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How to Increase Your Dispensary’s Foot Traffic, Ticket Sizes and More

How to Rapidly Boost Your Cannabis Sales

At Alt Thirty Six, we've formed a strategic partnership with SpringBig, seamlessly integrating our payment platform with an industry-leading loyalty program and advanced text message marketing tool. This article will explain how to use this upcoming feature to increase foot traffic, ticket sizes and overall sales.

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At Alt Thirty Six, we've formed a strategic partnership with SpringBig to seamlessly combine our digital payment solutions with their industry-leading loyalty programs. We're consistently adding state-of-the-art integrations like this to our cannabis point of sale software, making Alt Thirty Six an irreplaceable tool for ensuring your cannabis business can thrive and take part in the explosive growth on the near-term horizon.

SpringBig's platform empowers cannabis dispensaries and retailers to create marketing campaigns guaranteed to increase customer spending and retention. Their tools help business owners track and contextualize customer data to make informed decisions and design tailored text message marketing campaigns.

For over 20 years, SpringBig CEO Jeffery Harris has brought loyalty to the forefront of major retail businesses. After resounding success with Inte Q (his pioneering loyalty company serving retail and financial services clients), he's leading a deep dive into the cannabis industry with SpringBig.

SpringBig has integrated with 14 major POS systems, five e-commerce platforms, and wants to integrate with everyone in the space. Servicing over 700 cannabis retailers and 10 million consumers in the US and Canada, they share Alt Thirty Six's vision to bring the most innovative tools to the underserved cannabis industry. Instead of creating a single stand-alone platform, the SpringBig team devotes themselves to making every part of retail operations as easy as possible through the intelligent application of technology.

SpringBig's text message marketing platform is distinguished most by its integration with Alt Thirty Six to collect and track detailed purchase history on customers. A traditional marketing platform may be able to segment customers by age, dollar amount, and visit frequency, but SpringBig allows for segmentation based on preferences for specific products and characteristics around purchasing behavior such as time of day.

If a customer has visited at least four times, the SpringBig system can predict with 89% accuracy when that next person will visit within a 2-hour time frame. With dozens of different behavioral triggers, SpringBig's auto-connect feature will send automated text messages based on birthdays, anniversaries, and recent visits. For instance, after a customer leaves a dispensary or receives a delivery, they receive a thank you message. If a customer who usually spends $500 a week hasn't spent much within that same timeframe, a text will be automatically sent to their phone, offering a coupon or reminding them of an exclusive promotion.

By creating campaigns tailored for narrow segments within your customer base, you're able to personalize marketing in a way that boosts revenue more effectively. Your dispensary only needs to create campaigns that are personalized enough to make sense for your goals. Rather than creating customized text messages for each individual or for your entire customer base, you use your resources more efficiently by focusing solely on the customers most likely to return (establishing an economy of scale). These texts are strategically sent at precisely the right moment when it's most likely to inspire a purchase.

The best part is, SpringBig's loyalty program comes free with Alt Thirty Six. Merchants only pay when activating marketing campaigns that send text messages directly to customers. While text messages may sound old fashioned, they are the most effective, cutting-edge advertising option in the cannabis space today. Due to the legal restrictions on cannabis marketing, it's difficult for dispensaries to advertise on the same level playing field as other industries. Such roadblocks force many dispensaries and retailers to revert to old fashion advertising methods. As a result of policies tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have put in place (combined with legal limitations), cannabis ads are routinely denied.

SpringBig's text message marketing comes with easy-to-understand guides for staying within the policies surrounding text message marketing for cannabis, ensuring your campaigns remain in compliance with the law and the policies of major cellular networks.

Do loyalty programs actually create loyal customers?

While some may downplay the effectiveness of loyalty programs and text message marketing tools, those individuals usually don't understand how these tools function over the long term. Retailers and merchants may observe an instant spike in sales early on and then a gradual decline following the introduction of loyalty programs. Why? Many new customers do take advantage of loyalty programs in the early stages. Almost 40% of cannabis customers who sign up for loyalty programs tend to complete one initial transaction, never to return. However, truly loyal customers are few and far between, and they happen to be the individuals who will take your business to new heights.

This counterintuitive and fascinating phenomenon is a result of the 80/20 rule, a principle stating that 80% of the effects produced come from 20% of the causes. In this case, 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers.

These are diehard, loyal customers who will rave about your cannabis goods and services to others, automatically resulting in a second wave of free, word-of-mouth advertising. Instead of hiring brand ambassadors, these customers sign up to do it for free and without hesitation.

Data collected by SpringBig from dispensaries in Washington, California, Nevada, and Colorado found that customers who didn't sign up for loyalty programs contributed to approximately 50% of the spending within the first month of starting a new loyalty program. Simultaneously, members actively redeeming rewards only contributed to about 18% of that first month's spending.

Here's where sales take an unexpected turn. Over time, those numbers went in opposite directions. After 12 months, active members in the loyalty programs contributed to about 75%—despite making up less than 10% of total customers. Those customers who didn't sign up for the loyalty programs and contributed to 50% of purchases in the first month only accounted for less than 6% of total sales.

Loyalty-linked promotions and discounts lead customers to spend more, buy more items, and select more expensive products off of your shelves. This doesn't mean a loyalty program guarantees this in every instance with every customer, but it can statistically mean the difference between having a thriving business and one struggling to survive.

Our SpringBig integration will also allow you to gain valuable insights from your dispensary's unique customer behavior. Data collected by Headset (a leading data analytics and market intelligence platform for the cannabis industry) reveals that engaged customers currently contribute most to the cannabis industry's growth buy 20% fewer pre-rolls and 15% more concentrates.

Loyal customers also tend to have more diverse baskets that contain fewer flower products and more edibles, vapor pens, tinctures, topicals, and capsules. On average, these baskets are 35% larger than those of non-loyal customers, helping you to increase ticket size and scale your operation the smart way.

When you get to the stage when you're ready to set up your loyalty program or create a text message marketing campaign, make sure that the discounts you're offering are rewarding the kind of customer behaviors you want to encourage. Don't launch a massive promotion out of the blue. Instead, target promotions toward specific customers, rewarding them for purchases they've made over an extended period.

According to SpringBig's data, this approach has proven to be the most effective for increasing overall sales, ticket sizes, and foot traffic in the long run.

Alt Thirty Six and SpringBig are also working in partnership to integrate a widespread, points-based system for automatically incentivizing customers who've never visited your dispensary. Programs and features like these allow your business to tap into new segments of the cannabis market and scale at a pace in keeping with current and rapidly rising demand.

Just as our payment solutions have managed to keep everything simple and easy for merchants, these new and powerful marketing tools also won't require customers to download an app or go through tedious signup or point redeeming processes. As long as your customers have a smartphone, you'll be able to better understand their preferences and exceed their expectations.

As SpringBig CEO Jeffery Harris puts it:

“By combining forces, SpringBig and Alt Thirty Six have designed personalized and seamless customer experiences that empower dispensaries to scale their operations and better serve their communities.

SpringBig helps cannabis businesses overcome marketing and communication restrictions, while Alt Thirty Six helps them exceed regulatory requirements and process digital payments with ease. In both cases, intelligently applied technology is at the core of our solutions.”

Scale your dispensary with digital payments and integrated loyalty programs linked to sophisticated text message marketing.

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