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Welcome to High On Marketing - A weekly newsletter where I show you how to strengthen your email marketing strategy for your cannabis brand. Learn how to nurture your audience, increase retention rates, and sell more weed.

⚡Quick Tip⚡

Today’s Email:

• Top 4 Mistakes Killing Dispensary Email Sales (and how to fix them)

• Why Promos, Poor Segmentation, and Generic Content are Hurting Your Brand

• The Email Marketing Snowball Effect Explained

Let’s Roll 🛼

“We can’t afford to invest in email right now” - Every dispensary that thinks “investing” in their email strategy is expensive (it’s not).

That’s the most common excuse I hear from dispensary execs. for why their emails look like everyone else’s - generic, bland, boring…

But that doesn’t make sense to me - if you’re already allocating money, time, and resources to send emails to your list, why not make sure you do it right?

I have an email address solely for signing up to dispensary emails lists (for research).

And my promotions tab is nothing but repetitive subject lines and emails that are indistinguishable from the other 100 dispensaries failing to land in my primary inbox.

That, is a complete waste of your time and money.

I’ve dug through these failed canna-campaigns and found the 4 most common reasons they’re not landing in primary, and how you can stop wasting money writing emails for the spam folder.

Increasing sales through email doesn’t have to cost a lot - it just needs a little more of your attention to get the ball rolling.

Let’s talk about the top 4 email killers:

1. Your Subject Lines are Too Salesy:

Your subject line serves 1 purpose: To get the reader’s attention

Most brands think they accomplish this by putting their most jaw-dropping promo in the subject line so their reader sees that first.

Something like “BOGO SALE! Buy One Get One ½ OFF High Testing Eighths!”

Surely that’ll get their attention, right?

Wrong for a couple reasons.

Reason #1: Open up your email right now and go to the promotions tab.

What do you see?

Most likely you see a bunch of spammy, generic, salesy subject lines that never saw the light of your primary inbox.

When you’re constantly selling in your emails, you could be marked as spam.

You shouldn’t be selling in every email anyway.

Email marketing should be used to stay on top-of-mind and for providing value to your subscribers.

When you do that consistently, they automatically think of you next time they’re buying weed (because your dispo made the biggest impact).

Reason #2: The second reason your customers don’t really care about your “Door-Buster” deal is desensitization.

The average person sees 4,000-10,000 ads per day. Almost all of them are running some kind of money-saving promo.

People are tired of it.

Your customers are sick of being emailed by robots.

Now imagine, in a sea of generic, promotional subject lines, there’s one subject line that actually addresses you, and/or something relevant to you.

“Hey [first name], we picked these just for you!”

THAT stands out. Way more than the same boring promo they’ve seen 10,000 times today.

If you want different results, you need to try something different.

2. You’re Sending the Same Email to Your Whole List:

This is the #1 most common dispensary marketing mistake.

The most effective emails feel like they were written for that one specific reader.

You can’t do that if you’re sending the same message to everyone.

You have to segment your list by

• Purchase behavior (past products, order size, frequency)

• Preferences (survey or purchasing data)

• Lifecycle stage (new vs repeat vs churned)

• Etc.

This way your messaging is always relevant to that segment of customer.

If it’s not,

• They’ll stop opening…

• Engagement drops…

• Deliverability tanks…

• You’re back to square one (or worse)…

Most dispensaries don’t have enough time, people, or resources to work on creating better subject lines and emails that drive more weed sales.

But how much time and resources are you wasting by creating content that no one sees or engages with?

When you stop thinking about making sales with every email and instead focus on creating relevant, valuable content that you yourself would like seeing in your inbox, your customers start to take notice.

This leads me into my next point on why your emails aren’t working…

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3. Your Emails Look Like Old Coupon Books:

My mom used to clip out all the supermarket coupons from the paper every Saturday morning when I was growing up, and put them in one of those coupon organizer book things.

We’d go to the store and she’d pull out her organizer full of 20% OFF, 50% OFF, and BOGOs.

We’d get a week’s worth of groceries for like 4 bucks (she was a pro).

A lot of dispensary emails I get remind me of those pages of pre-clipped coupons on the backs of local newspapers:

• Just a bunch of generic salesy bullshit.

• Bright colors to draw the reader in which actually just takes focus away from the real content.

• Discount after discount after discount

What your reader actually wants: A genuine connection. Someone that “gets” them.

Don’t become another discount brand.

Mix up your content:

• Education

• Staff picks

• Events

• Loyalty reminders

• Interactive content

• Brand stories

4. No Personalization = No Loyalty:

If your emails sound like they could’ve come from any dispensary, your customers won’t stick around.

Luckily for you, so many dispensaries send the same emails with the same lack of personalization so it’s easier to stand out.

This ties in with what we discussed earlier in this newsletter about dispos sending mass emails that end up not being seen.

Personalization STARTS with their first name, but it doesn’t END there.

Personalized product recs and send time optimization are other key personalization factors you should include.

That’s how you send the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

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The Email Snowball Effect:

Email marketing has momentum.

And that momentum can work for you, or against you.

When you send well-targeted, relevant emails that get opened and clicked, email service providers start to trust you.

They reward you with better inbox placement, which leads to more opens, more clicks, and more sales.

But when you send:

• Salesy subject lines

• Untargeted blasts to cold segments

• Content that doesn't feel personal or useful...

You start getting ignored. Or worse - marked as spam.

And that sends the opposite signal to inbox algorithms.

Your reputation drops.
Your open rates drop.
Even your best emails get buried in the Promotions tab (or never get seen at all).

This is the email snowball effect in action.

That’s why getting this right now, before it gets worse, is necessary if you want to keep using email as a serious sales channel.

What You Can Do Today:

1. Remove “BOGO,” “% off,” and other sales language from subject lines.

   I’m not saying to never do it. But for now, try to earn their click with personalization and relevance instead of trying to “buy” their click with discounts.

2. Create two basic segments: new customers and repeat customers, cart smokers and flower smokers, etc. (if you already have some segments, choose 2 to target for the next month).

3. Start emailing them 1-2 times per week. No salesy content. Just content based off their segments/preferences. Product/brand education, loyalty reminders. If you want to promote relevant products to them based off preferences, try “We Picked These {products} Just For You, {first name}.”

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9VVS85T

Final Thoughts - STOP WASTING YOUR TIME:

• Mass emails

• No segmentation

• Selling in every email

These are completely wasting your time, hurting your email reputation, and costing you money.

The time to change your approach to dispensary email marketing is today - because tomorrow it’s gonna be a little worse, and it’s gonna be even harder to recover.

Wanna Work With Me?

If email is not your most profitable sales/marketing channel, we should have a chat.

I help dispensaries turn ignored inboxes into repeat customers by fixing the stuff most teams don’t have time for: segmentation, personalization, and copy that actually converts.

If you want your email channel to finally start pulling its weight, just hit reply to this email and tell me a bit about your current setup. I’ll take a look and point you in the right direction.

Until next week!

-Steve

P.S. ⬇️⬇️