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:

• How to (actually) grow your email list

• Pro Tips

• Free Email Template (at the end)

Let’s Roll 🛼

If you don’t know what the term “lead magnet” means, I’d recommend researching it before continuing on!

Hopefully my targeting has been effective so far, and I’m speaking to a seasoned canna professional who already knows how lead magnets and list growth works.

You offer value, they sign up.

But like anything in the canna industry, if you do it the same as everyone else, you’ll stagnate.

You HAVE to stand out and offer something different if you wanna make waves!

You’ve tried growing your list by offering irresistible discounts in exchange for email addresses.

That’s a great way to get one sale! Hooray! One sale!

BUT…

Here’s 5 tips for increasing the quantity AND quality of your email list, and how a few small tweaks can make all the difference!

1. Convenience Is Always Key:

Ensure that your sign up forms are integrated into every customer touchpoint (i.e. website, blog, social medias, etc.).

Signing up for your email list should be as quick and easy as possible.

DO NOT scare them away with questions at sign up; you can gather customer data over time much more effectively.

Pro tip: If you’re asking any additional questions other than their email address, limit it to their first name.

Having their first name is usually a painless question for your reader to answer, and it’s a strong start to your personalization efforts.

2. Incentivizing Sign Ups:

Hot Take: The main difference between a good incentive and a great incentive is presentation.

I see sign up forms all the time that say something like:

“Sign up for 50% off your first order.”

Great incentive, terrible presentation.

Notice how you glanced over that text, barely even noticing the offer.

Offers like those are features of becoming a subscriber; you need to sell them on the outcome.

You do that by evoking emotion from your reader:

• Using 1st and 2nd person POV in all CTA’s on your sign up forms

• Telling them exactly how signing up will benefit them

• Power verbs

Two of the strongest emotions to draw out of your audience to encourage action is curiosity and FOMO.

“If you don’t subscribe how are you gonna get your 50% off code??😭"

Here’s why it works:

• Relevant question asked directly to your reader

• 2nd person POV (You, your)

• FOMO (my discount😭)

• Benefit clearly stated at the end

• Outcome sold

“Discover how 10,307 people are changing their lives one puff at a time”

Here’s why it works:

• Power verbs (Discover how)

• FOMO (10,307 people already started)

• Curiosity (see ‘Power verbs’)

• Specific number (more believable)

• Benefit clearly stated (sounds simple, too)

It’s not always about what you’re saying, but how you say it😉

3. Solve Their Problems:

If you’ve done enough research into your audience, then you should know what their most common pain points are.

Cannabis users have a host of problems they’re looking to solve, and YOU are the one to help them solve it.

People only care about your content if it’s relevant, and beneficial to them.

There’s tons of common pain points of cannabis users:

• Low quality products

• High prices

• Faulty products (carts getting clogged)

• Mis-labeled packaging - I’ve seen carts labeled as Indica but the terps SCREAM Sativa

Your brand should be actively showing how you’ve overcome these common problems to provide products or services that are better than your competition. How are you preventing these problems from occurring?

This how you build social proof. Your audience needs to see that you’re improving people’s lives (or highs) before they feel inclined to sub.

4. Social Media Content:

Most of your subscribers didn't sign up for your list the first time they ever heard of you.

More often than not, they start as a social media followers. You need to give your customers a reason to take the leap and subscribe to your emails.

Social proof builds trust.

And valuable, relevant content anchors that trust in your reader’s mind.

They need to trust you if they’re gonna care about what you have to say.

Creating cannabis content for social media can be tough for obvious reasons.

It’s important to find a way to give your SM followers just enough value to peak their interest, and encourage them to discover more via the links in your bio.

All without violating community guidelines🙏

I have a "theory" in content creation that I call The Rule of 3:

In my opinion, your followers need to see no fewer than 3 pieces of content from you that are both hyper-relevant to the individual, and providing high-value information that helps them with a specific problem they're facing before they fully trust you and will consider subscribing.

In other words, you need to solve 3 real life problems that they’ve faced before they are willing to give you their contact info.

That’s what your SM content does; hits on common pain points, and offers a solution.

That solution just happens to be ‘Sign Up for Our Emails’.

5. Referral Bonuses:

Have your subscribers advertise for you!

Referral bonuses are a great way to grow your list organically, AND identify your VIP customers for future campaigns.

Discounts, rewards, and exclusive content are all great referral incentives.

You can even turn it into a contest with a “scoreboard” of your top referrals.

The customers that refer the most people to your list are your top brand ambassadors; your VIP’s (segment these customers for later).

Some creators I follow have referral programs where if you refer 3 people to their list, you get free LinkedIn/email/cold DM templates.

Putting a number on it gives your customers a goal to strive for.

And if the reward for achieving that goal is strong enough, they’ll go for it.

I’m a big fan of referral bonuses where if you refer X number of people to the brand, you become a VIP subscriber with exclusive access or discounts.

Exclusivity is powerful.

Pro Tips: Maintaining List Health and Engagement

Growing your list is only part of the challenge; keeping it clean and engaged is crucial for business growth.

1. Segment your subscribers!

It’s probably the biggest mistake I see in cannabis email marketing - brands that send the same email(s) to their entire list and hope for the best.

You’re wasting your time.

Segmenting your list is ridiculously easy when compared to the results it delivers.

Check out my post on advanced email segmentation strategies here!

2. Regularly clean up your list to remove inactive subscribers who skew your performance metrics and target your content to keep the remaining subscribers engaged.

Don’t delete these inactive subs (yet)!

Segment your un-engaged subs together for a re-engagement campaign.

Here’s a cheeky lil template for re-engaging your inactive subs.

Your email subscribers are your most valuable audience members.

You “own” your email subscribers unlike your social media followers who can be gone in a flash just cause you said “weed” by accident in your IG story.

Use your social media presence to funnel your followers to your email list.

Use your email list to funnel your subs to your website or physical store.

Then do what you do best: Sell Weed.

Happy Growing!

Thanks for reading.

Steve

P.S. Thank you all for your ongoing feedback! I can’t tell you how much it helps me grow my business, and I’m so glad so many of you are finding value in my content🙏🙏