We're just a few weeks out from the cannabis industry's Black Friday.
“Green Wednesday” is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving—and it's always a hot day for sales at dispensaries. In 2020, Green Wednesday set a new record; surpassing 4/20 sales.
How did this happen? Well, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is also the busiest travel day of the year. With so many people going to visit family and friends, Green Wednesday sees a lot of customers from other states where cannabis might not be legal yet. Not to mention the locals who want to stock up for Thanksgiving and get a head start on gift-buying for the holidays.
These factors all came together to create the perfect storm: a spontaneous holiday celebrating the free market and emerging industries… and cannabis.
It’s never too early to start dreaming up holiday marketing ideas for your dispensary, especially since nearly 44% of shoppers have already started holiday shopping.
From regulars to seasonal shoppers to new customers, as a dispensary owner, you want to excite everyone enough to make the sale over and over again. In this article, we’ve rounded up 7 ideas you can use to spice up your holiday marketing, including:
Holiday shoppers usually have big lists—and that means they’re looking for deals. In this article, we’ll walk you through how to reward them for shopping with you.
Note: Be sure your holiday marketing, advertising, planned promotions, discounts, and product bundles are in compliance with all local and state rules and regulations.
They’re tried and true for a reason: they work!
The trick is finding the sweet spot. Discounting your whole dispensary is easy, but you might end up losing more than you gain if you give too much of your inventory away. Instead, discount your top-selling cannabis products, and promote add-ons (that aren’t discounted) to accompany them.
Consider flash sales as an alternative to a full-season discount.
Set up a limited time discount in your Dutchie POS back office, and change the products on sale daily. Promote your daily deals ahead of time, and consider themes to make customers keep coming back for more. For example, you could discount pre-rolls one day and edibles the next.
If your dispensary is selling gift cards this holiday season, get ready for a busy January. Recipients of your gift cards will likely be coming in to spend them once the holidays wind down. Studies show that nearly 60% of gift card users spend over the value of their gift card, so take advantage of this opportunity by giving gift card recipients exclusive discounts.
Promote the fact that gift card users will receive exclusive dispensary discounts during the holiday period, and you’ve got a two-for-one way to boost sales.
A whopping 84% of shoppers make impulse purchases. What are you doing to encourage them in your store?
To capture shoppers’ imaginations and increase your chances of making a sale, bundle related products together and promote them as convenient stocking stuffers in visible areas around your dispensary, such as at checkout.
Keep the stocking stuffer bundles under a set price so they’re affordable impulse buys, which will increase their effectiveness.
If you don’t want to completely rearrange your dispensary—or even if you do—you can create suggested shopping gift lists. Craft an informative, easy-to-use checklist of top gift ideas for different types of consumers. Include related stocking stuffer ideas for upselling.
Increase impulse buys at check-out with easy bundled gifts on display. Entice them by tailoring the different gifts to different groups and labeling them: stocking stuffers for the dabber, edible-lover, and “traditional toker”.
For maximum impact, bundle one or two of your top-selling cannabis products with stock that’s out of season or slow-moving. The top products will entice shoppers, and you’ll move inventory that otherwise isn’t selling.
The holidays are a busy time. To help make your store a no-brainer stop and spread out the crowds, consider extending your hours on peak shopping days. If you’re not sure what the best days for extended hours will be, run some sales reports by hour in your Dutchie POS. Check to see which days in the last two weeks have had more sales in the evening—those are the days you should consider extending your hours.
Extended hours mean you can welcome a lower concentration of people in the store at any one time, making shopping safer and easier for your employees and customers.
Local search is powerful for small businesses, and dispensaries are no exception. In fact, 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. If your dispensary isn't optimized for local search, you're missing out on potential customers ready to shop in your area. The bottom line? Local SEO is critical if you want your business to stay relevant.
Here are three ways to ensure your dispensary gets noticed on Google.
Claim your Google Business profile, fill it out completely, and keep it updated. These are requirements for high rankings in Google Local.
Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing, Foursquare—if you can name it, claim it! Complete a business profile for each directory, ensuring location data is consistent across all (e.g., address, phone number, hours of operation, etc.).
Google reviews are most important; after all, they factor heavily into your Google Local rankings. Yelp is critical, too—it ranks in Google’s top 5 positions for 92% of search queries containing a city name + business category, e.g. [seattle dispensaries].
To learn more about how you can boost your SEO with Dutchie Ecommerce, visit our website.
Holiday marketing is one thing. Making the sale is another. Make sure you’re equipped to offer holiday shoppers an exceptional experience from the sales floor to checkout. Dutchie has tools for comprehensive inventory management, data reporting, customer loyalty and ecommerce—all parts of a winning holiday strategy.
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