Boost Your Sales with Cannabis Dispensary Email Marketing

Cannabis dispensary email marketing is not exactly the same as email marketing for online e-commerce brands. We're going to have to do things a little differently, but still help you increase revenue.

Email marketing is a powerful tool to connect with customers, build loyalty, and boost your bottom line even if you're selling cannabis goods offline at a point of sale.

This guide will walk you through the ins and outs of effective email marketing for your cannabis dispensary business.

We'll cover everything from choosing the right email platform to building a quality email list, all while staying compliant with industry regulations.

Plus, we'll show you how to measure and optimize your campaigns to ensure your emails are hitting the mark every time. Transform your dispensary's marketing strategy and watch your sales soar.

The Right Email Marketing Platform for Your Dispensary

Selecting the right email marketing platform is crucial for the success of your cannabis dispensary's email campaigns. Many platforms restrict or prohibit content related to your business, so it's essential to choose a cannabis-friendly provider that meets your needs.

Alpine IQ, Email Octopus, Emurcury, Flodesk, Hubspot, Klaviyo, MailerLite, and Moosend are some of the platforms that currently claim to allow marketing for cannabis businesses ^[1].

Cannabis-Friendly Providers

Among these providers, Klaviyo is our preferred choice for cannabis email marketing clients due to its robust features, affordable plans, ease of use, and acceptance of cannabis brands.

Other notable cannabis-friendly providers include Alpine IQ, which offers features tailored for cannabis businesses.

Pricing Considerations

Pricing is another important factor to consider when selecting an email marketing platform. Most providers offer free plans with limited features, but to get the maximum benefits and features it's a good idea to upgrade.

Most of these platforms base their pricing on the total size of your email list, however, if you're smart you can manage your payment plan by selecting the one that accurately reflects the average number of emails you send per month.

By doing this you can keep your costs lower than what the platform pushes you to pay.

Building a Quality Email List

Growing a robust email list is the foundation of a successful cannabis dispensary email marketing strategy. To build a quality list, focus on obtaining consent-based opt-ins from interested individuals.

Encourage customers to sign up for your newsletter both in-store and online, using clear incentives like discounts or exclusive content ^[4].

Leveraging In-Store Touchpoints

As most cannabis dispensaries don't have online e-commerce stores you'll need to focus on collecting emails in-store. Three of the best ways to do this are:

1. Before Customers Purchase

Place sign-up stations with clear instructions at strategic points throughout your dispensary, tying them to promotions valid for use during that visit.

You can use a QR code that customers can scan with their phone that takes them to a landing page where they enter their email in exchange for a discount code sent via email.

If you want to be more fancy, digital kiosks positioned in brick-and-mortar locations offer an innovative way to capture sign-ups as well.

2. During The Purchase

You can provide your staff with a script they can memorize and recite to the customer when they are paying for their purchase. They can tell customers that if they provide their email address they will get a discount added to their purchase immediately.

This will slightly reduce your profit margins as the customer was going to buy anyway, however, you have to look at it as a cost to acquire an email lead you can market to in the future. This increases a customer's LTV.

This has the highest chance of converting into an email lead as most customers will want to pay less for their purchase as they are making it.

3. After Customers Purchase

If you do not have the margins to offer discounts on your in-store cannabis products, you can train staff members to offer a digital receipt sent via email.

However, this has the lowest chance of converting into a captured email address as most customers can not be bothered with receipts.

Opt-in Strategies

Implement a double opt-in process to ensure compliance with email marketing regulations and enhance the quality of your list. This confirms subscriber engagement and interest.

Incentives for Sign-ups

You don't have to offer a discount in exchange for email leads. You can offer loyalty program discounts or exclusive content in exchange for email signups as well as running contests or giveaways to attract new subscribers.

However, never purchase email lists, as this can lead to legal liability, hefty fines, or even lawsuits. Focus on building a clean list of engaged subscribers who genuinely want to hear from you.

Cannabis Dispensary Email Marketing Regulations

When it comes to cannabis dispensary email marketing, it's crucial to navigate the complex web of regulations that vary from state to state.

In fully legal states, you must comply with specific advertising requirements, such as including the business name and license number, avoiding false or misleading statements, and not appealing to individuals under 21.

Placement restrictions also apply, prohibiting ads within 1,000 feet of child-centered facilities or publicly owned properties ^[6].

State-Specific Laws

In California, all advertisements must legibly identify the responsible licensee by name and license number.

Colorado requires that ads target audiences where at least 71.6% are expected to be 21 or older.

Oregon prohibits advertising within 1,000 feet of schools, playgrounds, or youth centers, and requires specific warnings about intoxication and health risks.

Age Verification Requirements

Most states mandate age verification measures for cannabis dispensary email marketing. In California, any direct communication must verify recipients are 21 or older through user confirmation, birth date disclosure, or other registration methods.

Content Restrictions

Across legal states, content restrictions are in place to protect public health and prevent underage appeal.

Advertisements, including email marketing, cannot contain false or misleading statements, promote excessive consumption, claim curative or therapeutic effects, or depict individuals under 21 consuming cannabis.

The use of cartoons, toys, or other images appealing to minors is also prohibited.

By adhering to these guidelines, businesses can effectively reach their target audience while minimizing legal risks.

Segmenting Your Email List for Targeted Campaigns

By dividing your list into specific groups based on factors such as customer preferences, purchase history, and loyalty program tiers, you can create highly personalized email campaigns that resonate with each segment ^[5].

Customer Interests

When segmenting based on customer preferences, consider their interests in specific product categories, such as flower, edibles, or concentrates. Tailor your email content to highlight new arrivals, special offers, or educational content related to their preferred products.

Purchase History

Purchase history is another valuable segmentation factor. Identify customers who are first-time buyers, repeat customers, or high spenders.

Offer first-time buyers a welcome discount, while rewarding repeat customers with exclusive deals or early access to new products.

High-spenders can be targeted with premium product recommendations or VIP perks.

Customer Loyalty

If you have a loyalty program, segmenting based on tier-specific rewards, such as bonus points, exclusive discounts, or special events, incentivizes customers to move up the loyalty ladder.

By leveraging audience segmentation, you can deliver highly targeted and relevant email campaigns that drive engagement, loyalty, and sales for your dispensary.

Geolocation Targeting

Geographical targeting of your email campaigns will help increase revenue results because customers located outside the state where your dispensary is located are unlikely to benefit from promotions or special offers.

If you offer delivery services you can tighten this geofencing by targeting email leads within an area radius or city zip code. That way you can send a campaign only to those customers letting them know if they order before a certain time, they can get same-day delivery of their weed.

This also helps businesses avoid the potential risks associated with mass marketing in regions where cannabis remains illegal.

By implementing distance-based segmentation, cannabis marketers can ensure their messages reach the most relevant and legally compliant audience, maximizing campaign effectiveness while minimizing legal exposure.

3rd Party Cannabis Data

A lot of cannabis dispensaries use point-of-sale platforms like Flowhub, Dutchie, or Jane Technologies to manage their inventory and sales. By bringing in data from these systems you can further segment your email list.

Content Calendar for Dispensary Email Campaigns

Creating a content calendar for your cannabis dispensary email marketing campaigns is essential to ensure that your messages are timely, relevant, and engaging.

A well-planned calendar helps you align your email content with seasonal promotions, industry events, holidays, and product launch schedules ^[7]. Tailor your content to match the season and highlight products that are popular during that time of year.

Cannabis Holiday Campaigns

Cannabis holidays also provide excellent opportunities to connect with your audience and promote your dispensary. Celebrate major events like 4/20, 7/10 (Dab Day), and Green Wednesday with targeted email campaigns featuring special offers, educational content, or event invitations.

Coordinate your email marketing efforts with your product launch schedules to generate buzz and drive sales. Create a series of teaser emails leading up to the launch date, followed by a grand reveal and exclusive promotions for your subscribers.

Creating Email Content for Your Customers

When creating email content it's essential to strike a balance between educational and promotional content while leveraging personalization techniques to enhance engagement ^[12].

Personalization is key to making your customers feel valued and understood. Tailor your emails based on their past purchases, preferences, and behavior.

For example, if a customer buys vape products, send them a special offer on the latest vape cartridges. You can also cross-sell complementary products such as dab rigs.

It's important not to blast your list with sales emails so mix educational and promotional elements. Share valuable information about different cannabis strains, their effects, and best uses. Explain the benefits of CBD and other cannabinoids, and provide tips on consumption methods.

This educational content helps customers make informed decisions and positions your dispensary as a trusted resource ^[13].

By combining personalization, educational content, and targeted promotions, you can create email campaigns that resonate with your cannabis dispensary customers, fostering long-term engagement and loyalty.

Implementing Automated Email Flows

Email automation isn't just about sending messages—it's about creating a personalized and timely journey for your customers. For cannabis dispensaries, this means nurturing relationships at every step, from the first welcome to celebrating milestones and re-engaging those who've drifted.

Welcome Series for New Subscribers

Kick things off with a warm welcome when a customer signs up for your emails whether it's via an in-store collection point or online.

Immediately after signing up, the first email should provide the incentive they signed up to receive. After that, you can introduce your dispensary, and highlight what makes your products unique—be it your high-quality cannabis flower, potent concentrates, or innovative edibles.

Follow up with emails sharing customer testimonials, press mentions, and guides on how to choose the right cannabis products to build credibility and create a positive first impression.

Re-Engagement Campaigns

For customers who haven't visited in a while, send personalized emails with special offers to reignite their interest. Acknowledge their absence and express genuine interest in their return to your store.

Highlight new products, changes, or improvements made based on customer suggestions. Offer an exclusive "welcome back" discount or loyalty points to incentivize a return visit.

By enriching your automated email flows with these strategies, you'll boost engagement and loyalty but also position your dispensary as a leader in customer experience and education.

Leveraging Customer Data For Better ROI

Measuring cannabis consumer purchasing behaviors provides valuable insights for businesses operating in the cannabis industry. By analyzing purchasing patterns, businesses can gain a better understanding of what their customers want and need, identify trends in the market, and increase sales.

Purchase Behavior Analysis

Analyzing customer purchase behavior helps you understand how and why consumers buy cannabis.

The best way to identify this is through market research, post-purchase surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. A survey is a quick, cost-effective methodology that offers quality insights.

Dynamic Content Insertion

Including dynamic content blocks in your email copy allows you to send targeted messages where subscribers get the same email, but the copy can have separate images, and product offers, and even the call-to-actions can be modified based on their customer personas.

This saves time compared to creating separate email templates for different configurations and provides better-tailored relevant content to your subscribers ^[16].

By leveraging customer data to deliver targeted promotions and personalized experiences, you can build stronger relationships with your customers, making them feel like a valued part of your community and ensuring they keep coming back to your dispensary.

Optimizing Your Dispensary Email Marketing

To ensure you're optimizing the return on your email marketing investments (ROI), you must understand and track five critical metrics: domain reputation, open rate, click-to-open rate (CTOR), click-through rate (CTR), placed order rate, spam rate, and unsubscribe rate.

1. Domain Reputation: Your domain reputation depends on how people who receive your bulk email messages react to them. Positive engagement like opening messages and clicking links can improve your reputation, while negative actions like marking messages as spam or leaving them unopened can hurt it.
2. Open Rate: Open rate helps you determine how successful the subject line of your message was among the audience who saw it in their inboxes. A high open rate means you sent an effective subject line to the right target audience.
3. Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR): CTOR tells you how well the content inside your email message performed with the recipients who opened the message and saw the contents. Use this metric to evaluate the effectiveness of your copy, design, images, call-to-action, and offer.
4. Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR tells you how your email marketing campaign performed overall. It takes factors like – your list segmentation, subject line, content, links, call-to-action, offer, and so on – and gives you a metric that you can use to improve performance in the future.
5. Placed Order Rate (CR): Placed order rate, also known as revenue or conversion rate, is a metric that measures the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. The formula is expressed as: Placed Order Rate = (Number of Unique Orders / Number of Unique Recipients) x 100. This rate is determined within the channel's specific attribution window, which is the timeframe during which an order is considered to be a result of the marketing message.
6. Spam Rate: The spam complaint rate is a metric that measures how many recipients flag your emails as spam to the total volume of emails you've dispatched. You should keep this number below 0.1% to remain compliant with Gmail, which is the world's largest email provider.
7. Unsubscribe Rate: Keep an eye on your unsubscribe rate and make sure it stays under 1%. To improve your unsubscribe rate, don't send generic email messages to broad audiences. Instead, segment your lists into niche target audiences and personalize the content for each audience.

Key Performance Indicators

In addition to the metrics above, cannabis dispensaries should track other key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of their digital marketing efforts:

• Percentage of Sales from Digital: Measuring your percentage of sales from your digital marketing campaigns gives you insight into how well your team is performing. What can sales from your dispensary storefront and online store be attributed directly to your email marketing efforts?
• Cost per Acquisition: What is the hard cost for you to acquire each new customer for your dispensary?
• Customer Value: This metric is a compilation of various metrics - How much is your client spending on average? How many transactions are they performing annually? This indicator will help you better understand the value of your customer.

A/B Testing Strategies

This method involves crafting two variations of an email to gauge which version yields a more favorable outcome ^[19]. By experimenting with diverse elements such as subject lines, imagery, and calls to action, brands can fine-tune their communications.

The best way to A/B test your campaigns is to start from the top down. By this, we mean only conducting one A/B test at a time to get the best results.

Start with the subject line to improve open rates. Send multiple campaigns testing different subject line angles to generate the highest open rate consistently. We've found that using elements of mystery and intrigue to be the best.

Next, test the headline above the fold in your email. Use different copywriting principles to push the reader to an action, which is clicking the button. Sell the sizzle, not the steak. The point of an email is to sell the click, not your product. Your website or POS should sell the product.

After that, you can test the offer in your email. This can form part of the headline. The more relevant the offer is to the audience, the higher your CTOR and Placed Order Rate will be.

Lastly, you can test the email button call to action itself. This should lead the reader to an action. Typically in promotional emails, this is something like "Buy Now". However, we've found that being more specific to the benefit, related to the desired outcome of the customer, provides better results.

This can be something like "Buy India Strains For A Mellow High".

Maximizing Email Deliverability

You need to keep your list clean if you want your emails to be inboxing with your subscribers and your cannabis dispensary email marketing to be successful.

Over 20% of email signups contain errors, typos, or invalid domains ^[20]. Regularly reviewing and cleansing your email list, known as email hygiene, helps improve your sender reputation, and email engagement rates, and reduces the risk of landing in the spam folder.

Remove inactive or unengaged subscribers by running a re-engagement campaign before removing them completely. Segment your email list based on shared interests and past purchase behavior to send targeted, relevant content.

Implementing authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC enhances email deliverability and prevents phishing attempts.

These standards validate that the sender is authorized to send emails on behalf of the domain, verifying the message's integrity and matching the visible "From" address with the authenticated domain ^[22].

By prioritizing email list hygiene, authentication protocols, and engagement-based sending, you can maximize your cannabis dispensary email deliverability and ensure your messages reach your subscribers' inboxes.

Cannabis Dispensary Email Marketing Revenue Strategies

Email marketing has a significant impact on cannabis dispensaries, offering a powerful way to connect with customers and boost sales. Use in-store touchpoints to collect email leads to market your products to increase customer LTV.

By choosing the right platform, building a quality email list, and adhering to regulations, dispensaries can create targeted campaigns that resonate with their audience. Segmentation, personalization, and automation play crucial roles in delivering relevant content and fostering customer loyalty.

Lastly, leveraging customer data and implementing effective measurement strategies are key to optimizing email marketing efforts. By focusing on key metrics, conducting A/B tests, and maintaining good email hygiene, dispensaries can enhance deliverability and engagement rates.

Ultimately, a well-executed email marketing strategy can lead to increased customer retention, higher sales, and a stronger position in the competitive cannabis market.

Cannabis Dispensary FAQs

How Can I Attract More Customers to My Cannabis Dispensary?

To increase your cannabis dispensary's customer base, consider these strategies:

• Deliver an exceptional customer experience to encourage repeat visits and word-of-mouth recommendations.
• Use effective pricing strategies to offer competitive and appealing pricing.
• Boost your local SEO efforts by collecting Google Reviews.
• Establish relationships with local healthcare providers who can refer patients.
• Offer a variety of payment options to make transactions smoother.
• Develop targeted email marketing strategies to engage different customer segments.

What Are Effective Ways to Market My Dispensary?

Here are the top 10 marketing strategies for your dispensary:

1. Implement loyalty programs to increase customer retention.
2. Utilize text message marketing to enhance revenue.
3. Create referral programs to leverage word-of-mouth advertising.
4. Engage in social media marketing, even on platforms with restrictions.
5. Re-engage customers through ecommerce remarketing.
6. Increase your Google ranking with local SEO for keywords like "weed near me" or "dispensary near me".
7. Discounts on specific products like flowers, edibles, and pre-rolls.
8. Special deals during certain times of the day or specific events.
9. Birthday discounts to make customers feel special and valued on their birthdays.

Is Mailchimp a Suitable Platform For Cannabis Email Marketing?

Unfortunately, Mailchimp does not support cannabis products under its Acceptable Use Policy, as it classifies them as pharmaceutical in nature. Therefore, Mailchimp is not an appropriate platform for cannabis-related email marketing.