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From operational costs to daily sales, it’s important to know how your business is running, down to the last cent. After all, you put a lot of work into your business (not to mention your blood, sweat, and tears), and knowing what is working can help your business thrive. One way to track that success? Your email marketing metrics.
Collecting emails through Square
Before you can drive and track your sales through targeted email marketing, you need to make sure that you have customers signed up to receive emails from you about your business and products. There are two ways you can collect your customers’ emails and have them automatically populate into your Customer Directory ready to be emailed: a printed QR code or sharing a link to the sign up form. You can also collect emails through your Square Point of Sale app or your Square Online site, however you will need to still have them sign up for marketing emails through one of the other methods.
Collecting your customers’ emails will allow you to engage with your customers through a channel outside of your online business, social media, or physical store, and is the first step to improve email marketing.
If you’re new to email marketing for business, here are some quick email marketing tips to consider before you get started:
- Make sure to avoid common email marketing mistakes, like sending emails that are too long and won’t interest your customer.
- Before you send your first campaign, ensure your email account security to keep information you distribute (and get in return) secure.
- Think about which email marketing metrics to track. Explore data from industry benchmarks to 2020 email marketing statistics, and decide what metrics will make a campaign successful to you — a high click-through or open rate? A high number of subscribers?
Tracking sales generated by email marketing campaigns
When you send out an email campaign (or post to Facebook) through integrated email apps, like Mailchimp on Square App Marketplace, you can learn a lot about your in-store customer buying behaviour and the impact of your email marketing for business.
To improve email marketing, you can track attributable sales and purchases (the amount of money you make from sales and the number of purchases) by customers who have viewed a marketing email or Facebook campaign. With Mailchimp, you’ll also have access to the tools you need to promote targeted email marketing campaigns and stay in touch with your customers, too. You can start driving traffic to your new landing page with Facebook and Instagram ads in Mailchimp in only a few easy steps.
Reviewing your sales
Before you begin tracking how to increase sales with email marketing, you should access your business’s sales information. You can find everything you need to know about your business in the Sales tab of your Square Dashboard. Your sales summary shows you important sales stats, including gross sales, discounts, and net sales. This information matters to you and your business because it gives you a bird’s-eye view of how your business is doing.
Gross sales tells you how much you’re selling in total, sans discounts and refunds, whereas net sales lets you know what you’re taking in after refunds and discounts are deducted.
You can use targeted email marketing to advertise discounts to get people in the door, or to return if they’ve become a lapsed user, but you want to make sure you’re never discounting more than you’re taking in.
After you’ve started to improve email marketing, you’re also able to download any of your sales reports as an Excel file so you can share them with your accountant, lawyer, or staff. Just choose the time period that you would like to review in detail as a download and select export, which will allow you to choose to download it as an Excel file or through accounting apps QuickBooks or Xero. Please note, you’ll need to connect either of those apps in order to upload your file via Square.
Driving sales through email
Outside of coupons, promotions, and other discounts, you can also use targeted email marketing to drive sales through Loyalty program software. With Square Loyalty, you can create digital rewards programs for your customers to help generate repeat business, and let them know about this feature through an email campaign.
After your customers make an eligible purchase, they can enter their phone number to enrol. If they didn’t enrol at the point of sale, but they did provide their email to receive a digital receipt, they will receive an email introducing the program and inviting them to sign up.
A loyalty program provides customers with an extra reason to return. Each time they make a purchase at your store (in person or online) they’re racking up loyalty points, which will in turn add up to a free coffee, pastry, or notebook — whatever product you feel comfortable offering as a reward. And you can improve email marketing with an email reminder of that reward.
Furthermore, 65 percent of consumers surveyed said they look to see if a business has a loyalty program prior to shopping at a store, visiting a restaurant, or trying out a service.
