Square Marketing
Back in the day, Square Marketing was a pretty lightweight marketing tool focused around email (with some lightweight Facebook functionality as well). There was very little in the way of customization and Sellers were repeatedly frustrated that they couldn’t make their communications to their customers truly feel like their brand voice.
Through research and customer interviews, we started to get a clear picture of the functionality this product needed to include in order to truly server Square Seller needs, but these individual anecdotes and feature requests didn’t fully resolve into a compelling product vision, and the existing architecture of the product wasn’t amenable to easily dropping in new features (even small ones like expanded color and theme options).
Ultimately, this version of the product wasn’t meeting the needs of Sellers, and we needed to change that.
This led us to a realization: to make Square Marketing compelling we needed to completely rebuild the editor and focus on a framework that allowed our team to easily introduce new customization options and components and be flexible enough to support a push into multi-channel marketing on Facebook, SMS, Instagram, and more.
We landed on a pretty standard layout for those of you familiar with the likes of Keynote, Sketch, or Figma, with a panel on the right that contextually updated with customization options depending on what a user is interacting with. This also had the benefit of relatively gracefully adaption to mobile web as a core principle in this design was to bring a truly responsive experience to Sellers.
Customization was a challenging area to define our strategy for, as we knew from research that expanded customization was top priority for Sellers, but that they also were typically small businesses that didn’t necessarily have much design or marketing experience or event the time! We used these guiding principles and focused on adding just enough flexibility to satisfy Sellers (color, component shape, fill style, and shape) while testing to make sure it was fairly challenging to make a campaign that didn’t look professional.
We pushed further than just a fancy new email editor and scaled this solution to multiple channels.
Square Sellers had been telling us for years that they wanted expanded options for Facebook advertising and Instagram: after all, that’s were their customers are and where these businesses felt they were best able to represent themselves. With the flexible editor framework we had created, we expanded the product to feature support for expanded customization and promotion options for Facebook and allowed for lightweight campaigns to be embedded in emailed receipts.
Ultimately, Seller reaction was overwhelmingly positive in both CSAT in NPS as well as conversations, and our approach has allowed the team to continue to evolve and expand the product with a greater sense of ease than before.
