What Is Square Marketing & Is It Right For My Business?

Square offers multiple intuitive software options that can help your small business run smoothly and Square Marketing is no exception. Square offers a simple add-on that syncs seamlessly to the Square POS platform, making it easy to reach your customers with promotions or other information.

Marketing is an integral part of any business plan, and having a convenient way to both keep track of your customers and reach them with a simple email or text blast is a simple way to help drive revenue. Square allows you to automate marketing campaigns, easily view and analyze customer behavior, and helps you reach new customers with Google Reviews.

In this post, we’ll take a look at what comes along with the Square Marketing subscription. Then we’ll compare some other email marketing platforms with Square, so you can see if you’re missing any features you may want or if it is just right.

What Is Square Marketing?

Square Marketing is an add-on to Square POS that allows you to send both one-off and recurring emails to your contacts. Because Square Marketing syncs with Square POS, you can target different types of shoppers with relevant messaging based on what they buy at your store.

Square Marketing Pricing

Square marketing costs are broken down by the number of contacts, so you’ll have all of the features available no matter what price point you need.

Square Email Marketing Pricing

• 0-500 Customer Contacts: $15/month
• 501-1,000 Customer Contacts: $30/month
• 1,001-2,000 Customer Contacts: $40/month
• 2,001-4,000 Customer Contacts: $55/month
• 4,001-9,000 Customer Contacts: $90/month

Square pricing continues to increase incrementally based on customer contacts. If these plans seem like a little more than you need, and you’re only interested in sending an occasional marketing email to a smaller list, Square also offers a one-off email sending rate at $0.10 per email to your existing email contacts.

Keep in mind that Square offers email campaigns to all Square users at no charge.

Square Text Message Marketing Pricing

Similarly, you can also reach customers with text messaging from Square Marketing which also has a simple pricing plan.

• 1-250 Text Messages: $20/month
• 251-500 Text Messages: $25/month
• 501-1000 Text Messages: $35/month
• 1001-5000 Text Messages: $60/month
• 5001-15,000 Text Messages: $90/month
• 15,000-25,000 Text Messages: $135/month

What’s Included In Square Email Marketing

The Square email marketing subscription includes these core functions:

• Unlimited email sends
• Email designer to choose themes and styles
• Fully integrates with POS and Square Dashboard
• Automated email campaigns based on an event trigger
• Automatic email collection with payment and digital receipt approval by your customer
• Seamless coupon redemption
• Sales and campaign real-time reporting performance data
• Marketing Assistant bot helps guide campaigns and makes suggestions

When you use Square mail marketing for your campaign goals, you’ll find options under Blast Campaigns in the left-hand margin. Blasts go out to your entire list and include:

• Offering a coupon
• Sending a quick update
• Creating a newsletter
• Sending an event invitation
• Product or service announcement

Under Automated Campaigns, you have the option of setting up a simple workflow to reach customers after they take a specific action, triggered event, or period of inactivity in the case of a lapsed customer.

• Welcome emails
• A thank-you email after purchase or signup
• Bringing back lapsed customers
• Birthday or anniversary email

How To Create A Square Marketing Campaign

Setting up an email campaign with Square Marketing is very simple. When I look at the Dashboard, what strikes me the most is how easy it is to find a ready-made campaign based on your objective. Each selection you make as far as goals guide you further into the process, with premade templates and designs already built for you. Square even adds suggestive text into the blocks that you can use or adjust. I can see how this would be particularly beneficial for someone if marketing or writing wasn’t already in their wheelhouse.

Below I’ve created a sample campaign, so you can get an idea of how the process flows from beginning to end.

Step 1) Define Your Objective

We are going to create a blast campaign to reach every contact with the same offer — a coupon. I’ve selected Offer a Coupon as our objective.

Step 2) Design The Campaign

After clicking the blue Design Campaign in the upper right-hand corner, I was taken to the email editor. I chose a floral design and am keeping all of the preset text Square offers to show you how simple the company makes it:

If you want more design freedom, you can also head into the drag-and-drop editor that’s accessed at the Blocks tab under Design Your Campaign. Since my goal is to highlight the simplicity of creating a campaign, I’m showing what you can produce with just a few clicks.

Step 3) Choose Your Audience

Next, you can choose to send it to everyone on your list, or you can target certain contacts. You can see in the image below that you can also share any promotion with your Facebook followers if you’ve linked accounts!

I’ve chosen to send my blast campaign to everyone on my list.

Step 4) Review & Send

The last and final step in sending your Square email campaign out to your customers is reviewing it. If you do not have a full email marketing subscription, as seen in the example below, you can opt to pay per email, or you can sign up for the free 30-day trial Square offers. I wanted to point out that you can also opt to resend the email if your customer doesn’t open it, and you can send a reminder email before the coupon is set to expire. Those send out automatically if you select that option on this screen.

As your email list grows based on sales, Square automatically begins segmenting into targeted email lists for you (e.g., new, regular, or lapsed customers).

How Does Square Marketing Compare To Other Email Marketing Options?

Square email marketing software doesn’t have some of the features you’ll find in some other types of email service providers, but it does simplify email marketing. It accomplishes this for small businesses by syncing data with your Square POS and even offering you campaign suggestions automatically.

Let’s take a look at how some of the other bigger names compare with Square, so you can decide if this suits your needs or if you need something with more bells and whistles.

Square Marketing VS Mailchimp

Mailchimp’s features are designed to extrapolate more data as your customers interact with your emails, landing pages, and social posts. Mailchimp’s generous free plan allows you to reach up to 2,000 contacts and is comparable to Square providing basic reports and recommendations.

You will also find a Mailchimp and Square Payments integration back in your Square Dashboard. If you do this, you can also sell directly from the free landing page and start selling online without a website.

Square Marketing VS Drip

Drip shines with its personalized campaigns you can create after you’ve set up your tagging and triggered events features. This allows you to learn exactly where your contacts go and what they’ve put in their cart. With that information, you can even set up automatic emails for triggered events, such as an abandoned cart or product promotion that fits with what they have browsed on your site.

For these reasons, if you have an eCommerce shop and a bit of time to get to know the features, Drip provides a well-oiled marketing machine that is largely automated with plenty of data to sink your teeth into.

What’s Included In SMS Messaging From Square?

Square text message marketing might also be something you want to implement or add to your overall strategy. With people becoming more and more reliant on their phones, SMS messaging can reach your customers almost instantly. Square makes it easy to gather customer information and create custom campaigns all with a simple pricing structure. Here’s what you can expect to find with Square text messaging.

• Sync with email marketing: You can combine Square text message marketing with an established email campaign to make sure that your customers don’t miss out on a sale or other important information.
• Square Customer Directory integration: Build your contact list from anywhere and allow customers to sign up to receive texts. You can also have customer easily sign up through social media platforms
• Automate campaigns: Square makes it easy to pre-build text messaging campaigns, automate and customize them, letting Square do your marketing for you.
• Solicit Google reviews: Send out reminders or requests for customers to leave Google reviews to increase your company’s visibility and reputation.
• Reporting: See in-depth reporting via your dashboard

Final Verdict

In short, Square’s marketing can be a valuable tool for your small business, especially when paired with other features like Square loyalty and its gift card capacity. Square’s free online store also makes it easy to reach new potential customers. If you are already using some of Square’s products, marketing is easy to add and set up and you can always cancel at any time as well.