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 Identify Your Core Customer Groups

• Tailoring Messages to Different Segments

• What You Can Do Today

Let’s Roll 🛼

Before you send your next email you must understand one thing…

Most email marketing campaigns fail because the content isn’t relevant enough to the audience being targeted.

That’s why identifying your core customer groups, creating specific customer personas, and tailoring your message to those personas is crucial if you want your emails to start selling for you.

Let’s get into how exactly to do it:

Identifying Your Core Customer Groups:

Your VIP customers make up a large part of your core customer groups.

And your VIP’s account for ~80% of your revenue on average, so identifying these customers and tailoring content to them becomes essential in creating effective marketing campaigns.

Here’s how to do it step-by-step (and how to create more VIP’s in the process):

1. Collect Data

Start by gathering as much data as possible about your customers. The more detailed your data, the better you can understand and segment your audience. Important data points might include:

• Demographics: Age, gender, income, education level, and occupation.

• Geographics: Location can influence cannabis usage due to varying legal statuses and cultural acceptance.

• Behavioral data: Purchase history, product preferences, frequency of purchase, and loyalty.

• Psychographics: Lifestyle, values, attitudes, and motivations.

• Usage intent: Why do they consume cannabis?

2. Analyze Purchasing Behavior

Look at your sales data to identify which products are popular with which types of customers. This can give you insights into the behavior and preferences of different segments. For example, you might find that:

• Younger users prefer vaping products.

• Older customers buy more CBD products for medicinal use.

• High-income individuals purchase premium products.

Take note of purchasing frequency as well; timing your emails so they are delivered around the time your customer’s need to re up can have a significant impact on conversions.

3. Conduct Market Research

To supplement your internal data, conduct research to gather more generalized information about cannabis consumers. This can include:

• Surveys: Directly asking customers about their preferences, how they use cannabis, and what they value in a cannabis brand.

• Focus groups: Gathering small groups of typical users to discuss their habits and preferences can provide deep insights.

• Social media: Sites like Reddit are great places to gather info on the common canna user.

4. Create Customer Personas

Using the data gathered, create detailed customer personas for each core group. A persona should be a representative profile that includes demographic traits, behavioral patterns, motivations, and any other relevant characteristics. For example:

• Persona 1: Medicinal Melanie

  • Age: 50+

  • Uses cannabis for: Pain relief and sleep aid

  • Prefers: Edibles and CBD oils

  • Motivations: Health and wellness. Pain-free life

• Persona 2: Recreational Ricky

  • Age: 21-30

  • Uses cannabis for: Recreation and social gatherings

  • Prefers: Vape pens and THC-rich strains

  • Motivations: Enjoyment and social acceptance. Gettin’ High!

• Persona 3: Athletic Alex

  • Age: 25-35

  • Uses cannabis for: Increased focus during exercise, and relaxation post-training

  • Prefers: CBD topicals for muscle soreness, low-THC content vape pens for focus

  • Motivations: Health, fitness, and maintaining a balanced lifestyle.

• Persona 4: Canna Mom Monica

  • Age: 30-45

  • Uses cannabis for: Stress relief, recreation, occasionally medicinal uses like anxiety or sleep issues

  • Prefers: Edibles for discretion, tinctures for precise dosing, and flower for personal enjoyment

  • Motivations: Wellness, stress relief, and managing the demands of motherhood

5. Validate and Refine Personas

Once personas are created, you need to validate them with real customer data to ensure they accurately represent real segments of your market. This is done through collecting data, creating content, and analyzing the results.

Refining personas involves making adjustments to your personas based on this validation process to better match the characteristics and behaviors of your target audience (i.e. A/B testing).

Remember to update personas regularly as you gather more information on your audience.

Tailoring Marketing Messages to Different Segments:

Now is the fun part…

Collecting data is boring for some (I LOVE it), but having all that info before you start strategizing your marketing approach is critical. Without proper research, you’re wasting time, effort, and money,

So, how do you leverage all this data to your company’s benefit? By creating content that focuses on the most common pain points, FAQ’s, and concerns of each customer persona you’ve created:

And there’s tons of ways to do this…

AIDA(R) is one of my personal favorites (I’ve added the “R” for “Retention”).

Awareness/Attention: Casting a wide net - grab your reader’s attention by addressing a common pain point felt by the segment you’re targeting (“Tired of low-quality sleep and waking up feeling unrested?”).

Interest: Turn their attention into interest by agitating the pain point (“You’ve probably tried {blank} and {blank} to no avail….”).

Desire: Give them hope - let them know there’s a solution (“What if I told you there’s a solution to your sleep problems (and it tastes delicious!)”).

Action: Tell them what to do next (“Click here to discover how our new CBN-infused gummies can help give you the best night sleep you’ve had since middle school!”)

Retention: A crucial addition to AIDA; use loyalty program incentives and optimized post-purchase flows to encourage repeat purchases.

If you want my full breakdown on using AIDA(R) for your canna digital marketing strategy, click here!

What You Can Do Today:

• Review your existing customer data: Look for similar customer patterns that can help you segment your audience.

• Draft a survey to gather more detailed psychographic information: Understanding why/how your customers use cannabis can help refine your segmentation.

• Start creating personas: Start sketching out basic personas based on the data you have gathered.

• Start a pilot campaign: Pick one segment and tailor a specific message to them in your next email. Track engagement metrics closely to gauge the effectiveness for future campaigns.

Create➡️Test➡️Analyze➡️Refine➡️Repeat

That’s all for today!

Happy Creating!

Steve

P.S. My templates drop this Friday! Are you losing sleep too or is that just me?😆