Cannabis Dispensary Retention Strategies That Actually Work
If you’re a dispensary owner looking to boost your cannabis customer retention strategy, you’ve come to the right place! With market saturation creating relentless competition, it can be difficult to keep your customers coming back for more. Ideally, your business can shine and retain a loyal and trusting customer base with attention paid to a few keen details.
Keeping a customer base active and engaged is a true balance between the varying presences your business holds. Customer retention in cannabis is complex, and there are many dispensary marketing avenues to consider when setting up for success — through your website, brand guide, marketing strategy, and budtender presence. Let’s brainstorm some surefire retention strategies to keep each piece of the experience exciting for your customers.
Start With an Accurate, Easy-to-Navigate Website
Creating an online hub for your dispensary that continuously provides current and accurate product information is undeniably important to build trust with your customers. Your website should also be easy to edit, refine, and scale with your business as it and your customer base grows. Customers should be able to easily access your website and navigate your product menu, review full product details, and contact your team with questions.
Ensure each product page includes consistent naming conventions, clear pricing, accurate ingredient and potency information, along with third-party testing certificates of analysis (COAs) and cannabinoid concentrations and any applicable compliance requirements. Transparency and accessibility builds trust and loyalty with your customer base, and both are essential to any cannabis customer retention strategy.
Use Branding to Build Recognition and Loyalty
Now let’s have some fun! How does your dispensary showcase its individuality? What colors and images, symbols and graphics differentiate from the competition? Branding is an enormous piece of a dispensary retention strategy, calling your customers to engage with your unique vision.
According to USC Dornsife, use of color and word choice, crafting a sense of belonging and achievement, as well as creating a shopping “experience” for the brand all contribute to developing strong brand loyalty. When your customers can easily recognize your brand, it creates incentive for them to engage with your store’s products.
The Cookies brand is a solid example of consistent and creative branding that is widely recognized in stoner households for their proprietary genetics and lifestyle brand. Regardless of scale and budget, look for ways to curate consistent branding both within your physical and throughout your external and digital presence. Experiential marketing coupled with a keen understanding of your customer base and their specific needs can help tailor your branding for more impactful customer retention.
Your Budtenders and Dispensary Atmosphere Make or Break Customer Retention
Your storefront, budtenders and customer service can make or break your retail space and are crucial for customer retention in cannabis to connect with and educate your customers. From easily legible menu boards to interactive pop-ups, there are myriad ways to keep your visitors engaged and knowledgeable on current deals and product offerings.
Many brands are happy to send ambassadors equipped with product knowledge who can educate your budtenders and customers on products actively housed on your menu. Dispensary managers should seek training, certification programs and vendor samples for their budtenders and staff to ensure they are knowledgeable about your inventory.
Equally important to retaining customers are the interpersonal relationships and comfortability your staff provides during the shopping experience. When customers feel at ease and connected with your budtenders, they are more likely to trust what products and services are recommended, and your dispensary retention strategy will soar to new heights.
Use Loyalty Programs and Data to Personalize Your Outreach
There are many email and texting tools to uptake into your marketing strategy that allow direct communication with your customers. Loyalty programs provide the ability to reach them in their inboxes on their mobile devices. Platforms like Alpine IQ and other ecommerce loyalty integrations gather useful data from loyalty members regarding the buying habits.
Start by organizing and targeting individual buyers based on particular brands, products and cart sizes. Creating granular audiences based on these statistics allows you to speak directly and more personally with your customers. This ability is invaluable for sharing relevant and personalized discounts and rewards, as well as for repurchase reminders, low and new stock notifications, product recommendations, milestone incentives and more. The data also informs content for your newsletter, social media, events and other educational offerings to maximize engagement with your brand!
Tell Your Story Through Social Content
Speaking of, social media has become a place where entities across the world tell their stories. Your cannabis dispensary can and should do the same by sharing content that reflects your vision, mission and connection to your audience. Show care and compassion for the work you do while simultaneously showcasing the diverse range of products you offer.
There are truly endless ways to approach cannabis social media marketing, but be sure to understand applicable local regulations as well as platform terms of use before hitting submit. While federal legalization remains stalled, it is all too common for brands to find themselves shadow-banned from sharing a beautifully trichome-laden leaf, cannabis consumption and cannabis sales language. Instead, try connecting with customers over shared needs and interests to organically contribute to cannabis dispensary retention strategy.
Pro tip: collaborate with fellow companies or other local businesses who share a love for cannabis to reach new customers and excite your loyalists.
Your Cannabis Dispensary Retention Strategy Starts Here
A smokin’ hot cannabis dispensary retention strategy isn’t built on any single tactic. It’s the sum of consistent branding, an accurate and accessible website, knowledgeable staff, smart loyalty tools and social content that actually reflects your brand. In addition to these strategies, you can also explore collaborations with other industry and community organizations, online review boards, local initiatives to connect with potential customers.
Start by auditing each customer touchpoint, from the first time someone lands on your website to the moment they leave your store. Where are the gaps? Where are you losing people you could have kept? Review and refine your cannabis dispensary retention, paying attention to detail and staying rooted in the needs and wants of those who frequent your shop. Nurturing our communal love of the cannabis plant is at the helm of these endeavors and when we can share this with each other, our collective growth facilitates the most well-rounded success.
If you want to learn from operators who’ve built loyal customer bases from the ground up, that conversation is happening at CannaCon. Join us June 26-27 at CannaCon St. Paul in Minnesota, or Aug. 28-29 at CannaCon St. Louis in Missouri.