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, @Pesso (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.

[bradrsi]

I agree 100%!  Please make this easier Square.  The same issue I had when switching over to square with over 20,000 previously opted in loyalty customers and square will not let me reach a single one of them until they opt back in through square's system.  It is so dumb and costing square so much money.  So, I get to pay another company to reach those customers instead of square.  It will take years for it to level out and square will miss every penny of that.  

[seiderman]

Hi @WineCurmudgeon, appreciate you sharing this feedback. Since Loyalty and Email Marketing use different primary identifiers (phone vs email), we’re unable to automatically sign customers for both products. However, any customer that opts for an email digital receipt should automatically be added as a reachable contract for Email Marketing. Through your loyalty program you also have the option to enable a setting to offer your customers bonus points for providing their email address and signing on to your mailing list. If interested, you can learn more about that setting here. Finally, since our Text Message Marketing product shares the phone number identifier with Loyalty, any customer who signs up for your loyalty program will automatically be considered a reachable contact for a text based campaign.

[Mel_LUNAUSSVCS]

Why CASHAPP? Please explain why clients have to use a secondary app?? Many clients don't stay with our loyalty program, becuase of this. 

[cspillane]

Hi @Mel_LUNAUSSVCS,

Thanks for joining today. Re: Cash App, clients do not have to use it. If you’d like to disable customers from being directed here, just go into your Square Dashboard and click Loyalty > Settings > toggle off “Enable Cash App Integration” > Save. Once the Cash App integration is turned off, your clients should still be able to view the points they earned in that transaction, directly on their digital receipt. They can also click the link on the receipt to go to their personal Loyalty Status page which showcases more info on the Loyalty program, available rewards, and their historical Loyalty activities.

[Michael80]

My biggest question is, why do we have to pay extra for this service? It's just collecting and saving a tiny amount of additional data on Square's servers; it's not like Square is printing and mailing out loyalty cards to our customers. So what justifies the additional merchant cost for this service?

My business is at the smaller end of the small business scale and I'm already paying almost $500/month in Square processing fees. If the Loyalty program really does generate significantly more sales, then Square is already going to benefit from that by collecting more processing fees on each additional sale. The fact that Square wants to charge us to use this loyalty program means that either Square is not convinced that this program will actually generate more sales, or Square is just trying to greedily shake us down for more money (which perhaps I wouldn't object to so much if Square were more responsive to fixing deficiencies in their software, many of which users have been complaining about for years and years).

Now some merchants will point to generating greater loyalty revenues compared to non-loyalty revenues. But that's a false metric UNLESS you have a way of measuring how much those loyalty customers would have spent without the loyalty program. My business currently has no loyalty program yet we have a fairly large number of repeat "loyal" customers whom we see on a weekly and even daily basis. For example, there is one family who drives ~30 minutes (one way) from a neighboring town every week just to buy from our shop. If we were to add a loyalty program, of course these regular/repeat customers will count towards "higher" loyalty revenues compared against a customer who may only buy from us one time (and who won't bother signing up for loyalty).

In any case, Square has a vested interest in every one of us generating more sales because more sales equal more processing fees collected by Square. So again I ask, why is Square charging us to add a feature that should already be an integral part of our POS system?

[cspillane]

Hi @Michael80,

Thank you for sharing your perspective. For context, we charge a competitively-priced fee for Loyalty because it costs money to build and maintain the product. Without that fee, we wouldn’t have an engineering team dedicated to the product: building out customer requested feature improvements, bug fixes, etc. 

[bradrsi]

We just started using the invoice feature of Square.  Why doesn't it allow you to add and redeem loyalty points?  

[bradrsi]

I just found where to enable this in the dashboard under loyalty settings.  Hopefully it will accurately add rewards and also remove them if there is a refund associated with an invoice.  

[bradrsi]

I just found where to enable this in the dashboard under loyalty settings.  Hopefully it will accurately add rewards and also remove them if there is a refund associated with an invoice.  

[cspears]

We have two reward levels set for customers as they accumulate points. One of those is they can redeem 100 points to save $10 off a purchase of $75. It would be nice if the software didn't offer it until the sale was $75 or higher. If a customer has this reward on their account, they can literally buy a $5 greeting card and when they check in ... it offers them to redeem the $10 off. I hope my question makes sense.

[seiderman]

Hi @cspears, appreciate you sharing this feedback. Greater control over the reward redemption process is something we hear quite a bit from our sellers. While I don’t have anything specific to share right now, investing in this area is top of mind for the team going forward.

[coj]

The loyalty program has been great. However, on the back end, I would like to see an option to be able to add what the customers to redeem the points for by category. For example, for each drink, I have 3 different sizes.  With this current set up I would have to add each size individually as an item for the customer to be able to redeem their points towards. 

[cspillane]

Hi @coj,

Thanks for joining today! It sounds like you might have your loyalty program set up to be “item-based” (e.g. points are awarded on an item-to-item basis). Unfortunately at this time we only enable a single program set up — meaning, with an item-based program, you can’t set category-specific rules (you would need to have your overarching program set up at the category level in order to do that).

[doc_choc]

Is there a report/means to show how many loyalty signups a team member makes.

We would like to offer team members incentive rewards for the largest number of signups say per week.

[bradrsi]

This is a really good feature that should be added if it isn't there already. 

[TCSlaguna]

Agree. We would like to incentivize our team to get signups as well. 

[seiderman]

Hey @doc_choc, this is a great idea! While this reporting doesn’t exist currently, it's definitely something the team and I have been interested in solving for. Is this something you’re already tracking manually on your end? Or something new you’re looking to incorporate into your business?

[doc_choc]

We track this manually, team members make a note of who they have signed up. Signup up currently involves the team manually adding new customers, we then at the end of the week take all the new signup in the customer directory, filter them and take their email and mobile and put them on the system using the marketing signup link (this gives the then gives them the correct status for email marketing and loyalty). We also then add the points manually for the transaction made at signup. We then add the customer to a group hitch applies an % discount off drinks and gelato in our shops. So it’s very involved. I think our problem is self inflicted to a degree as we are kind of making a VIP experience/club merging two things, a loyalty programme where they collect points and we offer automatic discounts discount, along with email collection so we can also communicate directly with customer via newsletter update, which is the most effect means for online retail (for us). Ideally we would love to market direct to the customer with email and text, but have the option.

[toria031173]

When will the 'Glitch' for using the points online be fixed? My loyalty is set up by category, so customers can redeem their points for the different categories of apparel, and each category has a fixed amount of points that are used for redemption. It can't be used online, because, as I was told by support, that the redemption has to be set up for each individual Item and not by category - and I have over 25,000 SKU's.  I was informed there is no short way around the set up and they were looking into a way around it. That was a year ago and I've not seen any updates 😞

[cspillane]

Hi @toria031173,

Totally hear you that this issue is frustrating (+ you can’t easily resolve it given the volume of sku’s which is even more frustrating!)... While I don’t have a specific timeline to share with you, I do know this is a top priority for the Square Online team this year, and they will be sure to communicate updates more broadly to affected customers. 

[TCSlaguna]

When you enable the loyalty program, the “enter your email address” page doesn't show up at checkout on Square for Retail using Square Stand. This can lead to a decrease in email address collection. We would rather have a larger email marketing list than have a loyalty program. 

Feature Request: 

Keep “enter your email address” page when loyalty program is enabled. Allow email and phone number registration when signing up for loyalty. 

I know there is a way to message people and give them extra stars if they provide their email address. But not all our customers follow through with it.