Growing an email list is essential for any cannabis business or dispensary looking to increase customer engagement and repeat sales.  It allows you to create relationships with your customers, build trust with them over time, and offer incentives that keep customers coming back. But how do you go about building a large and engaged email list for your business?

In this blog post, I’m going to show you 8 simple strategies that every cannabis business can use right now to grow their email list.

1. Start with your current contacts – Make a list of everyone you know, including friends, family, investors, vendors, affiliates, current customers, and so on. Send them a personal invite to join your email newsletter. *Please never add someone to your list without their consent
2. Leverage pop-ups to capture website visitors 
3. Promote your newsletter in your email signature
4. Run contests or giveaways
5. Sign people up at the POS
6. Collect sign ups at events 
7. Leverage Social Media to promote your newsletter
8. Add a sign-up form on your Facebook

Creating a larger email list gives you access to more potential customers, which ultimately leads to more sales and conversions for your business. It is crucial to your overall success since it allows you to communicate with your readers and customers on an ongoing basis. Email data is also a business asset. You can even monetize your cannabis email list to create additional streams of revenue. 

NEVER PURCHASE EMAIL LISTS

While it is possible to purchase a list, it’s important to consider some crucial factors before proceeding. 

First, there is a risk that the recipients on the purchased list may have already opted out, leaving your business with potential legal liability, hefty fines, or a lawsuit. 

Second, how do you know these contacts want to hear from you in the first place? Usually, the origin and quality of these email addresses are uncertain, making it questionable whether these individuals would be interested in hearing from you. Plus, in the cannabis industry there is a lot of dirty data, so you risk jeopardizing your sender reputation by sending to bad email addresses or getting marked as spam.

Additionally, using purchased lists can lead to consequences such as being removed from email service providers like Mailchimp or Klaviyo, negatively impacting your email reputation. Hence, relying on purchased lists is not advisable, as it can quickly damage your credibility.

It is common to hear about people setting up separate email service providers solely for the purpose of sending emails to these purchased lists. However, this approach can be highly detrimental to your sending reputation. From my perspective, this method wastes your email addresses, and there are more effective strategies to enhance lead acquisition.

THE IMPORTANCE OF A CLEAN LIST

You’ll often hear email marketers talking about list hygiene. According to Validity, List Hygiene is the process of validating your data to ensure you have a clean list of contacts to send campaigns to.

Having a regular plan for cleaning your email list is important. To improve the quality of your leads, it is recommended to scrub them through a validation service. This will help identify and eliminate invalid, temporary, or spam trap addresses.

WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS DATA?

Do you have a list that you aren’t sure how to handle? If you’re abiding by Texas’ HB 4 law, California’s Privacy Law, CAN-SPAM, CASL, or other data privacy laws, you may not be able to send to someone without their consent or process their data if they aren’t opted in.

If you can send in the region you are targeting and are sending one email to attempt to convert them to an opt-in to your email program, introduce your leads in small volumes. It is crucial to ensure that opt-in requests from lead lists account for less than 5% of your overall email volume. This prevents them from impacting communications to your engaged subscribers and negatively affecting your email deliverability.

For the remaining addresses you have, it is recommended to track their activities. By monitoring who reads or clicks through your emails, you can identify inactive recipients and remove them. This proactive measure helps maintain good standing with inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, etc., which utilize activity metrics to determine email placement.

CONCLUSION

Now that you know all about how to grow your cannabis email list the right way, you’re on your way to making more money for your business! Start today, whether it’s a promotion to sign up in-store, or a bong giveaway at your next event. If you need more assistance growing your email list, reach out to our team of email geeks at cannabis@sourcemarketinggroup.com.

Author Profile: 

Kristin is the Founder and CEO of The Source Marketing Group. The marketing agency is focused on elevating female-, veteran-, and minority-owned businesses in the cannabis and craft beer space.