Q&A: Customer Communication during the Holidays

[Kpay]

Hi Sellers,

The Holiday season is coming up quickly! On Thursday, November 16th from 10am-11am PST, Christina Dam, Product Marketing Lead @ Square, hosted a Live Q&A here in the community on: How to Effectively Communicate with your Customers during the Holidays.

@XtinaDam runs the Product Marketing team at Square focusing on products such as Square Loyalty, Marketing, Gift Cards and Directory. She has more than a decade of experience in digital marketing, e-commerce, brand-building, and bringing new products and digital experiences to life.

One of the products - Square Marketing - Christina is working on this holiday season.

 A couple example questions:

• How can I best let my customers know about our holiday specials for the upcoming season?
• I use Facebook to communicate to my customers, why should I use Square?

Thanks in advance! Cheers!

[XtinaDam]

Here's the answer for your question #3, @pessosices: 

That’s great that you already ordered the new Square Register - thanks for being an early adopter! 🎉   I’m excited about the new opportunities the customer facing display opens up for programs like Loyalty, but I don’t have specific plans we can share yet. Stay tuned and we’ll definitely post here when we have more info, it’ll be something our teams are working on throughout the next year! 

[XtinaDam]

Hey @pessosices, realized I never answered #4 for you! A couple cool things are coming out: 

We just launched our 2017 Holiday Sales Guide! There are some great tips on how to leverage different Square products to get ready, get set and sell for the Holiday season.

Additionally, we’ve just started rolling out the ability to offer discounts and promotions on eGift Cards. If you don’t see it in your account, it should be appearing soon! You’ll be able to offer a flat discount on eGift Cards for all customers, or create promo codes that can be distributed only to certain people if you wish.

We definitely have some cool product releases coming up in the next few months! I would recommend subscribing to the Product Updates blog to stay up to date on all the latest and greatest features! To subscribe click on ‘Subscribe to Product Updates’ on the top right corner of the page to get notifications about the newest releases.  💯

[XtinaDam · Accepted solution]

Thank you all for the great questions and participation, I hope you all learned something or got some new ideas to try for your business!

To wrap up, I thought I’d leave you with my personal Top 3 tips for the holidays:

1) Keep your business top-of-mind:

• As you all know, everyone gets busy busy busy as the holidays near. On top of that, all our email inboxes get flooded by offer after offer from companies far and wide. Even your most loyal customers can easily find themselves distracted by the flood of messaging around them. I hear a lot of owners resist emailing at this time of year, out of respect for their customer’s inboxes. However, in order to keep your business top-of-mind, it’s really important to actually engage more. Resist the urge to back-off, as it could mean your customers ‘forget’ about you during holiday shopping runs. I’m not saying email every day, but you may want to push a few extra messages if you want to take advantage of the holiday boost.

• With Square Marketing, there are a couple features that can help make this easy. Take advantage of our seasonal pre-designed templates (see them all here) to reduce the time it takes to craft a message, and also schedule your emails ahead of time. If you can carve out an hour or two now, you could set-up all your campaigns for the next couple months and schedule them now -- and cross all that marketing off your list!

2) Set your business apart:

• Each business is unique, and that’s what sets you apart! Try to create an experience that’s special and authentic for your customers, which can give them a good reason to visit during the busy holiday season.

• This could take the form of special offers, or try something more unique in-store, like hosting a special holiday event or open-house, or create special, personal moments in-store like offering free hot chocolate or light snacks for busy shoppers.

3) Don’t forget your Gift Cards!

• Looking across all our Square sellers, we see customers spend 600 percent more on gift cards in December than any other time of the year. They not only make great gifts and stocking stuffers, but can be a good way to generate additional sales from existing customers. Perhaps you offer 10% off Gift Cards over $50 or $100, and that could be enough for your loyal customers to stock up for themselves too. Read more about how Gift Cards can help your business here.

• If you don’t yet have gift cards, Square offers both plastic Gift Cards as well as free digital eGift Cards that customers can buy online and have emailed to friends and family. We highly recommend both so you never miss a gift card sale! Click here to see all our gift card options.

We wish you all the best success through the holidays -- and if any other questions come up, feel free to post them and we'll answer!