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 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 and 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.
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. Customer 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 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 personalised 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 personalise 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 personalise the checkout experience.
Add a loyalty program 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 program right from your POS. Once you set up and customise your program, customers will have a chance to enrol during checkout. We’ll go more into how you can drive repeat sales through a loyalty program later.
Add a link to sign up on your websites and socials.
You can easily collect customer information by adding a link to your unique signup form anywhere on your website. Once your customer contacts are saved you’ll be able to track their sales data.
If you don’t have a website, you can add this link to your social profile or promote it through posts to collect email addresses from everyone that follows you.
Build your email list in-store.
Customers can sign up to receive emails from you when they visit your business. Square makes it easy to download and print a customisable QR code poster you can place anywhere in your shop.
Offering customers a special voucher is a great way to incentivise them to sign up using the QR code.
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 location in the last three months and send an email campaign about your latest store opening nearby.
Send campaigns based on your business goal.
Whether you want to target your highest spenders or reward your most loyal customers, it’s easy to build campaigns centred around a specific business goal. Each Square Marketing campaign has a pre-set audience using smart groups, so it takes less effort to target the right group. You can always modify the audience to send your campaign exactly where you want.
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 incentivise customers to come back. Customers can earn points every time they shop with you, and you can customise 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.
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 right 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.
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 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, 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.
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
Goodreviews
Collect Google Reviews seamlessly with Square.
Learn more
Poptin
Convert more visitors with pop-ups and inline forms.
Learn more
Jotform
Collect payments with powerful forms.
Learn more
Check out more guides to help you optimise all sides of your business.