Square expands into email marketing

Square is giving its merchants the power of email marketing — as if your inbox wasn’t crowded enough.

Today Square announced a new suite of tools that will enable its cohort of businesses to engage with customers. Newest among these features is the ability to send promotions, announcements, newsletters, and event invites to existing customers.

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The expanded offering is meant to drive in-store sales and thus build Square’s reputation as a one-stop shop for small business needs.

Square’s new toolset isn’t novel. Independent services like MailChimp, SendGrid, and Campaign Monitor all help businesses create and track email campaigns. But, by incorporating an email marketing service into its platform, Square thinks it can get an edge on the competition by offering deeper analytics.

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Through Square Marketing, merchants can form campaigns based on how frequently a given customer patronizes their store. The tool divides people up into categories of “loyal,” “casual,” and “lapsed” and allows merchants to solicit different groups with tailored deals. A retailer could, for instance, send a $10 coupon to lure a lapsed customers back in, or give a 25 percent loyalty discount to patrons who frequent the store.

Square Marketing, though available through Register, is not free. Merchants can either pay ten cents an email or buy a package of unlimited emails. For $15 store owners can send unlimited emails to as many as 500 customers; for $30 they can email up to a thousand people.

However, Square’s new Customer Insights feature, which gives business access to anonymized aggregate data about their customers, and its Feedback tool, which lets merchant embed satisfaction surveys in email receipts, are both free.

What Square really stands to give its clients is a full consumer profile — something traditionally available to large companies with robust customer relationship management systems. Knowing how often customers shop and whether they respond to email outreach can quickly turn data to dollars for merchants.

Square says discount redemption rates for businesses that piloted the marketing program were double the industry average, generating almost a million dollars in sales.

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The company already offers of slew of back office tools for small businesses, including sales analytics, inventory management, appointment scheduling, and more recently, the ability to receive customer payments through its peer-to-peer transaction platform, Square Cash.