How to keep customers coming back with Square.
Your guide to managing customer relationships and
growing loyalty.
Building customer relationships is a crucial part of running a successful business. Over time, strong customer engagement will lead to repeat sales and turn customers into spokespeople for your business. A customer relationship management, or CRM, strategy will help you collect information to personalize your approach and help you reach customers with the right information at the right time.
Businesses of all types and sizes can get started with Square Point of Sale to keep track of sales, customer data, and performance metrics. From loyalty programs to marketing automation, you can choose the right add-ons for your business now, and add more in the future. In this guide, we’ll cover how you can grow your business by managing customer relationships with a tailored communication strategy.
Set up your business, deliver better customer experiences.
The first step to personalizing your customer communications is organizing your goods, services, and customer profiles. This will streamline your checkout flow and help you learn more about your customers with every sale. Start by setting up your items, inventory, and customer profiles in the Square Point of Sale app. Square solutions sync your customer information with sales data, so it’s easier to personalize your customer relationship strategies.
Create your Item Library and manage inventory
Let’s start with the basics. In the Square Point of Sale app you can add all your items, create different variations of each item, and assign every item to a specific category.
Organizing all your items, services, taxes, and discounts will help you make checkout faster, minimize errors, and deliver better customer service. This will also come in handy for automatic inventory management and sales reporting down the road.
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Start building your Customer Directory
Square Customer Directory is where you can view and manage all of your customers’ information. Every time you swipe a card, Customer Profiles are instantly generated and updated. These profiles include standard fields like name, email address, and phone number. You can personalize the customer experience by adding things like birthdays, social media handles, allergies, and other preferences to your Customer Profiles. You can also import an existing customer list from another program or app directly to Customer Directory to make the transition smooth.
Over time, these profiles will help you keep track of purchase histories, locations visited, and which employees your customers have interacted with, which will help you develop more personalized engagement and marketing strategies (more on that later).
Get to know your customers.
Collecting customer information will help you understand your customers and stay in touch, which leads to better overall customer service. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to learn more about your customers, which is why it’s important to gather information throughout the customer journey and sales process. Square CRM solutions have built-in features that let you collect information and personalize the experience at checkout, online, and beyond.
Save customer data with in-person sales
As you ring up a sale, it helps to know who you’re talking to. Turn on Add customer to sale before checkout so you can identify new or repeat customers right away to personalize the checkout experience.
You can also add a sign-up screen to your checkout flow so customers can control the information they share. They’ll have the option to add a phone number or email to stay in touch.
Add a loyalty program at checkout
Let’s face it: Everyone loves rewards. And with Square Loyalty, you can incentivize customers to share contact information by offering a digital rewards program right from your POS. Once you set up and customize your program, customers will have a chance to enroll during checkout. We’ll go more into how you can drive repeat sales through a loyalty program later.
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Capture customer information with online forms
Your website is a great place to gather customer data from web visitors. With Square Online, you can collect the data you need with customizable forms. From simple email subscription forms to complex lead capture forms, it’s easy to collect the information you need.
The emails you capture from email subscribe forms are all stored in Customer Directory so you have quick access to a 360-degree view of your customers.
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Embed sign-up forms on external websites or pages
If you have an existing website outside of Square Online, you can easily collect customer information by embedding a custom email form onto your website to sync email subscribers with sales data.
Even if you don’t have a website, you can customize a simple sign-up page to start collecting email addresses and adding information to your Customer Directory.
Get the Square guide for the tools you need to grow customer relationships.
Personalize your customer communications.
Now that you’ve decided how you’ll reach customers and collect information, you can start to build a communications strategy. The key to creating effective communication is sending relevant information at the right time. Customer segmentation may seem like a complicated topic for large businesses, but our tools and strategies make it easy for businesses of all sizes to engage their customers more effectively.
Create groups and segments
Customer Directory automatically creates smart groups based on common themes, including regular customers, lapsed customers, or customers who visited your business in the last three months.
For more advanced customer segmentation and targeting, you can create and save custom filters based on customers’ activities and purchases. For example, you could create a segment of customers who shopped at your downtown location in the last three months and send an email or SMS marketing campaign about your latest store opening nearby.
Use digital receipts as a strategic touchpoint
Think about unexpected customer interactions you can use to your advantage. Email receipts are a standard part of the customer experience where you can get creative. With Square Email Marketing, you can include a coupon to drive repeat purchases or let your customers know about an upcoming launch. Plus, you’ll reach customers when they’re most engaged (right after they’ve made a purchase).
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Send your next marketing campaigns over text
Text message marketing is emerging as an effective channel with some of the highest response rates. When you activate Square Text Message Marketing, you’ll get a unique phone number that customers can use to subscribe to your contact list, so you can send personalized marketing campaigns right to their phone.
If you want to contact customers with Square Text Message Marketing you’ll need to receive their consent, but we make it easy for them to opt in. Customers can opt in right from your POS after they make a purchase.
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Manage customer communications all in one place
Direct messages are a great way to keep in contact with customers about little things like confirming a shipping address, letting them know about a forgotten item at your store, or following up on a poor experience. Square Messages allows sellers to view and reply to all texts and emails about receipts, feedback, and appointment reminders from one place.
Set automated email campaigns
With Square Marketing, you can use all the information that’s stored in your Customer Directory to create automated email campaigns. These campaigns are easy to set up and highly effective at targeting the right customer with the right message.
For example, you can create automated campaigns that will send welcome emails to new subscribers, offer surprise discounts on birthdays, or re-engage customers who haven’t shopped with you after a set period of time. And with automated campaigns you don’t have to remember to hit send.
Keep customers coming back.
Once you’ve built up your customer base, engagement and loyalty will be an important part of growth for your business. Re-engaging customers who’ve already made a purchase is a cost-effective way to increase sales. Here are some ways you can engage with your customers to grow brand loyalty and improve the customer experience even further.
Build a loyalty program that’s rewarding for you and your customers
Loyalty programs are a great way to incentivize customers to come back. Customers can earn points every time they shop with you, and you can customize your loyalty program to let them redeem points for free items, discounts on specific categories, or a percentage off their entire purchase. Square Loyalty keeps track of everything right in your Dashboard.
There are many ways to tailor your loyalty program to fit your business and your customers, like the size of the reward, and visit-based or purchase-based rewards, etc. Here are some things to consider as you’re building your loyalty program.
Get valuable feedback from customers
Customer feedback can help you understand what’s driving both positive and negative experiences. Enable feedback on receipts so customers will have a chance to leave private feedback you can use to improve the customer experience for the future.
Go above and beyond
If a customer has a poor experience, you can respond directly to receipts and feedback comments with direct messages. You can offer a refund or send a coupon to help resolve the customer satisfaction issue. Square Messages gives you quick access to all of your conversations to make it easier to build stronger customer relationships.
Drive loyalty with gift card promotions
Square Gift Cards make great gifts, but they can also be used as a tool to increase customer loyalty. Customers can store a balance for themselves on physical gift cards or digital gift cards they can access right from their phone.
To encourage customers to store a balance on their gift card, you could offer a discount when they load a certain amount, and save their gift card to their customer profile for easy in-person checkouts.
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Improve customer relationships with insights and analytics.
Customer data, marketing analytics, and sales reports can reveal strengths in your customer communications strategies, as well as areas for growth. Square solutions have built-in analytics and reporting tools you can view anytime to keep your finger on the pulse.
Track email campaign performance
The benefit of managing your customers, sales, and email campaigns within one system is being able to quickly see which email campaigns are driving the most sales and then optimizing your email marketing strategy.
Get Customer Directory insights
Understand your customer loyalty and retention data by viewing New vs. Returning Customers and Visit Frequency reports, right in your Square Dashboard.
View your loyalty program activity report
See how many loyalty visits you get each month and compare sales between loyalty and non-loyalty customers to measure the impact.
Customize with third-party apps and APIs.
Square App Marketplace lets you integrate third-party apps and offers customizable APIs you can include in your customer relationship strategy so you don’t miss a beat.
and purchase data to target your customers.
Learn from other businesses.
Check out more guides to help you optimize all sides of your business.