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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.

Today’s Email:

• Why So Many Weed Brands Fail at Email Marketing

• How To Ensure That Your Brand Won’t

• What You Can Do Today

Let’s Roll 🛼

Why have so many cannabis brands not hopped on the email marketing bandwagon yet?

Look at every single big brand in the world; cannabis industry or otherwise.

Nike, Apple, Gatorade… Any of ‘em.

They all have meticulously-crafted email strategies that keep their audience entertained, engaged, and thinking about their brand at all times.

According to Gartner’s “The State of Marketing Budget and Strategy 2022”, brands spend roughly 12% of their annual revenue on marketing, and ~7.8% specifically on email marketing. (source)

So, more than half of their marketing budget goes to email alone.

Apple’s annual revenue: $383.29 billion in 2023.

• That’s $45,994,800,000 on marketing.

• $29,896,620,000 just on email marketing.

And the average ROI on email marketing is $44 for every $1 spent…

So, I’ll ask again:

Why have so many cannabis brands not hopped on the email bandwagon yet?

I have a couple theories…

1. Plain and simple, cannabis and marketing just haven’t caught up to each other yet; marketing has been around for 1,000’s of years, LEGAL cannabis ~10. The 2 industries just haven’t quite meshed YET!

2. The variety of backgrounds and experience levels in the canna industry: The diversity of this industry is one of my favorite parts about it - I’ve connected with people from all different countries, markets, social classes, backgrounds, and they all have one thing in common: Their love for The Plant.

   But with that comes a different problem…

You see, most of the time when you see a big, successful, renowned brand, the people at the top of the brand usually have professional business experience:

• They often have at least a 4 year business degree

• They’ve probably been at the head of other brands before joining

• They’re well-versed in different types of marketing, sales, and overall business ops.

In cannabis we have a lot of that too.

But we also have many instances of people starting cannabis brands after years or decades of being in the black market cannabis industry.

The kind of industry that they don’t teach you about in college…

Some of our best canna pros don’t know the difference between content marketing and copywriting, or how to create an automated email welcome series.

The biggest reason cannabis brands fail at email marketing is a lack of knowledge…

90% of canna emails I receive are spammy and oversaturated with images, links, and salesy jargon.

This formula results in slow load times, zero connection with your audience, and a quick trip to the promotions tab.

How To Ensure Your Brand is Different:

You have all the tools required for creating a money-making email marketing strategy already. You have:

• An audience

• Data on that audience

• A desire to write better content

• Me!

The first thing you should focus on is building a relationship with your audience. Without establishing a rapport, your audience won’t want to engage with you.

This means

1. No opens

2. No survey responses

3. No sales

In order to build a relationship and trust with your audience, your content needs to connect with them emotionally and help them in some way.

⬇️Here’s how your emails should flow⬇️

• Get their attention by using their first name and asking a relevant question.

• Preview text adds some intrigue.

• Body opens up with a surprising statistic and talks about the negatives of poor sleep. Also gives hope for a solution.

• CTA uses social proof and FOMO.

• P.S. is an extra little push.

I wrote that in 5 minutes. Email marketing isn’t as complicated as some think; you just have to write something people will actually want to read.

Your audience is tired of BOGO, 50% off, Buy Now, etc. Relate to them instead.

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What You Can Do Today:

The first thing you need to do is change the way you look at email marketing…

It’s not called email SALES for a reason; stop selling in every email. The example I wrote above will do the selling for you.

When you consistently teach your audience something of value, they start to trust what you’re saying more. So, when you add those cheeky little links to your CTA’s, your reader’s will naturally start to click.

Start researching what problems cannabis users are facing, or what questions they have, and answer them. Create content around those problems and questions.

You can use Reddit, customer surveys, or ask your budtenders what are the most FAQ’s at your shop.

You can also email me! If you’re a dispensary owner, and you like my example email above, I’d love to write a few free emails for you to tryout on your audience. Just give me your brand’s link, some content topics you’d like to see me cover (if you have any), and I’ll whip up a few samples for you!

*note: I am leaving for a 3 day vacation tomorrow morning so any emails you’d want written, I could get to you by the end of the week/this weekend!

Happy Emailing!

Steve

When You’re Ready, Here’s How I Can Help You…

Click HERE to download the High On Marketing Evergreen Templates - 50 pre-written emails tailored for cannabis brands to educate, engage, and encourage action from your audience

Stay on top-of-mind while building a well-informed, loyal customer base.

Get your templates today and have the next 6 months of canna content covered!

⬇️Don’t forget to use your subscriber code for 50% off!⬇️

9VVS85T

P.S. If you have any suggestions for restaurants or places we HAVE to visit on our trip to Virginia Beach, let me know!