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CRM (customer relationship management) is an extremely effective tool to help you nurture relationships with your customers and, ultimately, grow your business. There are a bunch of options on the market, most of which help you maintain lists of your customers and engage them through email marketing, support centers, and feedback. Square’s new Customer Engagement tool does all of that but then takes things a giant step further. How exactly does it stand apart from the pack?
Three key reasons:
It saves you time
If you’re manually entering people’s information from a clipboard or a fishbowl full of business cards, you know how time-consuming it is to keep customer lists. You can say goodbye to all that with Square Customer Engagement, because all your customer information is just … there. Customer Engagement syncs with the data from Square Point of Sale, so when customers swipe, their information goes straight into your online directory. What’s more, Square Customer Engagement automatically categorizes your customers into three buckets — loyal, casual, and lapsed. So there’s no extra work for you to organize your lists.
It has unique targeting capabilities
Square Customer Engagement is uniquely positioned to help you grow your sales. To understand why that’s the case, let’s first take a step back and look at marketing strategies in general. Typically, when small businesses think about investing in marketing, they tend to zero in on attracting new customers — spending a pretty penny on things like acquiring lists, advertising, SEO, and paid social media.
True, that stuff can be important in getting your name out there. But if your primary goal is to grow your sales, it’s arguably more effective to focus on reengaging your current customers rather than attracting new ones.
Why? For one, it’s cheaper. In the online realm, it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, according to a recent study by consulting firm Bain & Company. And repeat customers have a way bigger impact on your bottom line. The same study found that when repeat customers come back in, they spend roughly 67 percent more than new customers. Which nets out to a lot. Over their lifetime, loyal customers are worth 10 times as much as their first purchase, according to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs.
And herein lies the power of Square’s CRM tools. Square Customer Engagement is laser focused on helping you get more repeat customers. By segmenting your lists into loyal, casual, and lapsed customers, you can strategize about whom you target with which message. So you can quickly create an email about a promotion, an event, or an announcement, and select which group of people you want to send it to. You may want to entice your lapsed customers to come back in with a loyalty program, for example, or an invitation to your summer sale. The whole point of the tool is to help you get people to come back in.
It closes the loop
Another key advantage is that Square Customer Engagement closes the loop on your marketing efforts. Meaning you can measure precisely how effective you’re being. Other solutions allow you to track things like how many people opened a certain email or clicked something within it. You can see those things in Square Customer Engagement too — but we take it a step further. Again, because the tool is linked to Register, it gives you a 360-degree view of things. So you can see exactly how many people came back into your store and bought stuff in response to what you sent, as well as how much they spent. Only Square Customer Engagement can help you measure how effectively your email marketing campaigns are driving more foot traffic into your store.
The long and short of it — Square’s Customer Engagement software can help you create better, more effective marketing campaigns. And if your goal is to grow your sales, repeat customers are where it’s at. Give Square Customer Engagement a spin. And if you have any questions as you test things out, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
