Cannabis companies often don’t make adequate efforts in terms of online advertising and marketing. That’s why focusing on known via email marketing is even more effective in appealing to your customers (who haven’t yet been inundated with emails from dispensaries!).
Here’s the thing: every decision you make about your dispensary is crucial to the overall experience for the customer. It’s not a far stretch to say that the customer experience you provide plays as important a role as the cannabis itself! Email is an incredibly important marketing tool for just about every big brand out there, and there are numerous ways it can help your cannabis business.
In this article, the team at dispensary marketing agency Growth Dispensary Marketing, breaks down 5 Essential Email Marketing Tips For Cannabis Dispensaries:
Build Your Email Campaign
You can start building your email campaign with these simple four steps:
1: Build a Distribution List
It’s important that you frequently collect and update email addresses for your distribution list. Make use of pop-ups on your website that encourage visitors to sign up for updates and newsletters, or reach out for new subscribers at the end of your articles or articles by embedding sign up buttons.
2: Communicate In Parts
You don’t to make your customers feel like you’re pestering them with the very first email. It’s important that you determine an appropriate cadence for sending emails to your list of subscribers. For the first email, send a welcome message to new subscribers and tell them what they can expect to hear from you in the future. From this point onwards, you should email your list at least once a month with relevant news and content designed to appeal to your audience.
3: Segment Your Audience
To get the most out of email marketing, build several distribution lists. Identify segments of your audience who will enjoy a specific type of content, and be diligent about trying to serve them individually. This way, your emails will be more personalized to each user. Yes, it’ll take much more effort, but it’ll also yield big benefits for your cannabis business.
4: Proofread, Proofread, Proofread
Nothing comes off as more unprofessional than typos and broken links. Make sure your email has been formatted right, spelled correctly throughout, and no links in your email are broken. If a user opens an email only to see grammatical and spelling errors – they’re mostly likely going to opt out of receiving any more emails!
Know *When* to Use Email Marketing
Email marketing is most effective when it’s done at the right time. If you’re selling specific products, send emails that highlight their availability, their appeal, and what makes them exclusive to your consumers. If events are what drive leads for the sales team, send emails that urge people to sign up for these events.
Whatever you do, do not overwhelm your audience with too much content and too much variety. Make sure to tailor the content to the audience, and cut out any irrelevant information. For example, if you have a list of people who are interested in cannabis legalization, try to stick to this topic when you email them.
Choose a Catchy Subject Line
Your subject line is the one thing that almost every user will see – even if they don’t bother to open your email! Use the correct keywords, avoid spam words, and be conscious of what will resonate with the audience. Here’s a few things to keep in mind:
Connect to your subscribers at an emotional level so that they enjoy reading your emails. Keep your subject line natural to let them know they’ve received an email from a human being. Not a robot!
Keep each subject line short and comprehensive. A long subject line is not only confusing, but also hard to understand. The ideal length of a subject line is six to ten words. In fact, it’s been found that 21% of people open emails with a subject line in this range.
If humor fits with your branding strategy, go for it! Emails with a stronger personality are not just opened – but also liked and forwarded. Of course, you also don’t want to end up going overboard with humor, as it will come across as unprofessional.
Make use of questions and numbers, as they’re known to get you a higher click-through rate. Use them along with a variety of other subject lines. But make sure you’re not leaving anyone confused!
Choose the Right Email Marketing Tools
It can be helpful to make use of email marketing tools to reach out to customers – but you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the abundance of options in the market! You’ll find some pretty fancy tools out there for email marketing, but keep in mind that shopping for the right tool is all about your dispensary. Don’t be dazzled by the bells and whistles unless you actually require them. Instead, find a tool that your business can actually benefit from, and that doesn’t charge extra for unnecessary features you won’t be using.
Make Your Emails Meaningful
If your email doesn’t offer value, it most likely won’t be read at all. Any information that you’re including in your email has to be valuable for the reader. For example, any updates Cannabis legalization will be far more valuable to a user than what promotions you’re offering this month!
You can send out emails all you want, but only expect to make sales only when you understand the importance of value. Therefore, try to have a balanced mix of quality content, offers and promotions in your emails.
Bottom line: As we mentioned before, very few cannabis-related companies are successfully doing email marketing (if any at all!). That’s why email marketing is such a viable tool for any cannabis business today. It’s true that email marketing takes learning, patience, and quite a bit of set-up. But once you’ve gone through all of that – you’ve reached the big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!