As a reminder, releasing today we are offering support for marketing through Twitter and through text messaging. These features, among the most requested following last year’s major updates, allow for help with promoting your store in two similar but distinct ways.
The Twitter integration allows you to link an account to your point of sale and have your employees see incoming direct messages or mentions. This can allow you to reply to customers who might have complaints or concerns. You can also schedule tweets to send out on a recurring basis, or send out information when you get particularly interesting new stock in.
This is intentionally more limited than a general twitter client, making certain that employees keep their focus on just store business rather than the social media site in general, while giving the tools needed to quickly do what you need to to keep your customers engaged.
Text messaging is a much more one-way method of communication, but it can be used in ways that twitter cannot. The most important part of text messaging is that customers must opt in to receive messages, which will be sent to the primary phone on their account. This is a legal requirement for a business wanting to send texts to your customers.
Texting is done using text credits purchased through us. Credits can be used to send a single text of up to 160 characters to a single recipient; longer texts will cost additional credits.
Text messages can be triggered through a few different methods:
You can send a welcome message to new subscribers. We highly suggest including the method of opting out in this message.
You can send either a summarized or itemized receipt through text.
You can either manually or automatically send out notice when special orders and preorders are ready for pickup. This can replace the much more labor-intensive
task of calling these customers.
You can schedule marketing messages to go out to either all customers who have subscribed or to customers based on a search, allowing you access to powerful filtering, down to such things as ‘customers with birthdays this week’ or ‘customers who have bought this specific item’.