You’re looking for effective ways to market and promote your CBD products or your marijuana dispensary, right? Have you ever thought about using a dispensary texting strategy in your marketing mix? Here are 10 benefits of using SMS text messaging for dispensaries.
10 Benefits of SMS Text Messaging For Dispensaries
When was the last time you checked your phone? Mobile marketing is essential in today’s world, but SMS text marketing for dispensaries is crucial.
Did you know that research identified that the average person checks their phone about 85 times each day?
The researchers also found that more than half of the smartphone use – 55% – consisted of short bursts of less than 30 seconds of activity, which may be a sort of habitual behaviour for many users.
These are just some reasons why you need a dispensary texting strategy to grow your business and build your dispensary loyalty program.
Text message marketing has become a popular method to reach customers for many brands and local businesses. It’s also been proven to increase sales and increase customer order sizes.
Over 90% of people read their text messages within 5 minutes of receiving them.
If you haven’t thought about using text messaging to market your dispensary, we’re going to show you why you should. The following are 10 benefits of SMS text messaging for dispensaries.
1. Dispensary Texting Provides Immediacy
SMS is one of the most immediate marketing channels for dispensaries. Everyone in your target demo has a smartphone.
You can use this dispensary SMS feature as part of your dispensary loyalty program and offer customers special deals, birthday or holiday greetings, and useful/valuable information on events and other retail promotions.
For example, your dispensary can send an SMS message to a customer on their birthday, wishing them a happy day and letting them know about a special deal on the type of CBD oil or cannabis strain they purchase often.
An obvious example is taking advantage of 4/20 and using text messages in your dispensary marketing strategy for this “holiday”.
Just think about the retail traffic you can generate to your dispensary with strategically timed text messages to your customers. You could send out promotional messages in the late afternoon when people are getting off work.
The potential of SMS marketing for your dispensary is limitless, especially when you’re able to strategically time your messages to be delivered when your target is ready to take action.
There are not many other tools to market your dispensary that can offer such immediacy. This means that SMS text messaging for dispensaries can be an extremely valuable tool for you to instantly communicate with your customers.
2. SMS Text Messaging Has an Absolutely Insane Open Rate
Test messages get read. Period, full stop. Tell me I’m wrong.
As we mentioned above, SMS text messaging campaigns have an average open rate of 98%. That’s no typo – ninety-eight percent of text messages get opened!
Just to provide further content, the average email open rates are only 24.79%.
Just for fun, let’s compare that 98% open rate for text messages with recent analytics for social media. Businesses seem to forget that you can only expect your message to reach about 2-3% of your total audience.
When it comes to dispensary marketing, the bottom line is that you need to increase daily, weekly, and monthly sales on your marijuana and CDB products.
You need people to return to your online dispensary website, or increase the amount of qualified foot traffic to your cannabis retail store in order to achieve this goal.
Adding SMS text messaging for dispensaries into your marketing mix could be exactly what you need to grow your business.
3. Customers Can Easily Opt-In to Your Text Message Marketing
Text message marketing for dispensaries and every other business is a permission-based marketing strategy, just like email marketing in many countries.
To remain compliant with your dispensary’s text message marketing strategy, your prospects and customers will need to opt-in to your SMS program. If you provide super duper value (i.e deal$), this will be super easy.
It’s always a good idea to give your customers an option when it comes to your marketing. The last thing you want is to piss off a potential or existing customer with spammy text messages they never signed up for.
It’s totally ideal to send out mass text messages promoting your dispensary’s products and keeping your customers updated on your inventory and deals, but let your customers decide if they’d like to opt-in and it will let them feel more comfortable with your business as a whole.
This is totally win-win when it comes to marketing. Seeing how many customers opt-in to your SMS updates gives you information that you can then use for future promotions in your dispensary’s text message marketing strategy.
There are two ways to get prospects and customers to opt-in to your dispensary SMS marketing program.
- “Click-to-Join” widgets can be placed on your website or promoted on social media.
- Encourage targets to text a keyword to a short code number – for example “text ‘opt-in’ to 420420”. When a person clicks on a widget or sends a text, they receive a text opt-in invitation to join your dispensary’s SMS based loyalty program.
4. Text Messages Also Makes It Easy For Customers To Opt-Out
As much of a drag as losing a subscribe can be, it’s actually a blessing in disguise and probably the most important part of text message marketing for dispensaries.
If you keep sending out your texts, wanting to get an uninterested customer engaged, you could end up losing that customer altogether.
It’s better to give customers the option to opt-out of your dispensary’s text messages instead of driving them away, angry.
They may opt-out, but there are other marketing strategies that you can use for those types of customers instead.
5. Get An Edge Over Your Competition – No One Is Really Doing This Yet
How many companies do you know that are using SMS text messaging in their dispensary marketing plan? I’m betting it’s not many if any at all.
Did you know that in an entire day the average consumer is exposed to around 3,500 marketing messages?
There’s a lot of noise on Instagram when it comes to cannabis dispensary and CBD marketing. It’s easy for your brand to get lost in the clutter.
By using text message marketing to promote your dispensary your brand will stand out from the local competition simply because no one else is doing this.
No other dispensary is serving their customer’s needs, with immediacy and convenience, like you’re doing with your dispensary’s text message marketing and loyalty program.
When it comes to the competition in cannabis and CBD marketing, it’s absolutely vital for your dispensary brand to stand out, and using SMS text messaging for dispensaries can help you achieve this goal.
6. Text Messaging Doesn’t Require Internet Connection.
This is a huge bonus when it comes to your online marketing strategy with Instagram or Google. Using SMS text messages for dispensaries can actually put you in an advantage.
What if you’re sending timely marketing messages and your target customers can’t connect to a WiFi network? Guess what, it’s no problem at all!
Text message marketing doesn’t require any sort of Internet access. Your target customers will never miss a text message from your dispensary, even if they’re offline they can still receive your text.
7. Effective Customer Service Improves The Value of Your Dispensary Loyalty Program
I’m betting that customer service is an integral part of your dispensary loyalty program, regardless of if you operate an online dispensary or bricks and mortar retail store.
SMS makes a dispensary’s customer support system much more efficient than any other method. It makes it easier for both you the dispensary owner, your budtenders, and your customers to communicate.
For example, your customers can easily send orders, questions, or concerns and get answers in real-time, by a human or automated using a facebook messenger marketing chatbot.
For a dispensary business owner, SMS text messaging combined with the automation of a Facebook Messenger chatbot takes your customer service up a level or two from that of your competition.
For more complex customer services issues, automation is not the solution.
In this case, you can use text messaging to allow the customer to start a conversation and be escalated to a human budtender to answer their questions via SMS or directly over the phone.
Using text message marketing in your dispensary marketing can effectively help you manage frequently asked questions which makes your customer service a driving factor to increasing sales and boosting customer retention.
8. SMS Marketing Improves Communication Between Your Dispensary & Customers
In addition to the benefit listed above, text message marketing for dispensaries also helps improve communication with your current and future customers for the long-term.
Since communication is key to building any long term relationship, SMS marketing can be a super useful tool for your dispensary to build these lucrative relationships.
When it comes to the marketing part of your communication with customers and prospects, think of dispensary texting as a personal message from you them. To each customer/prospect specifically.
Your communication can easily be promotional based and not come across as spammy especially when you’re letting customers in on a secret sale, or even just a friendly thank you message after a purchase, with a coupon code to save on their next purchase.
Even better, your dispensary texting strategy can also the ability for customers to place an order for pick up via text messaging, and then you can reply to let them know their order is ready.
Text message marketing for dispensaries is an easy, fast and reliable way to communicate with all of your customers, in an unobtrusive medium that people are comfortable with.
9. Text Messaging Integrates With Other Dispensary Marketing Channels
Our digital marketing strategy for dispensaries is an omnichannel approach. Multi-channel marketing is the most effective way to create awareness and drive the right traffic to your retail store or your online shop.
It’s absolutely crucial for all of your dispensary marketing campaigns to be integrated with each other so that all your promotions are well coordinated and reinforce each other to each targeted audience.
One of the best things about SMS marketing for dispensaries is that it could work great as a standalone marketing channel but also plays very well with other cannabis marketing channels.
Social and traditional media are not always the most effective dispensary marketing channels to reach customers on time.
But, you can integrate these channels with SMS to ensure that your message will reach customers who haven’t read your email or saw your posts in their social feeds in order to let them know about your offers.
It’s been said that a simple follow-up text message encouraging customers to check the latest email offer you sent can help increase email open rates by 20%–30%.
10. Dispensary SMS Provides a Great Return on Investment
Understandably, ROI is the most important factor for considering an SMS text messaging strategy for your dispensary. All the above benefits likely sound amazing, but let’s face it if they bring little return, they’re essentially useless.
Like any type of marketing idea for your dispensary, when set up properly and executed effectively, SMS marketing can bring in some serious ROI.
Because SMS text message marketing for dispensaries is so new and untapped, it’s challenging to offer any concrete examples for a dispensary.
But, a marijuana dispensary is a local business. A local dispensary is a small business. In fact, your cannabis retail store – or even your online dispensary – is a retail business.
Therefore, I feel the following example of a retail business using SMS text message marketing to drive foot traffic to their E-commerce and physical stores is relevant to dispensary text message marketing.
Raange reports that Urban Planet, a popular retailer utilizing both physical stores and e-commerce sales, has been growing its foot traffic and revenue for years by sending out SMS discounts to their customers, based on local sales, holidays, and new products.
The second example in an industry outside of cannabis, CBD, and dispensaries, but still can be viewed as relevant in showing the benefits of text messaging is the British motor racing circuit Silverstone.
This company sent a text message to 45,000 people in their database, inviting them to buy tickets for an upcoming Formula 1 race. Just this single message resulted in a 680% ROI.
It should be noted that the success of this campaign is related to two important factors. The message was very timely and was highly relevant to the company’s audience.
Your dispensary can use the same type of strategy and expect some sort of success. You may not match a 680% ROI, but I’m sure you’d do quite well.
All it takes is a well timed and targeted message to your customers and your text message database.
We Can Help You With Your Dispensary’s Text Marketing Strategy
Are you convinced that SMS text messaging can be used to grow your dispensary business?
I’m sure you can see by the 10 benefits listed above, that a dispensary texting strategy can be a valuable tool to grow your dispensary loyalty program and your bottom line revenue.
If you’re looking to add SMS marketing to your dispensary marketing plan, we can help you with complete managed services.
Please contact us for a free consultation or to request a quote.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!
