Top 6 Cannabis Dispensary Marketing Strategies

What’s going on, you guys, Brandon here, back at it again with some more dispensary marketing tips. This video is gonna show you the top six dispensary marketing strategies to help you increase revenue, increase online orders and have a lineup of people coming outside the door. So that’ll further ado.

Let’s get right into it. So the top six things that I’m gonna cover today is one. It’s gonna be website conversion, two SEO, organic and maps, three email, four SMS, five loyalty, and six review generation. Now there are probably hundreds of other things that you can do to market for your dispensary. But in my experience, I found these six main things to at least be the foundation of a lot of success for a lot of the, the dispensaries that I’m working with.

So first things, first website conversion, what, like Why is this so important, right? Everyone who visits your online profile is going to visit your website first, right? They’re gonna go online or they’re gonna go on Google. They’re gonna go online, visit your website, and then they’re gonna make a decision whether or not they want to purchase from your business.

Right? The buyer funnel is that they go online first and then they visit your store afterwards, right? You’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars into, creating the best store and the best environment possible. And then you don’t really look at your website and what that looks like.

And the reality of things is, is that people look at your website first. They decide if they wanna make a buying decision and then they go purchase after, right? So what, why is conversion optimization so important? I think everyone would agree that you want more people to convert better, right? What is a conversion? It’s essentially how many people who in this situation, how many people who visit your website end up making a purchase, right? Same thing, how many people who visit your store in person and coming in and buying something, right? You want to increase the number of people who end up visiting your profile online to end up purchasing some sort of product.

And it doesn’t mean that they’re gonna purchase online, cuz I know some of you guys don’t have online purchasing, but this also means how many people can you get looking at your website and then calling you requesting directions, going into your store, you know, filling out a contact form. All these things are gonna result in more sales for you, right? So right here, I just have a very, simple breakdown of your typical buying funnel and how people would purchase online.

The first one is they would go to your website, website sessions, they would then go to the shop page. They would then go to the cart page. They would then check out and then ultimately they’re gonna make a purchase. Now in an ideal world, you want the number of people who visit your website to also make a purchase as well.

But as we know that doesn’t happen. So what I’ve done is I’ve just suggested the conversion at the top of funnel, meaning website sessions, a shop page visits by only 15%, right? What we can see here that this 15% actually resulted in $150,000 difference in annual revenue. And that’s literally, how can we make your website look better and optimize better so that you get more people to the shop page, of your site.

That’s literally it, right? And if you can adjust that by 15%, you’re gonna see hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue that you know you would otherwise miss. So now the next question is, is how do we improve conversion on your website? So the way I want you to view conversions is you wanna reduce the amount of friction it takes to get your customer to what they want.

And you also want to increase the, the authority, the reliability, the credibility that your website has so that people will end up making a purchase. Right? So first things first is that you need to speak to your target avatar, right? What are their fears, frustrations? Why should they choose you? This simply put is what is your key differentiator? Why should people go to your dispensary versus somewhere else? Right.

And do those things that you say make yourself different, appeal to the people who are coming in and purchasing from you, right? So different areas have different demographics, different finances, just different people who live in different areas, right? And you’re gonna have a specific area that you should focus on and then you should gear everything towards making that target avatar is comfortable as possible so that you can increase as many conversions as you possibly can.

Right. The second one is that you want to use video to engage the audience. So a lot of times I speak with dispensary owners and they’re like, yeah, you know, our, our bud tenderers are really, really awesome. They’re super knowledgeable. Our stores really, really cool. And the product are, our, cannabis products are really good, right? And then I look at their website and it just says like maybe a paragraph of text that outlines those three things that I just said, but what you really wanna do is you wanna help increase the comfort of how people view your online presence, right? Typically that can come into the form of like a website welcome video.

So if you think that your bud, bud tenderers are top notch and you think your manager’s absolutely crushing it, they give the best customer experience ever. What you can really do is just have a website welcome video that says, you know, Hey, I’m John, I’m Sarah. You know, thanks for coming to, my dispensary, really appreciate you stopping by, just wanted to show you your, our team, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right. Or if you cater to an older demographic, right? What that video will show is that people who have an older demographic, maybe you have a greater focus on C V D again, that has, a greater prevalence in people who are wanting to maybe just, you know, dip their toes into the cannabis space, right.

It really allows you to have that comfort or allows your customers to have that comfort about, Hey, okay, this place is really cool. I’m gonna go visit them. this doesn’t have the scary stigma around cannabis dispensaries, and like you’re in a back room or a basement or anything like that. No, this is a legit business that you can come to and feel comfortable in, right? Same thing, dispensary tour as well.

Right. You can also give a dispensary tour. Maybe you have, you know, a really awesome, grow in the back. And then you can have like a glass. I saw one dispensary that, you know, did a really awesome job of that. maybe you’re going to do drone shots. I think I saw a dispensary out in Vegas and they had a drone shot and the drone went inside their store and they did a big tour.

Right? All of these things help differentiate you from, you know, other competitors and then would also help improve conversions. The third thing is leveraging social proof. So similarly, like how you would want Amazon, you go on Amazon, you look at the products and you look at the reviews and then you go and buy, or you go on Google, you look at the re reviews and buy what this does is that it improves the social proof, meaning that if other people tend to rate this thing highly, then the chances of this of me also lacking, this is also gonna be high.

Right? So it’s something as simple as just putting a reviews widget on your website, because once people go to your website, customers who speak about your business in a positive light is 10 times more powerful than you saying, yeah, we have good quality service. You have a good quality product. you know, our location is great.

All these different things, our bud tenderers are awesome. But if you have customers, that say, say this for you, then it’s 10 times more powerful, right? You can also add credibility with awards. So if you won any, awards and stuff like that, and you’re really confident in the sort of genetics that you’re growing and that you have awards to show, put it on the website, cuz again, you’re gonna showcase that your business is better than everyone else.

The fourth thing is just getting the basics in order, contact info easily found in the header and then ensure a clear call to actions on each page. So this goes without saying, whenever somebody visits your website, you want them to be able to easily find the phone number easily, find the address easily, find the hours and easily find the shop page, right? typically what you can do is just have the phone number and the address and the headers so that if anybody wants to find this information, they can find it as easily as possible.

And they don’t have to scroll to the bottom of the footer. The second thing is that you wanna ensure clear call to actions on each page. They’ll call to action is just, you know, like the, the typical buttons that say order now or shop here. Right? But what this does is it prompts your visitors to take an action on your website because if you don’t have any of these call to actions, your website essentially just acts as like a brochure.

You know, whenever you read a brochure and you just don’t really do anything on it, there’s like some contact. There’s maybe a phone number in the back, but that’s about it. What you wanna do is you wanna prompt your visitors to take an action on the website. So in the header or in the hero section, the one that sits below the menu on your homepage, what you wanna do is have something that very distinctly says, shop now in a big, I don’t know, give you a purple fluorescent green button, but you wanna make sure that this button is, is prevalent on your website so that people can see it.

The fifth thing that you wanna do is use special deals to entice customers, to buy. And you see this a lot in the fashion space, right? A fashion space has a lot of similarities to the cannabis space. At least at this time is that you have a lot of people, high THC products that want the cheapest as possible, same thing in the fashion space, at least the lower end fashion space or the, the mainstream fashion space is that people want deals in sales all the time, right? You probably go to the menu and just go to the sales section to see what’s on sale before you go check anything else, right? That’s the same thing with these customers.

The special deals will help get customers through the door. And then once you show them a really good product, then you have them and then you, you can have, essentially upsell them or cross-sell them increasing the lifetime value of that customer, right? But you want to get the customer through the door first because if you don’t get a customer, you know, having a little bit of a customer is better than having no customer at all.

The sixth one is make sure your website is mobile optimized with an easily click to call function. So what you don’t want is having your customers wanting to call you then having to copy and paste your phone number into their dialer, and then having to, go and then call from there. You just wanna, it hyperlinked in the text so that when people end up clicking the button, they’re gonna end up calling you right away because you know, you want to reduce the friction, right? Which proves conversion.

Another thing is that whoever’s building out your website. You wanna make sure that even though it’s mobile optimized, that like the formatting of how the website’s built out is both mobile and desktop. And a lot of people just make it responsive and it just shrinks everything together. But like a desktop is horizontal and then a, mobile is vertical, right? So what ends up happening is that even if you have, like, let’s say your eight category sections, you have your eight category sections that sit horizontal.

A lot of times website owners will just shrink the website and just have eight, images of all the categories. But you can imagine how much strolling that takes, right? So you wanna make sure you have different designs built out for both mobile and desktop, which is very important. Another thing that you’d wanna try is leveraging live chat.

So this is important because when you leverage live chat, you, you open up another channel for your customers to end up calling you right, or end up, get getting conversation with you. Because what you wanna do is you wanna just improve the percentage chance that a customer’s gonna come in and buy, right? That’s all you want to do.

And right now, in terms of communication, there’s not much you can really do. You can call, you can email, you can fill out a contact form and you can go to the, to the, dispensary directly. But by having a, a live chat, this opens up a whole world of possibilities for people who, you know, aren’t going to email you, or aren’t gonna fill out contact front, cuz it gonna take too long to reply or can’t talk on the phone right now.

I just want give you a very quick text. So leveraging live chat is a very important piece that you can definitely add to your website to just improve conversions and help improve the chances that the people visiting your website will end up coming and purchasing from you. Eight site speed matters. So you wanna make sure your website is fast, right? And how many times have you gone on your phone or even on the desktop and the website takes even two seconds to load and then you end up clicking off, right? this is a very easy thing that you can fix, right? But it’s also easily overlooked because people think that, yes, I’m gonna add a bunch of animations and a bunch of videos on my website, not knowing that that actually slows down your website and reduces conversions.

And then you’re gonna, reduce sales as well. The ninth thing is then creating individual location pages. So this is for the user, for the dispensary owners that have multiple locations. So let’s say you have three locations in three different cities. What I see a lot is that these location pages is just one big page with all of your different locations, right? But if I’m in city one, I don’t care about city two and three.

If I’m in city two, I don’t care about cities one and three either. Right? So what you wanna do is create a custom experience so that even if you have select deals at stores like promotions at different stores, you wanna make sure you create individual location pages so that anyone who visits those pages will have everything detailed and relevant towards that location as well.

Not only that it’ll also help SEO, which I’ll get into in a little bit later. This is something, a study that I wanted to, just emphasize. We can see, the global mobile phone website, traffic share from 2012 to 2022, right? 2012, only 10%. But we can see here in 2022 is actually almost hitting 60%.

What does this mean? So this means that the majority of people who visit your website are actually coming from mobile and not from desktop. Yeah. What I see all the time is that these websites are all built out for desktop and they look really, really cool. Don’t get me wrong. The, the state of how websites are being branded.

Like I, I enjoy the design. That looks awesome. But as soon as I go to a mobile, it’s just like, wow, this, this experience is just horrendous. Like I, you know, I don’t even wanna shop here because when it takes too long to, I can’t find what I need. and there’s just, you’re missing out on tons of traffic that way, because the majority of people are actually looking on mobile, right? So you wanna make sure that your website is properly optimized for this.

And you know, why don’t you try shopping on your website, on your own phone and see if this, user experience is something that you like or dislike, and then you can then test and make it better from there on now, one of the most important things, SEO, and this is not because , we do SEO for our clients.

This is because just due to all of the regulations in, in the space and just so many different marketing strategies that have, issues, obstacles, maybe it’s just hard to do, or it’s super, super expensive. this is one of the best ways that you can come in and improve the revenue for your dispensary.

And what is SEO? SEO is just search engine optimization. It’s just a digital marketing strategy that drives awareness to both your brand and your website. And this is done by leveraging Google and other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo. So for example, if you want to establish a presence on the first page of Google for the keyword dispensary near me or dispensary in insert city, whatever your Saudi city is, you would target, these keywords with content that is gonna be relevant and valuable to the user searching your product.

So the equivalent of this is that, you know, when people go, online and they type in restaurant near me, or like Italian restaurant or a pizza restaurant or whatever it is, you’re just gonna go look at the first list listings on Google. And then you’re gonna go to the website, go look at the, the URL, go look at the website, decide whether or not you want to go eat there and then you’re gonna go eat there, right? Because like I said, that’s how people find you.

They find you online first and then, then they go into your dispensary second. Right? So, this is the SEO funnel, right? very, very simple one. The customer’s gonna want some sort of cannabis product, whether it’s flour, pre-roll tins or concentrates, oils, just whatever it is, right. they’re gonna want some sort of cannabis product.

They’re gonna Google cannabis, dispensary related keyword. They’re gonna look at the listings only at the top. And then they’re gonna check the reviews as well, super important. And then they’re either gonna go to the website, they’re gonna get directions, they’re gonna call directly, or they’re gonna make a purchase.

Right. And how does that look? That looks something like this, right? So they’re gonna go Google dispensary near me, look at the reviews. Then look at, the, the, the website they’re gonna go in. They’re either gonna go to the website or click on this Google maps listing, and then call directly, make a direction, right.

Or on the website, they’re gonna make a purchase. Right? So this is very, very important because everyone goes to Google to find things, right? It’s not like, you know, you just Google things randomly, like you typically Google things that you want to find information on, or you want to go do. So you’re not looking at restaurants.

If you’re not hungry people, aren’t gonna look at cannabis products if they’re not looking to consume cannabis products. Right? So this is a very important piece of the puzzle, where if you’re ranking on Google, not only are you gonna get a lot of people looking at your profile, you’re going to get people who have a predisposition to buy your product already.

Meaning that this marketing strategy is better than however many other marketing strategies are out there. Because even if you let’s say run a social media campaign, right? A like doesn’t necessarily equate to a purchase and website traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to a purchase either, but people who are looking for a dispensary, right.

Have a higher chance of purchasing from you than, somebody coming from social media, right. Or a like from social media, right. And this goes into this conversion piece, is that like, you know, when you’re optimizing for conversion, even if we do all those things, it’s even gonna be boosted even higher.

If that traffic mostly comes from Google, right? Cause these customers and clients, these customers from yours are going to end up or going wanna end a purchasing from you. Right. so scrolling down here, here are some of the local ranking factors. So there’s two places where you’re typically found on Google, right? There’s this Google map section.

And then there’s also the organic section that sits below Google maps. So these special local, SEO ranking factors, are these three main things cuz Google uses a different algorithm for local searches, which places importance on the three, important ranking categories and their supporting signals.

So first is proximity. Proximity is just how close is the business for the person searching, right. If you are located in city one and city three is 100 miles away, right? No matter how optimized a profile is that city, that dispensary 100 miles away, isn’t going to, show up because they’re just so far away.

Right? The second one is relevance. If I go and Google restaurant, a cannabis dispensary, isn’t gonna pop up, right. Or if I look up plumber, a restaurant isn’t gonna pop up. Right. So how relevant is the search term for the specific business? How optimized is the content on the website, on the page? What are the business categories? What are the section headings? What are the citations that have been built out? What is the relevance that this business has to the thing that I’m searching, right.

Like I said, if I’m looking for a general contractor, right. a dispensary shouldn’t pop up, maybe it will, but it probably won’t. And then the third one is prominence. What is the authority of the local business? the E profiles. I’m gonna show you that below brand mentions link signals, number of reviews, you know, how prominent is your business pretty much over the internet? So if I’m apple, my business is, you know, being, said everywhere by all these press releases all these different people on YouTube, it’s showing up on all the social media channels it’s showing up on blogging websites.

You know, my, website, if I’m apple super, super prominent, because I’m everywhere, right? So proximity, relevance, prominent. Those are the three special local SEO ranking factors. Now what is the E a T algorithm? So we have expertise, which is quality structured and media, rich content authority published on whatever new sites, ABC, CVS, Fox, NBC, and then trust, right? This passes.

This is page rank with link signals and implied trust of this, you know, not to get super technical. All this really means is that, you know, When you get quality links and quality content, talking about your brand and your business, right, you are going to be seen as a higher authority in this space.

So I can go ahead and buy any, domain and say, ah, Brandon’s the best.com, right? But it’s new, right? It, it doesn’t have any authority. Doesn’t have any relevance in this space, but if you, somehow get a link from, you just use the apple example and then apple.com sponsors your website and says, this is the best dispenser you should go to.

And then links your website. Apple’s a super authoritative website. If you get a link like that, they’re gonna come back. And, you know, Google’s gonna see that apple gives you its vote of confidence and it’s gonna end up you ranking higher. Right? So here’s some of the, factors that go into a little bit more detail just in terms of percentages of the local pack and then organic rank factors.

So we have link signals, like I said, this is like the anchor text, linking domain domain, quality. We have the on page signals, behavioral signals. So behavioral signals is just like user experience. So click through rate mobile clicks calls check-ins. So, you know, even though I was talking about the conversions and how you should build your website out, this also plays a significant portion on how you’re ranking, right? If more people are clicking on that domain, if more people are interacting with the website, that’s a lot better.

Google’s gonna say, Hey, people must like this website and also rank you higher. Right? You have Google my business signals, citation signals, personalization, review signals, social signals. We have all these different signals, right? It’s essentially telling Google that your website is really, really awesome website, so that it’s gonna rank you higher and give this, give your website, more, not promotion, but more awareness to the people who are searching.

Because if all these other websites say you’re a good, the chances that you’re also a good website is also a good right. I have very, very detailed videos on both the local organic ranking and the local pack, organic ranking. Just go check it out. I think it’s like how to rank better on Google maps and like how to do SEO for your, for, for your business.

I think those are what the webs, the, the videos are called. So now going into email marketing, this is very key. and a lot of people I’ve found are dismissing email marketing with the whole SMS stuff that’s going on. And I, I wouldn’t really recommend that it’s just another marketing channel, right? It is going to work for your business.

And it doesn’t make sense to remove this marketing channel. Why not hit people from both sides, email, and text and text marketing. So here are some stats on email marketing, Like 81% of small businesses rely on email as a primary customer acquisition channel and 80% for retention. Right? I am getting the sneaky suspicion that this is a little bit lower for the cannabis space.

Cause like I said, with all these loyalty programs and people using SMS, this is slowly dropping down, but hopefully I can change your mind to, to see how we can improve, your retention, rate your loyalty and getting more people into your business by using email and not just by using SMS. So welcome emails have the highest rate of, of, of opening, right? And that’s because when people sign up, people are going to, to open up the email because they literally just signed up.

So when you write your welcome email, this is where you have the highest chance of people coming in and reading it. So what are you gonna write in this email? Like what is the expectation you’re gonna set for your customers when they get this first email, right? Is it that you’re gonna send them deals every single month? Is it that you’re gonna send them deals every single week? Is it that you’re gonna keep blasting them with promotions? Like what is it? Are you gonna give them informational and educational content? Are you gonna give them customized content based on the segment that they are like, there’s so many ways you can build out what your email list is going to be.

But when you set expectations, right, your unsubscribe rate will will decrease and your open rate will increase because they’re coming in and you’re telling them, Hey, I’m going to send you a promotion every single week and you’re gonna love it. And this is gonna be the greatest thing and no other dispensary’s gonna compare you best believe that the other, like there, I’m gonna continue looking at and you have to make sure you maintain that expectation.

Right? If you say that you’re gonna send out the best emails every single week, you should send out emails every single week. Right? So consistency is key. I do think that when you’re first starting out, right, you need to send emails consistently. And consistency means is different for everyone.

Are you sending it every day? Are you sending it every week? Are you sending it every month? Like what does that look like? But if you’re looking to send emails twice a month to three times a week, there’s going to be a gradient of quality that you’re going to need to do. Meaning that the more frequent your emails go out, ideally the higher quality they’re gonna be.

Because if they’re low quality emails, then not, a lot of people are gonna read it. They’re gonna end up not liking it. Unsubscribing, sending you to spam all those things, right? But if you send them twice a month, you have some sort of leeway because you’re not spamming their inbox. So right now a good approach would be to send emails twice a month.

And then you can up it to weekly. If you’ve got great content or ever changing offers, regular promotions, then you can consider sending emails two to three times a week. But it’s very important to monitor these campaigns because a line between being helpful and informative and annoying is a very, very, very thin one.

I’m sure you face it yourself, right? Like you’ve got a bunch of emails. You’re like, ah, why is, why are these guys sending me, these email? Like, I don’t want this anymore. Then you unsubscribe send them to spam. Then your open rates get lowered. And then you have, quality issues with your email.

It’s it’s not fun. Right. But how do you actually go ahead and get to those three times a week, right? Like sure. You wanna send really good offers and promotions, but how exactly do you go about, doing better emails, right? And the solution is by AB testing, your email copy. So AB testing is essentially just what can you do on your emails to help improve whatever KPIs that you have determined are the things that you you’re trying to achieve.

So step one is you’re just want to define your goal. Are you looking to drive sales? Are you looking to drive awareness? Are you just looking to increase the brand equity? Like what, what do you do, right? This is gonna be your north star. This is gonna be the thing that says, Hey, if I don’t get X result, then the email is either going to be improved or something is going to be eliminated, right? So you can optimize for the end goal.

And you can only optimize for something once you have the end goal, because if you don’t have an end goal, you’re just aiming for nothing. And you’re shooting in the dark. It’s not like, Hey, let me just send out 50 emails. And then it is what it is. It’s like, no, the objective of my email is to get increased sales for flour or to get increased sales for edibles, right? What do I need to do in order to help get to the next step for that? Right? And step two is just testing the copy for effectiveness based on the desired outcome, you really need to be patient and you only need to figure out the formula ones.

You maybe need to kind of continue testing over time, but it’s gonna be like testing, testing. I don’t know what’s working. I don’t know. What’s wor like what is working? What’s not working testing, testing, testing, and boom. You’re gonna find the perfect email copy. That’s gonna help you achieve your goals.

And that’s what, what the goal is, right? So what is the outcome of this AB testing’s gonna allow you to drive better results from your email campaigns? Is it gonna increase your revenues without having to invest in additional marketing strategies? Cause you’re gonna have a subset of customers and you can email them as much as you want, and you don’t need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to do it, right? If you can grow your email this big enough, and you can know you can reliably send out a Valentine’s day sale, a Christmas sale, a Halloween sale, whenever it is and get people coming back, you know, you have a really good strategy for your emails, right? Third thing is, it’s gonna provide you with immense data on what your customers like.

And don’t like, so again, when you’re a high level marketer, it’s not just, I’m gonna do email marketing. I’m gonna put it out. It’s like, no, I’m gonna figure out what’s working. Is it a buy one, get one free. Is it a 15% off? Is, is it a 10% off? Right. Sometimes, you know, you know, when you do too much of a discount, the difference in customers that you get, don’t increase the profits that you get as a business.

So even if it’s like a 15% discount, you know that a 10% discount gives you closer enough customers and keeps your margins high. Right? So what do you actually test for, right? That’s the next question. The first things first is that you need to deter deter, sorry. You need to determine your baseline data.

This will help you understand whether your tests are helping or hurting. So example your open rate, 30%, your clickthrough rate 10% and your sales generated $12,000. This is just an example, right? So if you want to increase your open rates, right? There’s different things that you can test. If you want to increase your click through rates, there’s different things you can test.

If you wanna increase your sales generated, there’s different things you can test, right? So an email, there’s multiple things you can test. So subject line, short, long name and subject line. So these are like the most popular ones. So like short, I, you know, get 15% off your favorite, flower products, whatever it’s right.

It could be long. Hey, you know, it’s Valentine’s day, you wanna get something for blood ever, blah, blah, blah. . I can’t think of it off top of my head. typically the short ones would, would work a little bit better and then name and subject line. So typically what you would find is that if you put the person’s name in the subject line, open rates will increase.

So if you put Brandon, get 10% discount off your favorite products versus just get 10% discount off your favorite products, right? The bigger open rate will be. If you put the person’s name into it, promotion discounts, buy one, get one free in store deal. So let’s say, you want people to shop more in store because your bud tenderers are really good at upselling.

The customers that are coming in and you realize that your cart size has increased from eight 50% when they order online to 75, sorry, $50. When they order online to $75, when they order in store, you can then promote instore deals. You can say, get this deal in store only, not online orders, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you can have a promotion. Having more people come to the store, right. Calls to action. So I talked about this in the conversion optimization, you have shot now order here, click to buy these three things, resonate with different people, right? So you can then optimize for this to see, what your clickthrough rate of people doing.

These things are right. Customization. You can include name, not include the name content long form, short form images, different images, no images. You can maybe have the promo image in the email. You can maybe just have like a dog in the email and people are like, ah, that’s really fun. And then have, the, the promotion in the text.

There’s just so many things that you can test. But what you wanna make sure is that you only change one variable at a time. And this is the most important thing. Hence AB it’s not B CD testing, right? It’s AB testing because if you change multiple things in your email, then you won’t know what resulted in the increase or decrease.

Right. Which is why I said be patient. Because if you’re not patient and you try and test a bunch of different things, you’re never know, gonna know what’s work. You’re never gonna know what’s not working. And then you’re gonna be all over the place. So, you know, if you put the name in the subject line and then you have a 20% discount and then you have short form, and then next time you do long form and you do the complete opposite.

You’re not sure what works and what doesn’t work. Right? So this is something that you improve and you optimize each time. It’s not about, you know, how can I immediately generate 30% more sales it’s no. How do I incrementally go to the, to my end goal? Right? And what’s gonna happen with this testing. You’re not always gonna test and know what is right, because you’re gonna make a testing and you might get less sales, but now you know that that actually doesn’t work.

And then you can try something else. Right? So moving forward, you’re gonna have a baseline that you can optimize from based on your current emails. And then you can continue optimizing it. If it’s above baseline, good, keep the changes. If it’s below baseline, then eliminated, right. That’s all you really need to do.

And the last thing is that this concept applies not just for email, but it applies for SMS marketing. And even for in-store promotions as well, you can AB test anything. So for SMS marketing, you can’t, that you can’t, but you shouldn’t be sending out like text, like every single day, right? Maybe you could, you could, if you AB test and you realize that this is the most effective thing for you, go for it, right? But this concept applies for SMS because you can also test different things.

You might not have a subject line, but you can also always test promotion the call to action. The customization, the content and images. you know, for, for text short form probably works out best, but why don’t you test out long form? Maybe you say something funny. Maybe you have an email, an SMS that says, Hey, you’re gonna be sent one joke of the day that you can use on all of your friends.

And then one discount for the day, right? Maybe you can get away with sending that every single day because your jokes are really funny, right. Or you can maybe act as a vocabulary dictionary of the day, right? Here’s one new word you’re gonna learn that you can use. And then one discount that you can get, right? There’s so many things just get very, very creative with this, right? This is really fun stuff.

And don’t just be like, ah, this is really boring. Like, no, just see what works and what doesn’t work and continue testing as you continue testing, you’re just gonna get better. Right. Another thing that I’d recommend is getting feedback from your customers. So, you know, how many of you had a favorite restaurant? And then just for some reason, boom, it just wasn’t as good, right? For, for whatever reason, right? Typically, you know, in the restaurant space, maybe a recipe change, they cut back on some quality items, all these different things.

But in a lot of times in other service based businesses, they just get complacent. They’re like, yeah, I have a good base of customers. I don’t need to make any changes. I don’t need to continue to get better. Right. All businesses should strive and continue to just continue getting better month over month, week, over week, whatever it is.

And by occasionally sending out surveys, you’re gonna get an idea of what your customers really like or what they don’t like. Right. You can ask them what you think about our bud tenders, what you think we can improve on as a business. You know, what do you think about our in-store layout? You know, are there products that you want that we need to get? Are there products that, you know, we always have, but nobody wants, you know, by taking surveys, you get a, a better idea of what your customers want.

And then you can just give them what they want. Right. That’s all it is. It’s like your customers want something they’re gonna pay you for it. So why don’t you just give it to them? Right. So this is a very important piece of the puzzle. Another thing is getting reviews. So with email, you can get reviews, right? So, I’m gonna talk about like conversions on reviews and why you need a lot of reviews for your business, but like, it, it speaks for itself, right? You wanna boost online presence.

You wanna rank hard because you’re gonna get more reviews. Getting reviews is just a good idea all around. And you can do that by sending emails and then just sending very quick, texts to your customers. Very simple SMS marketing. So SMS marketing works very similar to email marketing, but like I said, there’s a few nuances.

So the average open rate of a text it’s set about 99% with 97% of, messages being read within 15 minutes of delivery, which is a crazy stat, right. But if you try and take advantage of this with your customers, they’re gonna be super unhappy with your brand, right? So the tolerance for receiving texts message marketing is significantly lower.

Like I’m sure you get a bunch of emails every single day, but if you start getting emails from businesses, you’re just going to be very, very upset. So, you may be, vulnerable to more opt outs and unsubscribes than you have over email. But this means that you just need to do text better. That’s all this means.

Is that just because texts might be a harder platform to use because people are opting out, right? It just means you need to be a better text. It’s not as easy as just saying, Hey, get X amount off your order, blah blah. Because every business is doing that. Not even in the cannabis space, but you know, all these, like fashion brands are also trying to get you to text and get text marketing and all that stuff.

No, you need to make sure that you just do text better. How you do text better. You just do this, you do the AV testing, right? The data’s gonna tell you how good your texts are and how bad your texts are. And that’s all you need to follow. Right? yes, it’s clear that SMS has a personal touch and that receiving one from a brand feels similar to receiving one from a friend or family member.

So it should be treated as such. So, SMS is probably slightly less professional than an email would be, but you know, you wanna make it feel comforting because people get texts from friends and families. they rarely get emails from friends and families, but they get texts from friends and families.

So you wanna make sure that the platform voice is aligned with is aligned with what you are sending your customers, yes. Important not to bombard your customer, for message after message super important. Then you can also use AB testing to continually improve your text messages, super important style review generation.

So this is what people see on Google. When they type in dispensary near me, they look at the reviews, 96, 6 91 and 51. So even though vapor room is 96 and it has the top review. If you were a new customer, where would you probably go probably to Mo Green’s dispensary delivery, cuz this, they have six hundred and ninety one, four 0.9 star reviews because the ratio is the exact same and they have more review.

So probably people are gonna go here, right? And again, this goes without saying, and just like the conversion optimization. I don’t think people really understand the power of getting more reviews until it’s broken down to them in this missed revenue. If you’re not focusing on this. So this is a power of review volume.

So this is a conversion lip. So at zero reviews display, obviously the baseline is zero. from one to 10, you have 52 from 11 to 30, that doubles to, 102% 31 to 5133% 51 to 100 that’s 148%. And then at 101 reviews displayed, boom, you get boosted to 251% conversion. So what does this mean in terms of added revenue or MIS revenue for your business, depending on where you are in that spectrum, right? How does this affect your store? So if you have 1000 potential customers and the baseline conversions 10%, and so then the number of your converted customers is 100 at an average card size of 60.

These are the sales generated. So with zero reviews, you’re gonna have 6,000 because 6,000 of 100 is 6,000, sorry, 60 times, 100 to 6,000. If you go down here, you then have 21,000 over 6,000. So you’re three, Xing your revenue generated. So under any other marketing strategies that can three X your revenue, like maybe, maybe, but for the most part, this is like, like maybe you can three your revenue, but not at the ROI that this can, right? Because you can continually get more reviews at a relatively low price, right? So, this is only a thousand potential customers and this is potential customers.

So, this could be anyone from, you know, looking at your online profile, visiting your store. A lot of times that you have 4,000 people visiting your website. Right? So, but I just wanted to keep it simple. But what happens if we now increase this to 10,000 customers, cuz eventually you’re gonna hit that 10,000 mark, right? So you normally get $60,000, but you’re actually gonna generate $210,000.

If you get 101 plus reviews, right? So this is something that you really, really, really need to focus on because it’s just, it’s just so easy to get reviews. All you really need to do is ask, right? If you have an email list, SMS list and you train your bud tenderers to ask people, you will eventually get to that 101 review mark.

I promise you, you just have to do it today. And you’re missing out on three. Xing your sales. If you don’t have these reviews, just something super simple that you can do to help boost conversions and help get more money. This is something that like I highly encourage you to do, right? you don’t need to hire anyone out to do this.

You just need to get as many reviews as possible. That’s it? And the third, I think the last thing is loyalty, right? So here was a study done, on how members purchase when they get different redemptions. So members with, members with more than one redemption, right? They make up 6 74 0.6% of total, spend in month 12, meaning that members who redeem some sort of loyalty, they’re gonna be the bulk of your customers coming in after members with no redemptions.

It’s 19.3 and the non-members it’s 5.8%, right? So this is the percent of all customers after 12 months percent, total spend, in one month and the percent total spend in month 12, right? So you can see here, right? That you want to help increase the times that people end up using, loyalty with you.

Because if they’re going to use a loyalty program, they’re probably gonna stay on for the long run, cuz they’re getting points there’s perceived winnings from, purchasing from your dispensary. So you wanna make sure that you can get people to at least just redeem some sort of points. So even if you have some point strategy and you think that, Hey, I’m not gonna make a lot of money because like this first initial points thing is super, super low.

You wanna just make sure that they, they come in and, and you try and, and get some redemption from them, right? Because you wanna make sure that you increase the people using your loyalty program. Right? Because a lot of times I see people just say, Hey, we have this VIP program, blah, blah, blah. But again, they don’t emphasize, they don’t work on this strategy.

Like with any of these strategies, it needs work. It’s not as simple as I’m gonna embed this software online. And then that’s it. No, you need to work the software. You need to work the tool. You need to make sure that you continue, driving as many people using this loyalty as best as possible. Right? So we can see how like active loyalty members are the most valuable customers you have making 74.6% of total sales in the year compared to 90 19.3% being made by non-active members and then 5.8% being made by non-members.

Loyalty, two, I can use, these are the two big ones. there’s a lot of other, ones that you can check out. I mean, if you have any questions, I can probably find a couple ones for you, but these are the two main ones that you would typically find Alpine IQ and spring big. And then now about leaving reviews.

So, loyalty is pretty important that kind of ties into, both review generation and for loyalty. but I wanted to put it here because you know, this, this is separate from actually getting reviews. This is just like, the motivating factors and how you can better your business, how you can drive loyalty for your business.

Right? So factors that motivate customers to leave a rating and review number one is a positive experience. Right. But what exactly does that positive experience mean? So I would break that down into four things. One is customer service. Two is pricing. Three is good product and good product and selection.

And then four is buying experience. So if you look at your reviews for your dispensary, you’re probably gonna have a lot of reviews that say, ah, this is really, really awesome. John helped me out. Remember it was my birthday or Sarah helped me out, was able to help me figure out a better product between the edibles that I was thinking you buy, right? Customer service, number one, most important thing, two pricing.

If you’re pricing your customers out of the products that you’re selling, they’re not gonna want to buy it. Especially in this market. People are trying to buy the lowest thing. For the most part, you have to show value, you have to do all these things. But for the most part, people are looking for cheap deals and sales.

The third one is good product and selection. If your product is bad, then people aren’t gonna come back. That’s the really, that reality of things are. And then again, if you don’t have a good selection of what people wanna buy, not get either and the fourth one is buying experience. So this also kind of ties into customer experience, but this more so applies to like, you know, do you, is your, inventory or always sold out? Do you always have long lineups? Is, do you have parking available? Can you order online? Do you do cart curbside pickup, the actual buying experience of how customers buy your products is also gonna play into what their positive experience is, right? And by generating a positive experience, people are not only gonna write reviews, they’re gonna end up coming back, right? So you wanna have good customer service, good pricing, good product and selection, and also good buying experience as well.

So overall in summary, what you want to do is one, you wanna have a good converting website, two, you wanna rank higher on Google, both organically and on maps, three, you wanna leverage email and SMS and then five and six. You want to leverage loyalty and also review generation as well. So if you have any questions on any of this, you can always download the can marketing checklist, just go to Canvan marketing.com/checklist.

It literally has a checklist of most, if not all of these things that I spoke about here. And there’s also a cool little guide there as well. If you have any questions, feel free to put them down in comments below. If you’re viewing this on YouTube, more than happy to answer whatever questions that you might have.

Now, if you’re super advanced and you’ve already downloaded this checklist, you can also book a strategy session with me. Well, I’ll go through, your website, your online presence. I’ll go take a look at everything that you have going on. it’s completely free. There’s no sales obligation. I won’t, you know, that’s, that’s about it.

But if you just kind of wanna chat about your business and maybe if you’re looking to get started, or if you’ve started already, you wanna make some improvements on some of the things that I’ve spoken about. please definitely give me a shout. And last one, not least if you’re on YouTube again, or even if you’re on Spotify, you can like, please hit the subscribe button, all that fun stuff that a YouTuber should say that you should do.

But, thank you very much for watching and hope to talk to you very, very soon. Thanks. Bye.