Best Practices for Square Marketing

Once you’ve set up Square Marketing, try using the following best practices to actively engage with your customers in a mindful manner.

Choose Your Audience

With Square Marketing, you have access to automatically-created lists of your loyal, casual, and lapsed subscribed customers. You can also create your own smart groups using Customer Directory filters to automatically keep a list up to date based on how and when customers engage with you. With these insights, you can target subscribed customers most interested in what you’re sending. For example, one group may be more appropriate to receive an event invitation than another group that’s better suited to receive a sale announcement.

You’ll also want to think about the action you want each customer to take when they open your marketing campaign. Whether it’s to shop a sale or RSVP to an event, your best bet is to include one actionable link — commonly referred to as a call-to-action or CTA — as the highlight of your email. By utilising the ready-to-go templates available through Square Marketing, you’ll be able to add your CTA quickly and easily.

Grab Your Customers’ Attention

Make sure the subject of your campaign will catch the attention of the group of subscribed customers receiving the email. Your subject will be the first thing your customers see in their inbox and could be the deciding factor in whether or not the email gets opened. Knowing this, try to get creative, but always be simple, direct, and actionable with your campaign names.

While you’ll want to make sure to pique your customers’ interest with each campaign, you’ll also want to stay mindful of how frequently you send out these emails. When thinking about an appropriate frequency, try to limit your campaigns to once a week (per customer group) and only send them if the content is worth your customers’ time. Campaigns that aren’t engaging to customers can result in recipients unsubscribing.

Find Your Rhythm

The Marketing section of your online Square Dashboard houses insights on how your campaigns are performing. You can view:

• Open rates — how many people opened what you sent — for each campaign.

• Click-through rates — how many people clicked on your CTA.

• How many customers visited your business and made purchases as a result of what you sent.

In these insights, it’s important to understand the day of the week and the time of day you send your campaigns. Make sure to leverage the tools available to you through Square Marketing, so you can make educated decisions on when to engage with your customers. Keeping the recipients’ time zones in mind, try to send out campaigns in the early morning on weekdays — Sunday evenings also have a great open rate due to people preparing for the week ahead.

Show Up and Be Mindful

One of the worst things that can happen to a campaign you’ve spent time on is for it to get caught in your customers’ spam filters through their email service provider. Subject lines like “Click Here for a Prize!” or “WIN A FREE VACATION!” are likely to go straight to someone’s spam folder. You can also familiarise yourself with the Australian spam laws to learn more about common spam triggers.

You’ll also want to stay aware of the appropriate ways to gather your customers’ information so they can receive email campaigns from your business on their own terms. You can use Square's customer information collection tools such as downloading a QR code or sharing a sign-up form to help you collect customers' emails and their consent to receive email marketing campaigns from your business.