Cannabis Email Marketing: Best Practices & Platforms

There are 5.18 billion Internet users in the world, and 49.1% of users aged 16-64 check their emails daily. On top of that, email marketing has one of the highest ROIs (every $1 invested results in $36 profit on average).

So it’s no surprise that email marketing is a great strategy to create brand awareness, increase sales, and build solid customer relationships.

However, when it comes to cannabis product-related marketing, businesses have to deal with an overwhelming number of regulations and restrictions.

But don’t worry!

We’re here to shine some light on all the intricacies surrounding cannabis email marketing, including the best practices, strategies, and the best cannabis-friendly email marketing platforms.

Let’s get started!

Cannabis Email Marketing Best Practices 

When it comes to cannabis email marketing, there are a few factors to consider in order to ensure your efforts are paying off.

Incorporate SMS Text Messaging

The cannabis industry is heavily regulated, and this can affect all your dispensary marketing-related activities. For example, some of the biggest digital marketing platforms, like Google and Facebook, have strict regulations and restrictions on promoting cannabis products.

Your best bet? Push your brand on other marketing channels.

For example, SMS text messaging is a great addition to your email marketing efforts as you can promote different deals and discounts via instant texts.

Promote the Right Products to the Right People in the Right Locations

Understanding key information about your subscribers (like age and location) can help you identify what products you can promote to them.

For example, you can’t legally sell or promote marijuana strains in states that only allow CBD product sales.

So, this step can help you segment your audience and create more targeted emails.

Include a Call-to-Action

Always end your email with a clear call-to-action invitation. For example, do you want subscribers to leave a review, visit your website, explore your newest products, or read your blog post?

Just be straightforward and encourage them to take action.

Decide What Type of Emails to Send

Do you want to start email marketing activities for your cannabis business but are not sure what type of emails to send?

Here are a few options:

• Welcome emails: Once users subscribe to your email, you can send them an email to greet them and thank them for subscribing.
• Friendly reminders: You can send emails that remind people of their abandoned carts or simply ping past customers if it’s been a while since their last order.
• Product reviews: You can share some of your bestsellers along with detailed reviews to encourage your audience to try them out.
• Customer surveys: You can reach out to customers and ask them for their feedback. To boost participation rates, you can offer them a small discount or any other incentive.
• Loyalty program emails: If you like the idea of loyalty programs (or already have one), your email subscribers are the perfect audience to whom you can promote this opportunity.
• Industry & business news: Keep subscribers updated on the latest news in the cannabis industry (e.g., any new legislations) and your business (let them know if you have opened new stores, hired new employees, etc.)
• Helpful guides and other useful content: You can send emails with helpful content, like tips on choosing high-quality products, or even promote some of your blog posts.

Cannabis Email Marketing Benefits

Email marketing helps businesses grow and increase brand awareness. It also allows you to stay in touch with your customers. Here are a few more key benefits of adopting an effective email marketing strategy.

Most often, the emails you’ll send to your subscribers contain links to your website (to various product pages, blog posts, or other supportive links). This naturally leads to more website visitors and increased engagement with your brand. 

Besides, email marketing increases repeat visits from high-quality leads.

As you get more visits from quality leads, you also increase sales.

In fact, 59% of marketing experts say that email marketing campaigns influence the purchasing decisions of their customers.

Additionally, email marketing is considerably more cost-effective than other marketing techniques. This makes it a great opportunity to save on more costly promotional campaigns such as digital ads, which are anyway highly regulated when it comes to cannabis product promotion).

Email marketing is a powerful tool through which you can communicate with your audience and build customer relationships.

Often a single campaign would comprise a sequence of emails (whether it’s telling your brand story or sending different discounts and other promotions).

All this creates strong connections with your customers. And don’t just take our word for that – 37% of marketers claim that email marketing is the most effective method for customer loyalty and retention.

Once you understand your email campaign performance by monitoring their KPIs, you will know your customers better. You can use all these valuable insights to improve your services and increase customer satisfaction.

You can even send email surveys where you ask for direct feedback or even do A/B testing to understand what emails perform better.

How to Create Your Cannabis Email Marketing Strategy?

Here are six actionable steps to help you kick off your email marketing efforts:

First things first, you need to choose the platform that will host all your email marketing campaigns and efforts.

It’s important to note that some email marketing platforms do not allow cannabis businesses to use their services. So, before you make a choice, research whether the platform is cannabis friendly.

Additionally, you should aim for a platform that:

• Supports powerful integrations
• Has easy to set up email automations
• Lets you craft beautiful email templates
• Provides detailed reports

Gathering relevant email addresses can be tough. But don’t worry. Here are a few tried and tested methods that can help you get started on building a relevant subscriber base:

• Subscription buttons: You can add subscription options at the check-out stage to attract customers to follow up and receive regular updates from you.
• Sign-up forms: You can add pop-ups that encourage website visitors to subscribe to your emails.
• Landing pages: Share relevant landing pages on social media or your website.
• Giveaways: This is a great incentive for leads and customers to give you their email addresses.
• Lead magnets: This is tailored content that shows to targeted customers in exchange for their emails.

Segmentation involves dividing your subscribers into different groups based on their demographics, characteristics, and preferences.

This way, you avoid sending the same email to all subscribers because, let’s face it – when you try to target everyone, you end up targeting no one in particular.

That’s because different leads and customers subscribe for different things (e.g., some people want discount deals, others want information about specific products, etc.)

The bottom line? Personalization = More sales

That’s because personalizing your emails to a specific target audience helps you increase engagement and conversions.

Email automation involves setting up specific email sequences that target your subscribers at specific times based on specific triggers.

This can significantly improve your email marketing results. Such automations also help you create email sequences faster and send the right messages at the right time.

A few different email sequences could be:

• Welcome email series
• Abandoned cart
• Order confirmation
• Review and feedback

Another important aspect of your email marketing efforts is understanding how to create well-designed and effective emails.

Lots of email marketing platforms offer ready email templates so you don’t necessarily need to hire a designer to create the template from scratch.

If you use an email design builder, keep in mind these email template basics:

• Have a clear outline so the email is easy to read.
• Write an engaging subject line.
• Have a clear sender name not to mislead or confuse your subscribers.
• Create an interesting copy that’s relevant to your readers.
• Write an enticing and well-crafted email introduction to retain engagement.
• Create an email footer with all the important information about your business.

Monitoring your KPIs will help you adjust and improve all your email marketing efforts, so you bring in even better results over time.

A few vital metrics you can track through the email marketing platform analytics dashboard are:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Bounce rates
• Unsubscribes

Keeping close track of such metrics for all email campaigns can help you identify key patterns and unlock the full potential of your email marketing efforts.

5 Best Cannabis Email Marketing Platforms

Here are some of our favorite email marketing platforms that offer their services to various cannabis businesses:  

MailerLite

MailerLite has a thorough and clear policy that’s friendly towards CBD and THC product-related businesses. With its user-friendly interface, MailerLite allows you to easily build email newsletters, pop-ups, and landing pages.

Key features:

• Landing pages and sign-up forms
• High-volume email sending
• Rich text editor and drag-and-drop email builder
• Multi-trigger automation options
• Combining pop-ups with landing pages

Pricing

While MailerLite has a free plan, this comes with a few limitations. To unlock more features and unlimited monthly emails, you can start with their Growing Business plan, priced at $9 per month for 1,000 subscribers.

Reviews

Moosend

Moosend is all-in-one cannabis business-friendly email marketing platform. The platform is easy to use as it provides premade automations, email templates for various industries, and tons of other advanced features.

Key features:

• A/B testing
• Powerful integrations and automations
• Email list management
• Reports and analytics
• Email editor and templates

Pricing

Moosend offers flexible pricing plans. The starting plan has a $9 monthly fee for 500 subscribers.

Reviews

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing platform that can be used by various CBD and other cannabis-related businesses. The service offers a powerful real-time database that allows you to manage all customer data from a single dashboard.

Key features:

• Email & SMS integration
• Detailed web, revenue, and ROI analytics
• Customizable email content blocks
• Premade automation sequences
• Automated email responses

Pricing

Klaviyo has a free plan for a limited number of subscribers. If you have a bigger email list, you can upgrade to their $20 monthly plan for up to 500 subscribers.

Reviews

Drip

Drip can help your cannabis business manage all its e-commerce growing activities, ensuring that you establish your brand reputation and that customers repeat their orders. With its powerful A/B testing and integrations, Drip can help you create highly targeted emails that increase brand loyalty and sales.

Key features:

• Email campaign management, scheduling, and tracking
• Real-time analytics and performance metrics
• Third-party integrations
• Drip campaigns
• Customer segmentation

Pricing

Drip’s basic plan starts at $39 for 2,500 subscribers, and the price increases based on the number of subscribers.

Reviews

AWeber

With AWeber, cannabis businesses can easily promote their brand and products. The platform has email templates, easy email editing, and contact management features. The service provider also offers excellent customer support in case you need any assistance.

Key features:

• Integration APIs
• Building and personalizing emails
• Managing email lists and email deliverability
• A/B testing
• Reporting features

Pricing

AWeber offers a free plan, but to access its more advanced features, you need to sign up for the AWeber Lite ($14.99 a month) or AWeber Plus ($30 a month) plans.

Reviews

Cannabis Email Marketing FAQs

Here are the answers to a few commonly asked questions:

The Bottom Line

Navigating through all cannabis marketing intricacies can be hard. But marketing is as essential for cannabis businesses just as much as for brands from other industries. For businesses looking to streamline this process while focusing on strategic decisions, our insights on how to outsource email marketing can be a game-changer.

If you’re a cannabis brand looking for a compliant way to promote your brand through email marketing or any other digital marketing techniques, we’re here to help. 

At Scopic, we’re experts in cannabis marketing, as we know all the regulations in the industry. Contact us today and launch your cannabis marketing efforts to success.