5 Best Square Loyalty Tools to Grow Your Restaurant

Square has some really great tools to help you boost sales and retention. And in this video we're going to talk about the five top tools that you can find in Square in order to do this. This all starts with Square Loyalty where you can offer points to your customers either spend based or item based. Then we get into automated coupons where you can send these on birthdays or you can do mass campaigns, item and category discounts. Think Bogo deals. Subscriptions which were typically used for by e commerce companies but but now can be leveraged in store as well. And then finally gift cards and store credit that really can be used to help you build your own bank a la Starbucks. So let's dive right in. Tool number one, Square loyalty. Square's built this great out of the box solution. You can issue points to your customers either based on total spend or based on certain items. And you can even configure these so on certain days of the week you can offer more points. Let's say every Monday and Tuesday between two and six we're going to do double points. Great way to build business on your slower days. You can also use loyalty points through tools like per diem and then you can further turbocharge that with let's say refer a friend program. I'm going to refer my friend. Once they use our app, I'm going to issue them extra points and I'm going to get points for referring them. Or a daily streaks feature. Come three days in a row, four days in a row, spend at least 20 bucks and then you win 10 extra points. Also have a gamification feature where you can spin the wheel. Hey, spend at least $40 today and get to spin the wheel and win extra point. Square loyalty customers, they end up spending 53% more and they visit 40% more often. So it's kind of a win win. Tool number two, automated coupons. Whether it's a birthday or you haven't seen someone in 30 days, you can set these up automatically. Once somebody signs up or places their first order with you, Square will automatically send them an email getting their birthday and then you'll configure the rewards that you want to give. It's good, I think for seven days. So that's a great way to, you know, for your customers to bring them in on their special day to create that unique bond with them that really helps to build loyalty over time. You can also configure these coupons. Obviously you haven't seen someone in X amount of days. Hey, we miss you. Sort of that win back campaign. So those are really effective. And then you can just use coupons by sending out, you know, through email marketing as you build up your email database over time. One way to do that is to enable online ordering. It's a lot easier to get people's emails that way. And then you're going to create a large email database that then you can market to. And that's a great way for you, that's a great way of direct response marketing to really help build sales and boost retention. Tool number three Item and category discounts Think Bogo deals. We work with Chip City. They actually run a Bogo deal every Wednesday through their branded app with per Diem. And their sales have shot up over a thousand percent. When they run these deals, it's really cool to see how many additional users they've gotten in their app because they're running these deals. They also offer a buy five, get one free. So think you're loading up on cookies, you got a party you're going to or something like that. That's extra incentive for you to get that extra cookie. And you don't have to add a coupon. It's automatically calculated at checkout. So those can easily be set up in Square, building up that loyalty over time. And obviously you communicating that to your guests and to your customers either over email on your website or if you have an app through push notifications. Tool number four subscriptions. So Square introduced this feature not too long ago. Its main focus is on E commerce. But if you use tools like per diem, then you can essentially build your own Panera subscription program where people are paying weekly or monthly. It can be as little as five or ten dollars a week or you know, even more. And what you're doing is you're giving either discounted items or free items a certain amount of times per day, per week, per month. Some French bakeries that use this, they have a lower tiered program where it's basically $10 a month and then they'll give discounts on their espresso drinks and on all their baked goods. The espresso drinks is actually like a 50%. Then the baked goods, it's 15%. Then they have a higher tiered subscription where they're actually given free espresso drinks up to, I want to say one a day. And then again they're giving 15% off all their baked goods. So they're really running this program to sell more of those baked goods to their customers. Using coffee as really that, that way to bring people in and they're building their subscription around. So great way to use subscriptions. Not just in the old school e commerce way where you're getting laundry detergent every three months, but really you can use it to boost sales at your restaurant. Tool number five, gift cards and store credit. So around the holidays, it's no secret, gift cards are the way to go. People send them to their friends, their family, their coworkers, and it's a great way for you to build sales around those times. And then with breakage, they are really profitable. So you can even leverage this year round, not just around the holidays, by selling store credit as well. So store credit is essentially me buying a gift card for myself. The main way to do this is through a mobile app. So this is where per diem and we're the top rated app in Square's marketplace. This is where you can really leverage a tool like ours. Just like the Starbucks app, you can load up your wallet and this would be for your branded app. So if I'm a customer at your store, I can load up my wallet and you can incentivize me. The most common incentive we see is pay 45, get 50. So it's kind of like I'm purchasing a punch card in advance as opposed to you just giving me that punch card. And then because I have that $50 just sitting in my wallet in your app, you collect it right away. And then I tend to spend more every visit. I tend to visit more frequently because hey, it's lunch or it's breakfast and I got this money sitting in your app and I should probably use it because it's already sitting there and I've already sent that money. So great way to build those repeat visits. We see about 15% of our transactions through our mobile apps actually are using store credit. Just like Starbucks, you can become your own bank. That's it for today's show. Those are the top five Square marketing tools that you can do to boost retention. Again, starting with Square loyalty and loyalty points, automated coupons, item and category discounts, subscriptions, and then gift cards and store credit. You can use these on their own. Again, if you have per diem and a mobile app, then we power all these tools within the app experience, making it really easy for you. And then, yeah, you have basically all the tools that a billion dollar brand like Starbucks has.