Get Started with Square Marketing

Square Marketing helps you connect with your customers with customised email and social media campaigns to promote your business. Targeted email marketing is an effective way to reach your customers and drive sales.

You can easily design custom emails, set up automated campaigns and see how your marketing efforts affect your bottom line – directly from your Square Dashboard. Read more about email marketing best practices.

Sign up

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for Square Email Marketing to start sending newsletters, announcements, event invitations, vouchers and more to your customers.

Square Email Marketing pricing is based on the number of subscribed customers you have in your Customer Directory.

This list combines:

• customers who’ve signed up for your emails via customer information collection tools.

• Customers whose information you’ve imported via a CSV upload.

Create an Email Marketing Campaign

You can easily set up and customise a campaign that targets your best customers and promotes sales and visits. To get started:

1. go to Customers > Marketing in your online Square Dashboard.

2. Click Create Campaign and select Email campaign.

3. Under ‘Choose a campaign’, select your campaign objective. If you’re sending an email, you can choose a one-time blast campaign or set up an ongoing automated campaign.

4. Under the campaign objectives, you can also choose to target your best customers with different smart groups. Smart groups are recommended customer groups, such as top spenders, frequent visitors, active customers and loyal subscribers. If you subscribe to Square Loyalty, you can also announce a Square Loyalty promotion.

5. If your business has multiple locations, you can select a specific location. This will determine which address shows up at the bottom of your emails, and limit where the voucher can be redeemed. If you want your voucher to be redeemable at all locations, leave the default All Locations selection. Select a pre-existing template from the theme library, or use the default template to customise your email to your marketing goal. If sending a Square Loyalty promotion campaign, you can choose from all your scheduled or currently active promotions, or you can create a new promotion. Note: if you’re including a voucher, make sure you include an offer amount and expiration date. Vouchers can be redeemed in-store or via Square Online.

6. Select an existing template from the theme library, or use the default template to customise your email to your marketing goal. Note: if you’re including a voucher, make sure you include an offer amount and expiration date. Vouchers can be redeemed in-store or via Square Online.

7. Customise your Square Marketing template. Choose your default campaign colours, layout, global styles, font size, button size, email header styles and more. You can also add images, new text fields and Items from your library, and order these blocks of content so the email layout looks how you want. With Square Marketing you have access to a searchable image gallery with over 850,000 free stock photos.

8. Select your recipients. Choose all customers or a custom set of customers. If you chose a smart group when selecting your campaign objective, you can adjust the group recipients by clicking Modify. Learn more about your customer directory and smart groups.

9. Review your campaign then click Schedule or Send Now.

Note: only send marketing communications to customers who’ve consented to receive marketing emails from your business. You’re responsible for ensuring the customers on your list have given explicit permission to contact them and for complying with all applicable laws. Review our terms for additional information.

Learn more about customizing your marketing campaign.

Reminder Emails

When creating a one-time (blast) campaign with Square Marketing, the option to send a reminder email to recipients who haven’t opened your message is disabled by default. If you want to send reminder emails, you can turn on this setting from the Review & Send step of the campaign creation process.

Reminder emails are sent five days after the original delivery date. Campaigns with vouchers or discounts are sent again to those who haven’t opened your message seven days before the voucher expires. By default, a voucher expires two months after the campaign begins unless you set it to expire on a different date.

Note: reminder emails can’t be disabled once you send the campaign.

Set up Automations

Square Marketing allows you to set up automated campaigns. These are emails and/or text messages sent to customers on an ongoing basis following a one-time setup. The messages are only sent to customers that meet the specific criteria for each type of campaign. The messages will continue to be sent until the campaign is turned off. Learn more about automated campaigns. 

Collect Google Reviews 

Set up Google Business Profile with your Square account and create automated email and text message campaigns requesting Google Reviews from your regulars. Google Reviews help you drive new customer acquisition and sales.

After you set up the Google Reviews, the automation will trigger or send when a customer becomes a ‘regular’ (makes 3 purchases in the last year), or when a customer leaves positive feedback. 

To get started:

1. from your online Square Dashboard, go to Customers > Marketing > Google Reviews.

2. Click Get Started and sign into your Google Business Profile.

3. From the Google Reviews tab under Recommended automations, click ‘Get more Google reviews’.

4. Customise the design of the template and activate your campaign.

5. Track your Google Reviews directly from your Square Dashboard. 

Schedule Marketing Campaigns

You can draft your marketing campaigns ahead of time, so they’ll be sent automatically.

To do so, click Schedule at the end of the campaign preparation flow to assign a date and time for your next promotion to be sent.

Schedule Recurring Marketing Campaigns

Set up recurring blast campaigns to automatically send weekly or monthly vouchers, reminders and invitations from your online Square Dashboard.

To do so:

1. go to Customers > Marketing in your online Square Dashboard and select Create Campaign.

2. Select a blast campaign, create a custom design and select your audience.

3. From the Review & Send screen, click Schedule.

4. Set when you’d like to start sending the campaign and select Repeat this campaign.

5. Choose if you want this campaign recurring indefinitely, sent a specific number of times or sent one time on a set date.

Note: recurring campaigns can’t be used with seasonal themes.

Assign Marketing Permissions

You can assign designated team members to send and manage Square Marketing campaigns. To do so:

1. log in to Staff > Team >Permissions in your online Square Dashboard.

2. Select Create Permission Set and enter the permission set name.

3. Toggle on Marketing, then click Continue.

4. Select the access points where the team member can use their permissions.

5. Click Save.

Learn more about assigning permissions to your team members.

Manage Subscribed Customers

To manage the number of subscribed customers in your directory, you can do the following:

1. visit your Customer Directory and resolve any duplicate contacts that might exist by clicking Resolve Duplicates.

2. Review your directory for any old, empty or unused customer records and delete them.

When sending marketing campaigns, a customer will be considered subscribed if they have opted-in by:

• scanning the QR code you printed

• clicking on a online marketing link shared by your business

• obtaining opt-in consent outside of Square and added them as subscribed manually on the Customer Directory (by uploading their information via CSV file).

Note: email addresses for customers that have expired or bounced will automatically be excluded from your directory groups and filters.

When a customer’s email address is unsubscribed or bounces, the email address will remain in your Customer Directory, but it’ll no longer be included in your Marketing filters and smart groups. You’ll need to manually delete the email from your directory.

You can use the Marketing Subscribers filter in your Directory to view subscribed customers.

View Campaign Reports

Get real-time reports wherever and whenever you want. Use our email marketing software to see how many people opened your email, how many clicked to learn more and how many made purchases through your campaign.

To view reports on a marketing campaign:

1. go to Customers > Marketing in your online Square Dashboard.

2. Select Campaigns. By default, all your campaigns are visible. To filter by campaign type, click Campaign Type.

3. Click the campaign to view an individual report.

For answers to common Square Marketing questions, review our Square Marketing FAQs.

Create and Send Vanity Code Vouchers 

With the vanity code voucher builder, you can create vouchers to promote your existing social media channels without subscribing to email marketing campaigns. To get started:

1. from your online Square Dashboard, go to Customers > Marketing.

2. Click Vouchers > Create Vouchers

3. From the design screen, you can create a custom code, choose a voucher type, choose when the voucher applies and add a description and an expiry date.

4. Click Activate.

You can view all of the vanity code vouchers you created in the voucher builder in your online Square Dashboard by going to Marketing > Vouchers. There, you can see the runtime, total discounts, total redeemed vouchers and the vanity code voucher status.

Note: if you created a voucher from the email builder, it won’t display in the list of all vouchers in the vanity code voucher builder.

To share your promo code across social media and other places online:

1. from your Square Dashboard, go to Customers > Marketing > Vouchers.

2. Select the voucher and click (···) > Preview .

3. Click Copy Code.