Text message marketing has become a staple of many dispensaries’ marketing strategies. With its 98% open rate and with 90% of messages being opened within the first 3 minutes of them being sent, if you aren’t utilizing text message marketing in your cannabis marketing strategy then you’re missing out.
If you are a part of the many dispensaries using text message marketing in your dispensary marketing strategy, you could be making some common mistakes that damage the effectiveness of your text message campaigns. One of the most common mistakes is sending your text messages to your customers at the wrong time. So in this article we will address the one of the most popular questions we get asked…
What is the best time to send messages to your customers?
We took thousands of text message campaigns and looked at what time they were sent. We then looked at how many visits each campaign produced to get thevisit rate for messages sent at each hour of the day. From this, we were able to deduce the optimal time to send out your text message campaigns that encourages the most customers to come in.
When do you think is the best time to send your text messages? In the morning so your customers have all day to look at it? Or at night so they can plan to come in the next day? According to our research, the best time to send out your text message campaign is between 4 and 5 PM. While some may say that the best, or most popular, time to send out a text message campaign is at 12 PM, our research shows that text message campaigns sent out between 4 and 5 PM have the highest attendance rates, with 7.16% of the audience making a visit to the dispensary because of the message.
Why between 4 and 5 PM? The most likely reason this was the most effective time to send a message is a combination of two factors. For starters, 4 to 5 PM is the time of day where people’s days are beginning to wind down and they are either off work or about to be, meaning they’re likely to be on their phones. On top of this, with the end of their work day coming soon people are looking forward to getting back home and relaxing.
While 4 to 5 PM was the most effective time to send a message according to our studies, we also saw strong results produced by messages sent at any time between 11 AM and 8 PM, with an average attendance rate of 6.80% during this time frame.
So, 4 to 5 PM is the golden hour to send out your text message campaigns. While it would be nice for that piece of information to solve all your text message marketing problems and boost your ROI ten fold, that will most likely not be the case. Here are some other things to consider when sending out a text message campaign:
Different days of the week
Similarly to how certain messages may be more effective by being sent at different times, messages can also be more or less effective depending on the day you send them. Along with our study on the best hour of the day to send out a text message campaign, we also looked at the best day of the week to send out campaigns. From the study, we found that messages sent on Thursdays yielded the highest attendance rate with an average of 9.81%. Other days we found to be most effective were Wednesday and Friday, with messages sent on Wednesday yielding average attendance rates of 8.42%, and messages sent on friday yielding average attendance rates of 8.57%.
It may be useful for your business to try sending messages on different days of the week to see which day is best for each different type of message you may have. Typically with text message marketing, tips and reminders are sent earlier in the week, while sales and promotions are sent during the latter half of the week. Whether this pattern will work for you, and whether Thursday is truly the most effective day to send your text messages is up to you to decide because at the end of the day, each business and each customer base is different.
Is the message time-sensitive?
There is a time and place for everything, and the same goes for text messages. When sending out a message, it is important to consider the audience of the message and the contents of the message when deciding on what time to send it. If the contents of the message contains information regarding the start of the day like morning deals, and is targeted towards early risers, then it might be best to send the message early in the morning between 8 and 11 AM. If your message is specifically meant to target the night owls on your customer list, then maybe you should send out the campaign after 9 PM.
Only you know the goals and audience of your message, so it is important to consider those factors before defaulting to the overall best time to send a message: between 4 and 5 PM.
Other common mistakes
Sending messages at the wrong time is only one of the many common mistakes people and businesses make when sending out text message campaigns. One other mistake many make is failing to utilize carrier segmentation when sending messages, which is available through Springbig, which can cause your messages to not be delivered due to certain carrier restrictions. Other common mistakes are things such as using messages with the same verbiage, which leads to a decrease in deliverability, and sending messages with too much content, which can cause the content to render poorly.
When sending a text message campaign, there are many other factors besides the ones discussed in this article that affect the effectiveness of your messages and it is important to be mindful of those as well. Want to learn more about making an effective dispensary text message marketing campaign? Read our other articles here.
