust, there is a process and knee jerk changes are not the best way forward. I also appreciate that there is always a bigger picture, so it’s great to hear that there may be some movement on this in the coming months. Thank you again. 👍

[seiderman]

Definitely. I'll also try and make sure to reach out directly with any specific updates. 

[WineCurmudgeon]

I agree it would be very helpful if Loyalty and Marketing and Customer Profile were better integrated. I have customers complain that after they sign up for Loyalty they don't get their email with special invitations, coupons, etc. The reason they don't is because Marketing does not have permission to use their email address. At least I think that is the problem. If not, please let me know. 

[doc_choc]

Hi @WineCurmudgeon, yes you are spot on with the problem (I’m in tears when we don’t sign up customers as they leave the shop, missed opportunity 😫). All the elements are pretty much there, they just need bringing together, tidying up. I’m hoping the clever people at Square see this and can apply their Square magic touch sooner rather than later. Do this and it would be a truly awesome, powerful marketing tool. 

[GACoffee]

The biggest gripe for me is that Square marketing via text requires a separate opt in for the customer. Understandable, but when is that to occur? Text marketing would be the most effective but at present is useless to me. 

[doc_choc]

@GACoffee Sounds like it’s part of the tidying up process, smoothing out the little niggles. Permission status whether it be email or text always seem a little challenging. We don’t have the text marketing here in the UK just yet so haven’t experience what you described .

[lornaz]

Hi @GACoffee! I have good new for you! For our Loyalty sellers, text message marketing does not require a separate sign up for your Loyalty enrollees. All your Loyalty enrollees who have enrolled in the last 1.5 years will be automatically opted in to Text Message Marketing. You may have a subset of customers who pre-date the combined opt-in, and thus do not have the proper consent to be reached via Text Message Marketing. However, this subset is still reachable via a Loyalty-specific one-time campaign provided through Text Message Marketing. You should be able to see how many customers you have who have opted into text message marketing in the sign up flow (before you sign up). Let me know if this helps!