Everyone knows how notoriously difficult cannabis marketing can be. However, you’d be surprised to learn exactly what’s possible when you’re able to maneuver the tricky restrictions and regulations.
For instance, Instagram and social media in general come with the risk of getting shut down – even if you do everything right. Email marketing, on the other hand, has no such risk.
In fact, unlike on social media platforms, you can’t lose access to your audience.
When your account gets taken down on social media, you lose access to your followers and ways to connect with them. Whereas with email, your list of contacts is always yours, no matter what.
In other words, if you choose a cannabis-friendly email platform, you can send your customers all your promotional content and use the word “cannabis” as many times as your heart desires, without risking anything.
Not to mention, email marketing has one of the highest returns on investment of any marketing channel. On average, e-commerce businesses can see a $36 return on $1 of investment.
What are the benefits of email marketing for cannabis businesses?
Email marketing is a powerful, yet underutilized channel of marketing. Particularly as an e-commerce cannabis or CBD brand, your email marketing strategy could help skyrocket your sales. Our Cannabis Creative clients have seen results as significant as email being solely responsible for 6% of annual revenue.
With email, you can:
- Create personalized and automated content regularly.
- Collect feedback and surveys from your customers.
- Promote products and increase sales.
- Generate traffic to your site and increase leads.
- Send time-sensitive campaigns to targeted audiences.
Here are five ways you can get started with email marketing for your cannabis business:
1. Personalize as much as possible
Personalization will never go out of style. Email marketing is powerful because you can collect and utilize a lot of information about your customers. Integrating your email marketing with your website can give you insight into what your customers are searching for, how they interact with your website, purchase habits, and more.
Using this data to personalize your messaging will allow you to build a deeper relationship with your customers as a brand. You can address them by name, add information that they may find helpful, suggest products or services that fit their needs, and more.
A robust email strategy will allow your brand to shine so that you will consistently catch the attention of your most valued customers.
Use your next newsletter as an opportunity to connect deeper with your subscribers! Survey to get more information from your audience, introduce your mission and founder story, or try something else. Don’t be afraid to get creative.
2. Create strategic email automations
Email marketing doesn’t have to be that dreaded addition to your already long to-do list. With all the advanced technology out there, it is simple to automate a good chunk of your email marketing plan. Our team prides itself on creating strategies that give you more freedom so you can do more with your time.
You can create many different types of automation sequences. Let’s go over some of the basics:
Welcome Series
You’ve seen the ones, the “welcome to our list” emails that give you a quick crash course into what you signed up for. This is a great starting point for automation for any brand, e-commerce or otherwise, because it introduces your subscribers to your brand and gives them a more personal touchpoint.
Include a founder story, letter, or video, remind subscribers where to find your products and services, or give them an exclusive welcome gift in the form of a discount. This is your first impression in their inbox, so make it a good one!
Nurture Series
Follow up about a purchase, download, or service booking with nurture sequences. These types of automations help you build your relationship with your audience by providing more value on something you’ve already interacted about.
For instance, if a customer downloaded a Cannabis 101 Guide that gives them bonus loyalty program points when they sign up, you can send a nurture series reminding them to sign up for the loyalty program and explaining its benefits.
Look into opportunities your brand has to set up a nurture series with your customers and increase the number of personal touchpoints you have with them.
Abandoned Cart Emails
You know, the “Oops! Looks like you forgot something in your cart” emails you get when you start to shop on a website and either get completely distracted or change your mind altogether. These emails win back a significant amount of business for brands daily and are a really valuable part of your cannabis email marketing strategy.
If you are a cannabis or CBD brand, this is one automation you must work towards sooner rather than later!
Post-Purchase Series
Similar to a nurture series, a post-purchase series is a sequence of messages to customers to remind them to review your products or experiences, let them know when it is time to reorder from you, relay important information about their purchase, and more.
This is especially helpful when you’re trying to build reviews on your website (therefore, power-packing your product page SEO!) or just trying to get an idea of how customers use your products.
It is a natural progression of building your relationship with customers and an opportunity to see where you can improve while still establishing community.
Whether you offer a product or a service, brainstorm to see what type of automated series your brand could benefit from.
3. Share your brand story
Getting customers through the door to your dispensary or purchasing from your website is already a challenge. Industry rules and regulations don’t make it easy all the time, but email marketing can help you build brand awareness in a more powerful way.
Through strategic emails, you can share your brand story and what you have to offer. Not only that but knowing that your subscribers already gave you explicit permission to contact them means they’re interested!
In other words, it’s not a guessing game; they want to learn more. A well-thought-out cannabis email marketing strategy will keep you at the top of mind for customers that are on your list.
Staying relevant to your customers is essential in today’s saturated market and email may be the golden ticket you were looking for to catch their attention.
See how you can share your brand and story in an engaging way through email. Try something new! Experiment with an email video series from your founder, share testimonials from early customers, and more.
4. Analyze your email marketing reports
There is nothing more valuable than being able to see tangible results and identify exactly what is and is not working in your marketing strategy. Email marketing offers some of the best, most detailed reporting, particularly on subscriber trends.
You can get insight into your consumers’ behaviors and interactions with your emails, what links they find interesting enough to click on, how they navigate your website, and what influences their purchase decisions.
If you’re already set up on a cannabis-friendly email platform, dive into your email analytics. Use what you know to leverage the things that work and experiment with what could be improved!
5. Share timely and relevant information
When you have time-sensitive events, the last thing you want to do is scramble to get a post up on your social media after you have actual content from the day of, only for it to be at the mercy of the algorithm (but don’t get us wrong, a good social media strategy will work to your advantage during these times as well).
With email, you can share your message in real-time and know for sure who it’s getting delivered to while also being able to plan ahead in most cases.
Whether you’re having a limited-time sale, opening a new location, sharing pop-up events, or something else, you can quickly update your email list with just the click of a button.
Take a look at your calendar and see what time-sensitive and exclusive news you can share with your email list. Create and schedule emails to help them stay in the loop!
Get started with cannabis email marketing
Email marketing is one of the few ways cannabis businesses can market their business without worrying as much about stringent rules and regulations. With the right strategy and guidance, you can easily build an engaged community while increasing your sales and growing your business at scale.
Contact us to get started on an email project today.
