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 personalise 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 programmes 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 personalising your customer communications is organising 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 personalise your customer relationship strategies.

Explore Square Point of Sale

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.

Organising all your items, services, taxes and discounts will help you make checkout faster, minimise errors and deliver better customer service. This will also come in handy for automatic inventory management and sales reporting down the road.

Start building your Customer Directory

Customer Directory is where you can view and manage all of your customers’ information. Every time you take a card payment, Customer Profiles are instantly generated and updated. These profiles include standard fields like name, email address and phone number. You can personalise 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 programme 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 personalised engagement and marketing strategies (more on that later).

Explore Customer Directory

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 personalise the experience at checkout, online and beyond.

Save customer data with in-person sales

As you enter 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 straight away to personalise the checkout experience.

You can also add a signup 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 address to stay in touch.

Add a loyalty programme at checkout

Let’s face it, everyone loves rewards. And with Square Loyalty, you can incentivise customers to share contact information by offering a digital rewards programme right from your POS. Once you set up and customise your programme, customers will have a chance to enrol during checkout. We’ll go more into how you can drive repeat sales through a loyalty programme later.

Explore Square Loyalty

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 customisable 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 complete view of your customers.

Explore Square Online

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 customise a simple signup page to start collecting email addresses and adding information to your Customer Directory.

Personalise 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 city centre location in the last three months, and send an email or text message 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 Marketing, you can include a voucher 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).

Explore Square Marketing

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 programme that’s rewarding for you and your customers

Loyalty programmes are a great way to incentivise customers to come back. Customers can earn points every time they shop with you, and you can customise your loyalty programme 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 directly in your Dashboard.

There are many ways to tailor your loyalty programme 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 programme.

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.

Drive loyalty with gift card promotions

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 directly from their phones.

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.

Learn more about Square Gift Cards

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.

Explore Square Analytics

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 optimising 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, directly in your Square Dashboard.

View your loyalty programme activity report

See how many loyalty visits you get each month and compare sales between loyalty and non-loyalty customers to measure the impact.

Customise with third-party apps and APIs.

Square integrates with third-party apps and offers customisable APIs you can integrate with your customer relationship strategy so you don’t miss a beat.

Explore Square App Marketplace

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