Dive Brief:

• Payments systems provider Square has launched Square Marketing, an program with CRM capabilities.
• The system will sort customers based on their use frequency and purchase histories into loyal, casual, and lapsed categories. 
• Square Marketing promises to permit small retailers to better target consumers based on offline sales and email opens. 

Dive Insight:

Square’s newest offering will help client companies match email opens to in-store activity such as coupon redemption and payment. Like similar e-mail products, it features email templates and a dashboard, with additional basic segmentation capabilities that sorts recipients into loyal, casual, or lapsed categories.

In beta testing, redemption rates were two times the industry average, the company claims. In addition to its payment processing and point-of-sale, Square now targets smaller retailers with analytics, financing, and marketing products. Correlating customers' emails with their frequency to stores, this new product could help retailers reach out and incentivize both loyal and lapsed customers, driving traffic to stores with promotions or special events.

With this new service, Square also seems to be going beyond its simple payment processing beginnings, offering data-heavy retention tech that could help retailers on a variety of levels.