Email marketing presents a terrific opportunity at a time when most marketing tactics are out of bounds for marijuana dispensaries and other cannabis-related businesses. For instance, cannabis-related businesses cannot advertise using Facebook or other social media platforms, Google Ads, print advertising or direct mail.

Fortunately, there are still ways for marijuana dispensaries to market themselves, and email marketing tops this list. Since the recipients of your emails have asked to receive them by subscribing, email marketing allows you to speak directly to a loyal audience that is eager to hear from you.

What’s more, email marketing provides you with an effective way to offer special deals and upsells to your customers while constantly keeping in touch with them and reminding them of your dispensary brand.

Why should you use email marketing for your dispensary?

 Take a look at the following statistics:

• 92% of adults who use the internet use email.
• 61% of adults check their email on a daily basis.
• 64% of internet users in the US have printed a coupon from an email. This is proof that promotional emails drive online sales and in-store visits.
• Email marketing has an ROI of 122% when it’s done correctly. This is 4 times higher than any other form of digital marketing.
• 72% of people would rather receive promotional content through email. Only 17% prefer to receive it via social media.
• 75% of e-commerce shoppers are likely to open branded emails. This makes email marketing the best channel for marketing a cannabis-related business.

To drive the point home, let’s look at the specific benefits of using email marketing.

Benefits of email marketing for dispensaries

• Emails are easy to share
  With an email, all a subscriber has to do is click on the forward button to share a message with their friends.  Your subscribers have friends who trust them. They can therefore become great advocates of your brand when they forward information about your brand or a new sales offer at your dispensary.
• Personal and targeted
  While most forms of marketing are impersonal and target a general audience, email marketing for cannabis dispensaries is targeted and delivers a personalized message. You can personalize the email by using the recipient’s name, and a sales funnel that best suits their form of interaction with your brand.
• Email marketing allows you to test your messages
  Email marketing gives you the freedom to try out factors that influence a customer. Different offers, graphics, headlines, and even the color scheme that you use will cause varying reactions from your customers.  All you have to do is to try sending two different offers and see which one performs better in terms of click-through rates.
• Brand awareness
  Each time you reach out to a subscriber on your email list, you are making them aware of your brand. You are slowly planting seeds of trust that will in turn convert a potential customer into a loyal customer. Constant communication with your subscribers means that you will always be on their mind. Whenever they want to shop, your brand will be the first on their mind.
• Tracking engagement and sales
  Being able to measure user engagement and sales is a crucial element of the success of your cannabis dispensary. Email marketing helps you measure different areas of engagement, such as when someone clicks on specific links in the emails you send. This data can help you measure the tendencies of your customers and help you market to these tendencies.
• Low overhead costs
  Email marketing is inexpensive. All you need is to host your list on a service that provides email marketing services and then create email content that resonates with your target audience. With a strategic plan of action and great copywriting, you will be up and running in no time.

Now that you know how important email marketing is, you are probably wondering what types of emails you should send to your subscribers. Let’s talk about that in the next section.

Examples of emails dispensaries can send

Direct emails

A direct email is any email that is sent to your entire subscribers list. These general email blasts could be a simple ‘hello’ accompanied by a dispensary update, an announcement of a new product, or a dispensary promotion.

Even though these types of emails are considered to be general, you can still increase their engagement by segmenting your list of subscribers. When signing up email subscribers, look at what they are interested in. This information should help you divide your list into groups of people who are interested in the same type of information.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are emails that you send to your subscribers based on their actions on your website. A subscriber may have added herself to your subscriber list, abandoned an item in their shopping cart, filled out a form, or completed a purchase.

Because transactional emails respond to an action, they are viewed as the most relevant to your subscribers, and they generate the most engagement. These emails aim at following up on an action and give more information to the customer.

Email newsletters

Email newsletters are emails you send to your subscribers to update them on your dispensary as well as to nudge them to take specific actions.

When sending out a newsletter, it is essential to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What would you expect to hear from a marijuana dispensary on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis? Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Interesting and educational articles on cannabis culture, industry news, local laws, cannabis culture, and many more that you have linked to a third-party site or written yourself.
• New product announcements and special discounts.
• Ongoing columns such as shout-outs to your favorite producers, suppliers or budtender of the month.
• Local, community, or in-store events that you are involved in.

Email Marketing Tips for Marijuana Dispensaries

Email marketing is the lifeline for marijuana dispensaries to survive in this competitive cannabis industry. Unfortunately, most brands are struggling to get good results from their email marketing campaigns.

What if most of your clients or leads replied to your emails? What if they opened and read your messages and then responded to your CTAs? We’ll go on to outline some simple ways to leverage email marketing to get some pretty darn impressive results.

1. Build A List

Before you can start an email marketing campaign, you need to build a list of subscribers. Take time to think about what your audience would like to read from your emails and then use this to build your list.

There are several ways to develop your list of subscribers. For example, you can generate leads from your website by using a gift or special offer to lure website visitors into subscribing. You can also use a sign-up box on the pages of your website or use social media to ask your followers to subscribe.

2. Improve Email Deliverability

An undelivered email is a lost opportunity. Once a lead signs up, request them to whitelist your email address. This way, their ISP flags your email as credible, and your subsequent messages will have a much higher chance of reaching their inbox, rather than the spam folder.

3. Know Your Audience and Their Goals

Who are you sending your email to? What kind of content do they want to receive? Are they interested in exclusive offers, news, blog posts, or business updates?

Understanding your audience and their needs will help you define the aim of your marketing campaign and align it with your marketing strategy. Also, understanding the purpose of your campaign makes it easier to measure your progress along the way.

4. Segment Your Audience

Once you have researched your audience and know what they want to receive, it’s time to divide them into specific groups. Not all your subscribers will want to hear the same thing. Segmenting them into groups allows you to customize emails so they’re highly relevant to the recipient, regardless of the stage they are at in the customer buying cycle.

When your subscribers receive customized emails, they are less likely to unsubscribe, and more likely to respond.

5. Be Personal

Personalize your emails for every individual subscriber. Write as if you are addressing them personally. Use their first name and speak directly to them, just like you would do if you were talking to them face-to-face. When signing off, use your personal name rather than your corporate name. This makes the email look like it came from a person.

You can even go as far as using the customer’s past purchase data while drafting the email so that it becomes more engaging to them. Sending emails that relate to your subscriber’s interests goes a long way in motivating them to open the email and interact with your content.

6. Write Valuable Content

Craft enticing subject lines for your emails. This is the first point of interaction; miss the chance to capture their attention, and all your effort will go down the drain.

Any content you put in your email newsletter should offer value to your readers. Ask yourself why your audience should open your email. How will your newsletter improve their life?

Ensure that your content is entertaining, informative, inspiring, useful, helpful or educational, and it should convince the user to take action.

And speaking of convincing readers to take action…

7. Always Include a CTA

One of the biggest mistakes marijuana brands make is not having a clearly defined call to action (CTA). If a reader looks at your email and they can’t determine what they are expected to do within five seconds, chances are they will delete your email.

Whether the action is to purchase some marijuana product, sign up for a trial, or fill out a form, be aware of what the primary aim of the email is and what you want your audience to do. Then, add a clear call to action to direct users to a product page or other landing page.

8. Optimize for Mobile

Most cannabis customers will be reading your emails from a mobile device. You therefore need to optimize your emails for mobile.

All your emails should be mobile-friendly. They should have a responsive design, and the content should be easy to read and engaging. Ensure that your content fits all screen sizes.

9. Make It Easy to Unsubscribe

Ensure that your subscribers are free to manage their subscriptions by including ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘manage your subscriptions’ button at the bottom of all your emails.  Give your subscribers the freedom to choose how often they want to hear from you, and their email preferences.

When subscribers find it difficult to unsubscribe, they develop a negative feeling towards your brand. Worse still, they could mark your email as junk or spam.

Finally

These are just a handful of tips to get you started.  There are a bunch of other tips you can use such as integrating emojis, turning to effective A/B testing to improve open rates, tracking behavior with robust analytics and using optimized timing to send emails to drive revenue.  Above all, be consistent and make sure your messages focus on what your audience would like to hear.

Options We Have Available

At Reefer Mail, we specialize in providing email marketing services to marijuana-related businesses. We have several options that you can choose from depending on your needs and budget.

If you run a small dispensary, you can sign up for our $9 monthly subscription that allows you to have up to 2000 subscribers and send an email each month.  For $29 a month, you can send up to five emails a month and have a subscriber list of up to 5000 people. This plan suits most companies.

If your dispensary tends to be more aggressive in its campaigns, then our $59 monthly subscription would be better for you. This plan allows you to send up to 15 emails each month and have a maximum of 10,000 subscribers.

Our last plan, which is most suitable for agencies and high volume organizations, costs $129 per month. This plan allows you to have an unlimited number of subscribers and send as many campaigns as you wish.

For more details on how you can start your own mailing list and reap the benefits of email marketing for marijuana dispensaries, reach out to us by clicking the link below.