Best Practices for Cannabis Retail Email Marketing

As the competition in the Canadian cannabis retail industry continues to grow, retailers need to be taking advantage of all the tools available to them. As each cannabis retailer is essentially selling the same product, they can differentiate their brands through customer experience. The customer experience usually begins with them finding your store online, checking out your menu, looking through the website and deciding whether to purchase before ever stepping foot inside the store.

With the introduction of delivery and click-and-collect this year, cannabis retailers have been given an opportunity to capture their customers’ contact info much easier than ever before. It’s essential to try and collect as many of your customers’ email addresses as possible and use them to create a one-to-one communication channel. Because email marketing is an age-gated environment, it allows cannabis retailers to use promotions they’re unable to compliantly try elsewhere.

Website forms with some effective messaging is a good way to gather the emails of potential customers, but online ordering tools such as Dutchie are the best way to amass the emails of the majority of your customers who shop online. Make sure to include some language in the menu to encourage them to opt-in to receive marketing messages.

Building an Audience

Dutchie is an excellent tool for retailers to sell products online, track sales data and prove the ROI of email marketing campaigns, but the email tool itself is not ideal for customer engagement. If retailers want to maximize their online sales, they need to provide a better experience for their customers by exporting the contacts they’re collecting through Dutchie and importing them into an email marketing platform.

Dutchie collects a variety of customer information during the checkout process, such as first/last name, DoB, phone number, email, total orders, total sales, and email opt-in, which is easily exportable. We also recommend exporting the list of your abandoned cart contacts and will go into why later.

Segment Your Contacts

Before you export your Dutchie contacts, you’re going to want to filter and then segment them. Start by filtering for email opt-ins and selecting all contacts that are TRUE. This means that you’re not emailing contacts who haven’t opted-in to receive marketing emails from you, which is illegal. 

Once you’ve removed those who haven’t opted-in and exported your contact list, you can then segment the audience in any of these three ways:

1. Frequent shopper – has more than 5 total orders
2. Big spender – has over $500 in total sales
3. Abandoned cart – cross-reference the abandoned cart contacts export with the list of opted-in contacts

The contact list segmentation is optional, but it does make the email marketing campaigns more effective if you use language and products to speak to each of these segments individually.

Establish an Email Marketing Tool

Once you have your contact list cleaned and segmented, it’s time to upload it to an email marketing service of your choice. The two we recommend are Mailchimp and Klaviyo, but there are other providers out there. Both of our suggested email marketing platforms are free to use until you reach 10,000 email sends to up to 2,000 contacts for Mailchimp and 500 email sends to up to 250 contacts for Klaviyo.

Setup your account with the email marketing platform. Once that’s done, you can import your list of Dutchie contacts. If you are uploading multiple segmented lists, make sure to use tags to differentiate them.

Create Email Campaigns

Now that you have your contacts imported into your email marketing platform, it’s time to set up some campaigns. Some campaigns we recommend you start with are:

1. Welcome
2. Promotion
3. Abandoned Cart
4. New Inventory + Secret Menu
5. Event + Contest

The welcome email is meant to introduce your brand to the subscriber, let them know what kind of content they can expect to receive in your emails and how often they’ll be receiving them. If you’re using a discount to encourage people to join your email list, you can send them the promo code in this email to thank them for joining the club.

The promotion email is a great way to advertise products on sale or to provide your email subscribers with an exclusive discount. Make sure they know they are only receiving the promotion because they are a loyal customer as well as an email subscriber.

The abandoned cart email is a tried and tested way to support those shoppers who were close to purchasing, but questioned themselves. Maybe they wanted to do some research or shop around for a better deal. Offer them some more information about your brand and store or better yet, an incentive to finish checking out. Sometimes customers just need you to hold their hand or give them a nudge in the right direction.

Tracking Campaign Conversions

Dutchie supports all standard UTM query parameters used by industry-standard analytics platforms. UTM parameters are tags you add to a URL — when your link is clicked, the tags are sent back to dutchie Analytics, as well as Google Analytics and tracked. With these tags, you can gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.

There are 5 different parameters you can add to your URLs, but there are 3 main parameters that are widely used.

• utm_source: The source helps you identify the location (source) that is sending you web traffic.
• utm_medium: This is the medium you used to advertise or market to consumers. It could be things like an email newsletter, banner, or text message.
• utm_campaign: This is the individual marketing campaign name or promo code for a product. An example might look like – “april2021contest”

Use a Campaign URL Builder tool to help set these up.

When creating your email marketing campaign, use the link you’ve created in a call to action. Any click through actions from receivers on the link you created should be tracked in your Dutchie Analytics in the Marketing dashboard.

Get Prepared by the Pros at grnhouse

These are the most effective email marketing campaigns to start off with, but you’re not limited to them. There are plenty of other ways to generate additional revenue using email marketing if you have the knowledge and ability to do so, but before you start sending emails, make sure that you have authenticated your domain. 

For more information on the new inventory + secret menu and event + contest emails, as well as consultation on email marketing for your cannabis retailer, email info@grnhouse.agency and they can help to grow your cannabis brand.

Canadian Cannabis Retail Marketing Guide

Over the past few months, when it comes to creating original content, we’ve been focusing on the fastest-growing segment of the Canadian cannabis industry, retailers.

This series of articles is dedicated to informing and educating Canadian cannabis retail store operators about marketing, promotions, branding, partnerships, and product selection.