There are numerous sales and marketing tools In the cannabis industry that brands and retailers alike need to take advantage of. One of the most important ones being a dispensary CRM system with features built specifically for modern cannabis retailers as opposed to typical mainstream systems.
CRM for Cannabis Dispensaries
Before we dive into why a CRM system is so important for cannabis businesses, let’s make sure we are on the same page as to what exactly a CRM is, and why it is an essential solution for any successful dispensary and business owners in general.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and is designed to help you build stronger relationships with your customers, increase brand loyalty, and maintain customer satisfaction and retention.
CRM solutions are just as important to a cannabis company and the marijuana industry as a whole as they are to traditional retail clients. To that end, a vital part of any cannabis CRM system is analytics features to generate detailed customer-specific reports, then use these reporting features and the key details they provide to help improve your dispensary operations, create smarter marketing campaigns and ensure continued growth and operational efficiency.
A business analytics platform like a CRM does this by segmenting customers into separate buckets, letting you target specific groups based on user personal information and the current status in their customer journey with your business.
In doing so a cannabis dispensary CRM solution can streamline and sync your entire software stack into one dispensary management system so your store has an industry-leading customer service experience.
In the legal Cannabis Industry, this has the added benefit of organizing the tricky supply chain and the relationship between cannabis operators, producers, regulators, vendors, distributors, brands, marketers, etc.. to ensure efficient product placement and sell-through and traceability from seed to sale.
Although this only occurs with best-in-class technology that employs ERP solutions like data-warehouses.
What Role Does My POS Play in CRM?
If you’re currently running a cannabis dispensary you are already familiar with one of the numerous options for Point-of-Sale (POS) systems. This is that super convenient, never confusing piece of technology where you keep track of your basic accounting data (lest we forget about those cannabis taxes). Your POS system might have some mainstream applications like inventory management, sale traceability, basic sales reports, and other default features that retail application providers have.
However, by utilizing a seamless integration with your POS, you can pull and push data from your point-of-sale directly into your CRM software. This way, you can analyze what your customers are buying, and anticipate their needs. Using detailed reports with key data points like product preferences for certain cannabis brands or products, you can create more personalized marketing messages based on real cannabis user data.
You might think you can get by with just a POS, but combining springbig’s marketing software platform with your POS will create a fully-fledged CRM for your cannabis dispensary. A POS system lets you process transactions that provide data, while a CRM lets you use the data to strengthen connections with your customers.
Creating Customer Loyalty With CRM
One of the best ways to utilize a comprehensive CRM is with a loyalty program and text messaging platform, which takes cannabis dispensary and brand marketing to a whole new level.
Using the key reports provided by your CRM will show you who your most loyal customers are and how to increase customer loyalty among net new customers. This will help you customize your loyalty program to create the perfect recipe for increasing brand loyalty and browsing experience.
While your rewards program should be designed to fit your company’s unique business model, we believe making rewards proportionate to a customer’s loyalty makes a program more effective and successful. Using a CRM that integrates with your POS and supports your loyalty program makes this all the more possible.
Optimize Conversion With SMS Marketing
Making sure your consumer retention marketing strategy is keeping up with the latest marketing trends is essential to its continued success, which makes dispensary text message marketing and mobile optimization a must.
Text message marketing is extremely important, especially in the cannabis industry as it is one of the only ways cannabis dispensaries can reach their customers without running into current regulations. It boasts a 98% open rate and according to digital marketing studies, also has a 209% higher response rate than email marketing or Facebook. While text message marketing is powerful, it can’t be the only change you make to your customer loyalty program and overall strategy to build relationships with your customers.
According to recent studies, 33% percent of those who left a customer loyalty program did so because they felt that it lacked an enjoyable multi-channel experience. That means they want to see the loyalty program exist seamlessly on their laptop and on their phones through emails, texts, apps and online ordering. Many customer loyalty programs either fail to utilize the various channels in which they can get relevant messages to their customers, or fail to make these channels seamlessly integrate into one another.
What does seamless integration mean? That means if you receive a text saying that you just received 200 points, you can log into your account on the mobile app and see 200 points in your account. No mass messages blasting the same irrelevant types of cannabis SMS text messages that many so-called ‘cannabis’ SMS marketing service providers are guilty of.
Making sure that your SMS loyalty program is up to speed with the latest tech trends is essential to its success, so investing in it to make it seamless across all platforms and including text message marketing in your loyalty program is a must.
Automate Customer Engagement and Marketing Programs
Good customer engagement software needs to be automated. Cannabis dispensary owners don’t have the time to plan who and when to send every piece of promotional material to. Doing this manually is not very efficient and is much better to leave to an advanced opportunity management and marketing automation software.
Allow springbig’s system to analyze your cannabis consumers’ favorite products, online shopping habits, average order size, and so much more to craft the right retail experiences for each individual person.
Award-winning dispensaries don’t provide cookie-cutter experiences, they use the latest cannabis marketing technology developments to provide relevant promotional material to the right people at the optimal time.
