Square launches tools to help brick and mortar businesses create and track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns
Square Brings Accountability To Email Marketing — Square is in the process of building up a series of products and services that use its payments platform as a foundation.
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch lands a month after Square's shift toward small businesses began with seller-side services like instant deposits and dispute protection — the strategy being to build products on top of the payments platform rather than just process transactions. Email marketing is the next layer: Square can measure whether a campaign drove purchases because the purchase itself runs through its hardware.
The move also prefigures the pattern that followed: a year later Square extended the same closed-loop logic to paid media with its Facebook ad integration, and by 2018 MailChimp chose to partner with Square rather than fight it, wiring e-commerce landing pages into its merchant base.
First-order effects
- Brick-and-mortar merchants using Square gain native campaign creation plus effectiveness tracking tied to their actual register data, removing the need to stitch together an email vendor and point-of-sale reports.
Second-order effects
- Dedicated email-marketing vendors lose their main pitch to small retailers — attribution — since Square's measurement closes the loop from send to sale, pushing rivals toward partnerships (as MailChimp did in 2018) rather than head-on competition.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Square keeps annexing merchant back-office functions — it later launched Square Banking for savings, checking, and loans — consolidating around the payments platform as the operating system for small business.
The trend: Payments processors are becoming small-business operating platforms, using transaction data as the measurement layer that lets them absorb marketing, apps, and banking one category at a time.