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.

Today’s Email:

• 5 Essential Canna Email Strategies for Engaging Your Audience

• Actionable Tips for Incorporating Each Strategy

• What You Can Do Today

• More On My Email Templates

Let’s Roll 🛼

The best way to engage your email subscribers is by providing consistent, relevant, and valuable content.

Here’s 5 strategies you should be incorporating into your emails to educate, engage, AND entertain:

1. Leverage Storytelling:

Emotions sell.

And stories connect emotionally.

Storytelling is a powerful tool in email marketing, especially for cannabis brands where building trust and educating consumers is crucial due to growing competition and stigmas.

Being able to share your brand’s mission/vision/goals in a readable, captivating way is an incredibly valuable skill to have (and very underrated).

Start with your brand’s origin story: Consumers connect more deeply with brands whose origins resonate with them personally.

One thing I know after reading HUNDREDS of different cannabis brand’s origin stories; no two brand’s have the same come up. It’s the perfect opportunity to share your brand’s unique story, and to resonate with your target audience.

Effective storytelling (in emails at least) involves hooking your reader at the start, continuing to hook them throughout the content, and ending with that good ‘ol personalized, relevant call to action.

You can drastically improve your engagement and conversions with just a few tweaks to make your content more story-like:

#1 is the Hook: Instead of saying “Our latest batch has the highest {terp} yet!” Hook your reader in by saying something like "Last night, something incredible happened in our greenhouse..." then steer the conversation to talking about your latest batch.

One of those really makes you stop for a second (that’s all you need).

Storytelling in Customer Stories: This one is super obvious but still underused. I see a lot of customer stories that start something like “See how John is using CBD to treat his PTSD.” Boring.

Give your customers a voice, a personality!

“Meet John, a veteran struggling with PTSD, and see how our CBD oil has helped him find peace after years of struggle."

Ok, enough on storytelling. I still have 4 more points to make.

2. Building Trust Through Education:

Education is what will help push this industry forward.

If you know me, you know how much I loathe discount-spamming as a content strategy.

Not just because it’s boring and overused, but because it’s selfish.

I feel it’s important for every cannabis brand who is involved in content creation or has any type of online presence to do their part in spreading awareness and education to help progress our industry.

Educating your audience is a win-win; well-informed customers are more confident and likely to make purchases.

When you teach your customers something, you increase the perceived value of your brand:

• Build trust

• Establish authority

• Stay on top-of-mind

Start incorporating more educational content into your schedule. Recommend relevant products related to your topic, or encourage your reader to “Discover More” on your blog or website.

Start by looking at your FAQ’s.

• What common questions about your brand or products could you answer in a piece of content?

• Ask your budtenders what the most common asked questions are by patients.

• Search common pain points or cannabis FAQ’s on Reddit.

3. Engagement Through Interaction:

Interactive content like quizzes or surveys can dramatically increase engagement rates. Not only are they fun for your customer, they can also provide you with valuable customer data.

Most smokers like to talk about weed. Adding a preference poll at the end of your emails can open that line of communication from B2C.

Polls can be used on most social media platforms as well; just be sure to keep the amount of questions to a minimum to not overwhelm them.

For more involved surveys, where you’re trying to gather as much customer data as possible, you’ll need to give them something for their efforts.

The question of “is this too much for my audience?” becomes redundant the better your “reward” is.

Stop promoting yourself; start listening to your customers more.

Start incorporating more polls, quizzes, and questionnaires into your strategy. Make it fun and interesting.

Here’s a couple poll ideas that can give you important customer info, and your audience will actually enjoy answering:

1. Strain Preference Poll:

"Indica, Sativa, or Hybrid: What's Your Go-To Strain? Cast Your Vote!"

Options: Indica, Sativa, Hybrid

2. Flavor Exploration Poll: 

"We're Cooking Up Something Special! What Flavor Profiles Excite You?" 

Options: Fruity, Earthy, Citrusy, Sweet, Spicy, Minty

3. Product Format Poll: 

"How Do You Prefer Your cannabis? Tinctures, Edibles, Vapes, or Topicals?" 

Options: Tinctures, Edibles, Vapes, Topicals

4. Favorite Consumption Spot: 

"Where's Your Favorite Place to Enjoy Cannabis? Share Your Happy Place!" 

Options: Nature, Home, Social Events, Artistic Spaces

Some of these questions will provide you with valuable info, some are strictly for fun and engagement (it’s good to have both).

4. Don’t Forget the Visual Learners:

Humans are visual creatures. Information about cannabis effects, potency, or the science behind your products can be made into well-designed infographics.

Some things to consider:

• High-Quality Images: Include clear, high-resolution images of your products. Showcase new strains, packaging, or use cases.

• Infographics: Use infographics to break down complex topics like the extraction processes, the benefits of different cannabinoids, or a comparison of strains.

• Step-by-Step Guides: Create visual step-by-step guides for using products, especially for beginners. For example, show how to roll a joint, how to dose edibles, or how to care for cannabis products.

• Personalization: Tailor the visuals and content of the email based on the recipient’s preferences and previous interactions with your brand. Don’t forget to segment!

Just be careful to not make your emails too image-heavy (they could land in spam).

5. Consistent, Valuable Content:

It’s no secret that consistency is the key to long-term email marketing success.

Always think of what your customer wants to see. Do they want to be inundated with ads? No. Do they want to learn something, be entertained, and maybe save a few bucks on their favorite products once in a while? Yes.

Give your customers something to look forward to each week.

Establish regular email series such as weekly tips, myth-busting sections, or DIY cannabis recipes. This not only educates and entertains, but gives your audience a reason to look forward to your emails.

• Weekly Tips: Simple, actionable tips for enhancing their cannabis experience.

• Myth-Busting: Address common misconceptions about cannabis to educate and inform your subscribers.

• Interactive Content: Get your audience involved as much as possible.

Want to learn how to create consistent, high-quality canna content? Click here for my guide on crafting Evergreen content for your email strategy.

If you consistently prove your brands worth, your customers will continue to purchase from you.

Providing valuable, targeted content each week will increase open rates.

Once they’ve opened your email, your relevant product recommendations and personalized CTA’s will help drive action, and direct your customers where they want to be.

But it all starts with finding your strategy, and sticking with it.

Join the Essential Community for Marketers

Stay ahead of the curve and join the thousands of marketers shaping the future of marketing with the American Marketing Association. As the largest community-based marketing organization, you’ll find award-winning content, professional certifications (PCM®), industry-leading training events, and vibrant local chapters. Members get access to an abundance of resources, on-demand courses, and the most essential community in marketing.

Get exclusive benefits when you become a member today!

What You Can Do Today:

Start adding more educational (or evergreen) content to your schedule.

A common misconception about evergreen content is that you’re not promoting your brand or products so why bother creating content that doesn’t drive sales?

And that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Like I mentioned above, you want to incorporate relevant products or links to blogs/product pages into your educational content.

And that’s where email segmentation comes in…

You want to create high-quality content for customers of all backgrounds and experience levels.

1. Identify Key Educational Topics:

   • Start by identifying topics that are relevant and of interest to your audience. These could include the benefits of different cannabinoids, the science behind how cannabis affects the body, legal updates, and best practices for using various cannabis products.

   • Hint: Start with FAQ’s

2. Develop a Content Calendar:

   • Plan a content calendar dedicated to educational topics. This helps ensure a steady flow of evergreen content that keeps your audience engaged over time.

   • Experiment with different types of educational content, such as detailed articles, quick tips, and deep dives into specific subjects like terpenes or the differences between strains.

3. Segment Your Audience:

   • Use email segmentation to tailor the educational content to different segments of your audience.

   • Personalization can increase engagement by making content more relevant to each subscriber.

4. Test and Optimize:

   • Regularly test different aspects of your educational email campaigns (subject lines, email layouts, content, and send times) to see what resonates best with your audience.

Next month, my Evergreen Email Templates will be going live!

30+ evergreen email templates tailored for cannabis dispensaries to help beef up their email strategy!

The point of creating these is for cannabis brands to easily start incorporating more educational material into their content strategy; my templates cover a wide-range of canna content and FAQ’s.

From the newbie smoker, to the 30-year vet, you’ll have content for them all!

The “templates” are mostly completed emails that you would just have to fill-in-the-blanks with your brand info.

Here’s a few of the topics I’ve covered so far:

• Cannabis and pets

• The Entourage Effect explained

• The science of cannabis genetics

• Exploring lesser-known cannabinoids

• Mastering the art of cannabis extraction

• Incorporating canna into your wellness routine

• Cannabis and chronic pain, insomnia, and anxiety

These emails will be your new secret weapon…

Anytime you’re struggling to come up with content ideas, just grab one of my pre-written emails, fill in a couple blanks, and hit send.

Even if you use just one of my emails in your content schedule per week, you’ll have at least 6 months of emails at your disposal!

You will easily stand out from your discount-spamming competition if you are creating truly valuable content for your customer!

This will be my first digital product and I can’t wait for it to go live! I’ll keep you all updated as we get closer to launch day!

Thank you all for your continued support and engagement on my posts!

Happy Strategizing!

Steve

P.S. After writing this I’ve realized I could make an entire newsletter on leveraging storytelling in your canna content. If you’d like to see that topic covered next week, reply to this email with “yes”!

If you have something else you’d specifically like me to cover, let me know that too! I’m always open to suggestions for providing you the content you want to see!