CBD Email Marketing in 2025: A Step-by-Step Guide

‍We're going to show you how to kill the competition with the best CBD email marketing strategy in 2025! Email marketing for CBD companies is one of the most effective and cost effective ways to promote your business and its products.

In this step-by-step guide, we'll walk you through the essential strategies and tactics to supercharge your CBD email marketing efforts and drive serious results as the CBD industry gets more competitive.

From how to market CBD products via email to leveraging email automation, personalization techniques, and building your CBD email list; we've got you covered to make more revenue with CBD email marketing in 2025!

What Is CBD Email Marketing

Email marketing for CBD companies is especially important due to unique regulations and advertising restrictions that limit traditional channels such as TV, radio, and social media.

One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is that it allows CBD companies to own their marketing audience rather than relying on rented ad spaces.

When your business captures email addresses, you own the audience and their attention. This ownership means that companies are not subject to the changing rules and policies of third-party platforms.

The Most Important Thing: Email Deliverability

If no one sees your emails, it doesn't matter if you have the most beautiful emails in the world - make sure your emails are landing in subscribers' inboxes. How? By making sure your email deliverability is on point.

If your open rates are below 20% there is a very good chance your emails are being sent to the spam box. To ensure this doesn't happen there are a few basics you need to have before you can engage in an effective CBD email marketing strategy.

1. Email authentication records are set (DAMRC, DKIM, and SPF)
2. The sending domain and IPs have been warmed up so you have a high sender reputation
3. You have a dedicated sending domain tied to your brand URL
4. You've cleaned your email list and removed all spam traps
5. All your emails have a 60:40 text-to-image ratio

Choosing the Right Email Marketing Platform

Choosing the right email marketing platform is important for CBD businesses. Consider factors such as platform capabilities, deliverability rates, and compliance with laws and regulations specific to the CBD industry.

When deciding on potential platforms and CBD email marketing service's, look for:

1. Ensure the platform allows CBD-related content and complies with all relevant laws and regulations
2. High deliverability rates are essential to ensure your messages reach subscribers' inboxes
3. Drag-and-drop email builders and customizable templates to create visually appealing campaigns
4. Robust automation tools to send targeted messages based on subscriber behavior and preferences
5. Detailed analytics and reporting to track campaign performance and optimize future strategies
6. Integration with other marketing tools and e-commerce platforms to streamline your workflow
7. Reliable customer support to help navigate any email marketing challenges

How to Evaluate Platform Capabilities and Limitations

1. Research the platform's terms of service and acceptable use policies to confirm they allow cannabis & CBD-related content
2. Request information on deliverability rates and ask for case studies or references from other CBD brands using the platform
3. Test the platform's features with a free trial or demo to ensure it meets your specific needs

Building and Segmenting Your Email List

Great email revenue started with having a targeted email list that is continually growing. To ensure that your campaigns resonate with your audience, focus on organic list-building strategies and segmenting your subscribers based on their interests, preferences, and behaviors and zero party data.

Strategies For Organic List Building

1. Add subscription forms on your website in the form of pop-ups, floating bars, etc.
2. A/B test different offers to see which generates the most leads
3. Create gated content or lead magnets that will appear to targeted consumers in exchange for their email addresses
4. Include a subscription button at the checkout page to attract prospects and customers
5. Share converting landing pages on your social media or website to get their opt-in
6. Offer giveaways where people provide their email addresses in exchange for a chance to win free products
7. Reach out to your existing SMS contacts and request their email addresses

Segmentation for Targeted Campaigns

Sending bulk messages to all subscribers won't yield the best results for your cannabis business. Instead, use email segmentation to send more targeted messages that maximize conversions.

Best Practices for a Healthy and Engaged Subscriber List

1. Set up a Sunset flow to identify inactive subscribers and stop sending them emails
2. Regularly clean your email list by removing undeliverable addresses and inactive subscribers to maintain a high sender reputation.
3. Provide valuable, relevant content that educates and informs your subscribers, not only about your brand, but other topics they may be interested in
4. Personalize your emails with dynamic content and product recommendations based on each subscriber's interests and behavior
5. Offer exclusive promotions, discounts, or early access to new products to reward your most engaged subscribers and encourage loyalty
6. Monitor your email metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, spam rates, and unsubscribes, to identify areas for improvement and optimize your campaigns

By following these best practices, you can cultivate a loyal and responsive subscriber list that drives long-term success for your CBD email marketing efforts.

Crafting Compelling Email Campaigns

Once you have your segments you can start sending out regular campaign emails to engage your subscribers and drive conversions. Focus on creating targeted, informative, and visually appealing emails that resonate with your audience.

Email Campaigns Valuable for CBD Marketing

1. Welcome emails: Engage new subscribers and make a great first impression with a well-crafted welcome email. We've found these emails have an average open rate of 60%+, making them an excellent opportunity to connect with your audience
2. Educational content: Provide helpful information and industry trends to build credibility and trust with your subscribers. These nurturing emails can be a precursor to sales
3. Promotional emails: Alert your subscribers about special sales, discounts, or new product launches to drive revenue
4. Newsletters: Keep your audience informed and engaged with regular newsletters that include a mix of industry articles, trends, and promotional content
5. Transactional emails: Confirm subscriptions, orders, shipping, and other important information to ensure a smooth customer experience

How To Create Email Campaigns for CBD Brands

Steal our 6-step process used to create CBD email marketing campaigns that increase conversions and push revenue for our clients. With this process, we ideate, create, and send over 1 million emails each month.

Keys to Creating Eye-catching Subject Lines

People need to open and see your email if they're going to click and buy your products. Your email subject line is a very important component of your campaign, as it determines whether your subscribers will open and read your message. To create compelling subject lines.

1. Keep them short, ideally under 50 characters, to ensure they are fully visible on mobile devices
2. Use personalization, such as including the subscriber's name or location, to improve open rates
3. Create a sense of urgency or FOMO by emphasizing limited-availability
4. Use mystery and intrigue to peck the readers' curiosity
5. Test different subject lines to see what works best for your audience

Content Strategies for Educational, Promotional, and Transactional Emails

1. Educational emails: Focus on providing value to your subscribers by sharing industry insights, actionable tips, and relevant blog posts. Establish your brand as an authority in the CBD space
2. Promotional emails: Highlight your best-selling products, offer exclusive discounts, and encourage repeat purchases. Use clear calls-to-action (CTAs) to guide subscribers to your website
3. Transactional emails: Ensure that these emails are clear, concise, and contain all the necessary information. Put the most important details first and use a straightforward design

Remember to keep your email content engaging, timely, and relevant to your audience and your email campaigns will drive more sales for your business.

However, the biggest limiting factor about email campaigns is the manual steps of creating each. What if you could automate sending emails to your audience?

Leveraging Email Automation and Personalization

Creating effective automation email flows, or funnels, is a pivotal step in harnessing the full potential of email marketing for your cannabis or CBD brand. By implementing personalized automation flows, our clients have experienced a 20%-50% increase in sales and save 12-19 hours per week.

Email flows, based on event triggers, have a 152% higher open rate than traditional campaign emails, and are very effective at capturing audience attention and revenueBusinesses utilizing these automation strategies report up to a 50% increase in conversion rates.

Integrating Automated Email Flows

These flows allow you to send targeted, timely messages based on specific event triggers or subscriber actions, ensuring that your audience receives relevant content at the right moment.

To illustrate the impact of automation and personalization in email marketing, let's explore some real-world examples of effective strategies:

Use Personalization to Increase Engagement and Conversions

By tailoring your messages to each subscriber's interests, preferences, data, and behaviors, you can foster stronger connections and encourage your audience to take desired actions.

Here are some ways to incorporate personalization into your CBD email marketing:

1. Segment your email list based on demographics, purchase history, zero-party data, and engagement levels to ensure that each subscriber receives content that aligns with their needs and interests
2. Use dynamic content blocks to display personalized product recommendations, offers, or educational resources based on a subscriber's past interactions with your brand
3. Incorporate personalization fields, such as the subscriber's name or location, to create a more intimate and engaging email experience
4. Leverage behavioral triggers, such as abandoned cart reminders or post-purchase follow-ups, to deliver timely, relevant messages that encourage subscribers to complete desired actions

Analyzing and Optimizing Campaign Performance

Monitoring your key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for optimizing your CBD email marketing strategy and improving your practices over time.

Most email marketing platforms offer reporting capabilities and analytics tools to help you track significant email metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribes.

Understanding Key Email Marketing Metrics

1. Open Rate: This metric 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 indicates an effective subject line sent to the right target audience. Be aware of false opens from Apple's iOS 15 update
2. 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
3. Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR is a metric that tells you how your email marketing campaign performed overall, taking all factors into account, including list segmentation, subject line, content, links, call-to-action, and offer
4. Unsubscribe Rate: While it's better for uninterested subscribers to unsubscribe rather than mark your messages as spam or never open them, high unsubscribe rates indicate that you're not sending the right content to the right audiences
5. SPAM Rate: When your emails are marked as spam they affect your email deliverability and should avoided at all costs. High spam rates indicate your audience does not want to receive your emails

Tools for Monitoring and Analyzing Email Performance

To gain deeper insights into your email campaign performance, consider integrating your email marketing platform with Google Analytics or Maaly Hubb. This will allow you to look more closely at your metrics and reach safer conclusions about what's working and what needs improvement.

Additionally, you can send quick surveys to your audience to collect valuable feedback and create more tailored content. This direct input from your subscribers can help you identify areas for optimization and better understand their preferences and needs.

Iterative Process for Optimizing Future Emails

Once you start recognizing patterns that work and have the data to prove this, stick with them to keep nurturing your audience and increase your sales. Take winning strategies and test angles, copy, creative, segments, timing and other factors to find more winners to build on your success.

By continuously monitoring your email metrics, collecting subscriber feedback, and implementing optimization tactics, you can create an iterative process for improving your CBD email marketing campaigns over time.

This data-driven approach will help you better understand your subscribers' behavior and preferences, allowing you to craft more effective campaigns that drive results for your business.

Integrating CBD Email Marketing with Overall Digital Strategy

Integrating email marketing within a brand's wider digital marketing strategy requires a cohesive approach that aligns with social media, SEO, and content marketing efforts to enhance brand awareness and drive website traffic.

By leveraging the strengths of each channel, CBD brands can create a synergistic effect that amplifies your marketing impact.

Start by improving your keyword strategy to attract the right online traffic to your website. Convert these visitors by capturing high-quality email subscribers who are interested in your brand.

Send email campaigns to share valuable content, such as blog posts, and videos hosted on your website. Have an effective funnel to convert this traffic from email campaigns into customers.

Integrate your email marketing platform with your social media accounts to create re-targeting campaigns on Meta. This same integration can also be used. create lookalike audiences to find new customers.

Additionally, utilize social media to gather insights on audience preferences and tailor your email content accordingly.

Finally, track the performance of all your campaigns through analytics and use this data to refine your overall digital marketing strategy, ensuring each component works harmoniously to boost brand visibility and drive visitors to your website.

Why Email Marketing is Important in the CBD Industry

Reliable Communication: Email provides a dependable way to communicate directly with customers, unlike social media platforms that may shadow-ban or limit cannabis content With regular newsletters, promotional emails, and personalized messages, businesses can keep customers informed and engaged despite advertising restrictions.

Building Relationships: Email marketing is highly effective in building and maintaining customer relationships. By sending targeted emails, companies can cater to the specific needs and preferences of their audience, fostering loyalty and trust. This is particularly important to cannabis and CBD brands when other channels are restricted.

Driving Sales: Well-crafted email campaigns can highlight new products, offer special discounts, and encourage repeat purchases. This direct line to customers can significantly boost a cannabis business's revenue and growth, making email marketing an essential tool for navigating regulatory challenges. Email marketing can be a predictable revenue generator when done correctly.

Navigating The Legal Complexities of CBD Email Marketing

With legal restrictions varying from one location to another, marketers need to grasp these nuances before launching their campaigns ^[7].

Federally in the USA, cannabis remains classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act which imposes strict advertising limitations nationwide.

In addition to these legal discrepancies between federal and state law comes the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They've got their own set of guidelines about licensee disclosure requirements, age restriction enforcement, and health risk warnings that need careful attention.

Conclusion

Mastering CBD email marketing in 2024 is a multi-faceted process that requires careful planning, execution, and optimization. By choosing the right platform, building a targeted and segmented email list, crafting compelling campaigns, and leveraging automation and personalization, you can effectively engage your audience and drive significant results for your CBD business.

As you navigate the unique challenges and opportunities of marketing CBD products via email, remember to continually analyze and optimize your campaigns based on key metrics and subscriber feedback to ensure long-term success.

If you're searching for a dependable CBD email marketing agency, seek professional assistance from Maaly. With our expertise and comprehensive services, you can elevate your email marketing efforts and achieve your business goals in the competitive CBD industry.

FAQs

What Are The Key Stages of The Email Marketing Funnel?

The email marketing funnel consists of five critical stages:

1. Awareness: Introducing your brand to potential customers.
2. Consideration: Providing material that makes your audience think about making a purchase.
3. Conversion: Convincing your audience to make a purchase.
4. Loyalty: Encouraging repeat purchases by building a loyal customer base.
5. Advocacy: Inspiring customers to recommend your brand to others.

What is The Three-Step Process in Email Marketing?

The three-step process in email marketing involves:

1. The Announcement Email: Introduce a new product or offer to your audience.
2. The Reminder Email: Remind your audience about the product or offer.‍
3. The 'Last Chance' Email: Alert your audience that the offer is about to expire, encouraging immediate action.