Practical Strategies to Convert More Website Visitors to Customers & Increase Revenue by 22+%.
12 Proven Ways to Supercharge Your Dispensary’s Website to Increase Order Size and Drive More Sales
Please login or join Foottraffik for FREE
Got Webinar Fever?
Watch more of our live webinars, video tutorials, and more below.
Read The Transcription
All right. We’re getting close to start time here. Give it a few more seconds. Let everybody log on. While we’re waiting, if anyone would like to add their location to the chat. Where you’re from. Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Pennsylvania. The chat is in the top right of the window. All right, we’ll just get started.
Thank you for joining us today. We’re here to learn three ways to get more customers to your store. There are a lot of different ways that we can drive traffic to your store. We’re going to focus on three in this session. If you wouldn’t mind silencing your phone, closing out all the browser windows you may have open and logging off your email and off your phones so you can be focused for the presentation. First and foremost, I want to introduce myself. My name is Guillermo Bravo. I’m the CEO and founder of foot traffic. We’re going on about four years in service now.
And by the way, the Google Android phones typically come with Google Chrome, Google search, and Google maps as the default apps on those mobile phones. Mobile browsers. So not only does Google supply search engines, it also supplies a browser, Google Chrome. For the Apple iPhone users, they’ll be defaulted to Safari, which is 52% of the total mobile browser market. For Google Chrome, they own about 41% of the market. And Samsung is at 5% of the market share. Let’s take a look at website visitors, so from our data, which is from an average about a hundred unique dispensary websites, the source of a majority of the visitors to a website are through mobile devices. So of everybody that visits your website, 76% of people are using their mobile phones. They’re on the run. They could be driving home from work, picking up cannabis on the home. They might be on the way to happy hour. Whatever they might be, they’re always on the go. What does everybody have in their pocket? A cellphone. It’s the age that we’re living in and it’s mandatory to have a presence on mobile. All right, let’s take a look at Google specifically. The keyword dispensary dominates all searches across Google by flying colors. If you look at the graph, the keyword dispensary in blue, keyword dispensary gets roughly eight times as many searches in comparison to the keyword dispensary near me or Weedmaps and Leafly nationwide. Just looking at this even further, compared to Weedmaps and Leafly, Google is still King. People go to Google first to search for a dispensary. So you’re on your phone, where do I buy cannabis, or where do I buy pot? And you’re going to see Google results based on that. It’s a low percentage of people type in Weedmaps or Leafly and then search on those platforms. As you can see here in this graph. And one thing I wanted to emphasize is that instead of paying Weedmaps or Leafly, why not go to the source and pay Google directly? They’re the source of all the traffic as far as searches in Google and Google search and Google maps. Now transitioning to Google my business and Google in general, they have a robust number of data points and they’re very transparent with that data. So you want to ensure that you use this data to your benefit to make business decisions based on the data points that you observe in Google. Does anyone have any questions so far?
Feel free to ask them in the chat on the right side. I’ll be stopping at each section so we can dive in further as well. Google my business is a free and easy tool for dispensaries to use to manage their business on Google, on Google search, and on Google maps. When set up, it allows dispensaries to showcase their stores in local areas and transforming the process customers take now to find a product or service that they require.
So let’s take a look at Google my business in detail. One of our clients, Cannavine, out of Ukiah, California has given us the opportunity to share their data for the sake of this webinar. So this is Cannavine dispensary out of Ukiah, California. So I’m going to dive in detail to everything on the Google my business side. This is Cannavine dispensary. This is a look at the Google my business profile in action. As you can see it has the Google map view on the right side. It has the photos. If you have a Google 360 view tour, it’ll show that here as well as your business name, your reputation and reviews, your address, your hours of operations, your phone number. You can see your reviews across all platforms. You can see Weedmaps, Yelp, and so on. So this is a look at what customers would see on the front end when searching for your brand, Cannavine dispensary. And if they’re using their mobile phone, they’ll most likely be using Google maps by default. They’ll see the results in the map format. All right, so let’s dive into the Google my business profile now. As you can see, this is the back end of the Google my business listing. So this is your account if you were to register your dispensary on Google my business. You can see and manage all of this data for your dispensary all in one location. So this is all the information about your dispensary. This is where you add everything. Special hours, phone number, your website, any information in regards to your business. Accessibility, anything special about your business.
This is essentially your resume online. This is a primary channel for you to market your business. And when I spoke before about Google and data itself … There’s quite a bit to look at when analyzing what data is provided by Google. If you go into your Google my business profile under insights, this’ll give you a full overview of what data is tracked from your listing. And all this is highly valuable in making business decisions. So in regards to queries or search terms, these are keywords that customers use to find your business. The three most popular keywords that are used to find this dispensary are branded terms. And those are Cannavine, Cannavines, Cannavine. The keywords below that are non branded keywords. So these are general keywords that customers are using to find this dispensary. And these keywords are dispensary, dispensary near me, and Ukiah dispensary. So these are all keywords that are not related to the business. They don’t include the business name. And these are opportunities for us to get customers’ business for general keyword terms. And we can sort this data by the last month or last quarter or last week. So you can see there’s 120 different keywords that customers have used to find Cannavine dispensary. So this gives us a glance at what keywords customers are using to discover our business.
Okay, now let’s take a look at how customers search for your business. So the blue section of the pie chart here is discovery. And that’s customers who find your listing by searching for a category, product, or service. So an example of that would be cannabis store, marijuana dispensary, pot shop, cannabis club. They use general keywords to discover your business. And direct in the green are customers who already know your business name or address. So they’ll type in Cannavine dispensary into Google or they’ll type in the address, 1230 Airport Park Boulevard, Suite 3, Ukiah, California 95482. So for Cannavine dispensary, 91.6 of customers are finding the business through the discovery category, meaning that they’re searching for a cannabis store or dispensary, dispensary near me, and they’re finding the business. So those are all new opportunities for customers to get new customers and business.
Where customers view your business on Google? There’s two places that Google shows your Google my business listing. One is on Google search and the other is on Google maps. Search is what I showed you before. You go to google.com and you just type in dispensary near me. I’m in San Diego. So this is showing local results based on my geographical location. Listings on Google maps. That’s going to be browsing maps.google.com and you can search for the same term, dispensary near me. People can use the same keywords, but it’s just a different application people use to source search for dispensaries. The easiest way to single this out is search is google.com and maps is maps.google.com or the Google maps application on your mobile phone.
Now let’s transition to customer actions. Highlighted in the green here are people who have visited your website. So that means someone has visited your Google my business profile. They typed in dispensary near me. They saw Cannavine dispensary in the results. And from there they decided to click and visit your website with the goal of visiting your website to make a pre-order or purchase online before visiting the store. In yellow, that’s people who actually requested for directions to visit your store. They have intent to purchase, so they’re going to request for directions using the Google maps application and visit your store. So those are high converting customers. They’re people who have intent to purchase and they click on directions to visit your store. Hopefully they placed a pre-order before so they can pick up and skip the line. Calls. So these are customers who are calling to get more information on a product that they’d like to purchase.
Now transitioning to the directions requests section of the Google insights. This is a very small market, so there’s not too many zip codes. But if you were in, let’s say New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles, you would see a significant list of zip codes that customers are using to request for directions to your dispensary. And you can use the zip codes from this data to influence some of the other marketing channels and advertising that you’re investing in across billboards or geo-advertising or Google Ads and so on. It could be guerrilla marketing, it can be billboards, it could be geo-advertising, you can use the zip codes for Google AdWords campaigns. So these zip codes are really important to be leveraged on any of the marketing campaigns. Phone calls. So this is a glance at how many times customers call your business during the week and what the most popular time is. And this also looks at the most popular times people make phone calls. Popular times. So this is a glance at the most popular times of the day and during the week as far as foot traffic to your store. And we can see what time the store is going to be busy depending on what time of the day it is and day of the week.
So typically, you know from 4:00 PM on Thursday all the way through Sunday is really high traffic times in the dispensary. Photo views. This is taking a look at all the photos that have been uploaded by you in comparison to businesses like you. In the graph, the blue line is actually our photos and how many views have been received, and in the red is our competition. And this’ll show you how many times customers have used and viewed that image. So this is when a customer goes to your Google my business listing, goes to your profile, and then clicks on an image. And just viewing the picture and that would be considered a photo view.
So this is an overview of all the insights within Google my business. In addition to the data used to find your business, you can actually look at your reputation and manage all your reviews within the reviews section of the Google my business listing. You can see all of the replies for your dispensary within the reviews section of Google my business. You can edit your responses, you can just maintain that relationship with your customers within the Google my business platform. You have full flexibility into maintaining your reputation online. You can also enable messaging in addition to people calling to get more information about your business. They can actually direct message you directly through the profile and you can respond to them using the Google my business application on your iOS or Android phone. And under the photos section you can manage all your photos and any photography used. You can feature which picture you like to show by default, what logo you like to show by default, what cover image, which 360 view tour you like to highlight when people are looking on your profile. There’s a lot of flexibility here to manage your online presence on your Google my business profile. So we really want to control our presence and brand online and how we showcase our dispensary across Google and all platforms. So we can choose which pictures and videos we’d like to show to customers. Okay, I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen and transition back to the slideshow presentation. Perfect. All right, so Google Ads. Google Ads or Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers can bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in search results. Since advertisers have to pay for these clicks, this is how Google makes money from search. And this is why Google is one of the most valuable companies in the world.
So why is this important? Google Ads gives you the opportunity to increase brand awareness. It works a lot faster than SEO. So since it’s advertising and you’re paying for exposure, that could be seen … Sorry. It can be seen instantly. So if we start an ad today, get it approved, we’ll start to see results right away. Another thing is, someone could invest in SEO and dominate a local market on the organic side, but we can outrank them with ads. So we can be seen at the top, above our competition in a market if we’re opening a new store.
Another thing is that we can influence your audience to make them purchase. So when people are searching for a cannabis store or dispensary, they may see your name or your brand and pass it. They might recognize the name from a billboard or some other advertising that you’ve been doing. And having that ad displayed above the fold or at the top, it’s giving you that opportunity to influence your customer to make a purchase. We can target people based on demographics. So this is specifically with compliance, most of the laws state that we have to show, for California I believe it’s 72% of all ads have to be 21 and up. So we can control that and show your ads to that audience so that you’re compliant legally.
Another thing is you can actually schedule ads. So if your peak time is Thursday between 5:00 PM and midnight, boom, we’ll want to increase bids during that time and show the ads in your market during peak time. And for most dispensaries, from our data, it’s pretty much Thursday happy hour all the way to Sunday 6:00 PM is peak time. That’s when you get the most foot traffic for your business.
So let’s take a look at the organic results. This is a result if someone were to search for San Francisco dispensary. So this is what people see naturally. This is what you’ll see on your phone. This is what you’ll see on desktops. And so this is what you’ll see if you’re paying for an ad. Earlier today I just did a bunch of searches for different dispensaries in different markets. This is San Diego. This is a look at what your ad would look like locally. I did another search for Oakland dispensary. Here’s some of the competition that I’ve seen in Oakland specifically. So these are all ads that dispensaries are paying Google to run local ads and they could be for your brick and mortar retail location or they could be for delivery service.
Here’s another look at Google ads in San Francisco. So Grass Roots Dispensary, Barbary Coast, and The Apothecarium are all organic listings. These are all, you’re not paying for this, you’re getting this exposure for free through Google my business profile. Elevated San Francisco is paying per click to get exposure above the competition. So this is a great way for you to get exposure in your local market. Especially for new dispensaries who are just opening up, you have no reputation. There’s no reviews. You’re starting from zero. So what’s the best way to go to market? Boom, start some Google Ads. Start to get some foot traffic in there. Start to get feedback from customers on their experience and improve your business.
All right. What is tracked? So what are the goals that we have with your Google Ads? And how do you want to use this as a dispensary? We want to drive sales. We want to drive store visits. So these are the top three goals that we would focus on with Google Ads. The first is going to be foot traffic. We want to drive as many store visits as possible when spending money on Google Ads. That’s our number one goal.
Number two, website business. If someone chooses not to immediately request for directions, they may visit the website just to get more information on you. Or they may visit your menu or your deals to see if they actually want to visit your store. So that said, this is another goal that we want to focus on. Phone calls. We can have ads target customers who want more information, so they’ll give you a call. And all of this information is tracked separately. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen and dive into a live Google AdWords campaign. Give me one second here.
All right. Perfect. So this is another example of Cannavine and their Google Ads campaign that is running live pretty much for the last six months with some downtime during the campaign. So this is a look at the preview of the AdWords campaign. As you can see, we’re not using any mention of cannabis or marijuana or dispensary in the ad. We’re using Mendocino’s premier rec shop, cultivated experience, which is their tagline for the business, high quality safely produced products, come visit today for in store specials. Boom. Their address, set to go. So a very simple ad really focusing on getting foot traffic.
And as a marketer this is what’s really valuable to me. The data that Google tracks based on the ads and what is working and what is not and what the cost per acquisition is or CPA is for a new customer to come into your door. The first is impressions. So this is anytime someone has seen your ad in passing, browsing through a webpage, it might be at the top or maybe at the bottom. There’s a lot of different places that the ads are shown on Google search and Google maps. So anytime someone sees your ad that’s an impression. Clicks. Clicks are anytime someone has seen your ad and then clicked to visit your website. So this is immediately visiting your website or clicking on your ad to click on the phone number or call your business.
So we have complete transparency in how much money we spent over this campaign. Nearly $2,400. So we can calculate what the ROI is as a dispensary for this advertising channel. Verified calls. This is confirmed or verified calls to the business from the profile. So Google has tracking capabilities. They have a unique phone number that can be used that we can track these calls separate from all the other calls to your business. Map actions. This is the number of times people saw your ad and they clicked on your business pic on Google maps or got directions to your business. So you know when looking at Google AdWords as a channel to get new customers, I use this metric as a priority indicator for how successful the campaign is. So 2,063 divided by 790 map actions. Just off that metric, we’re paying close to $3 for someone to get directions or see our business and click on it. Which I think is fairly affordable based on the limitations that dispensaries have to advertise. And this is not counting clicks to the website or phone calls. So we spent 2,363. We had 412 clicks to the website, 34 calls, and 790 map actions.
We’ve also connected Google Analytics so you can see how many of the visitors to your website are actually new visitors, how much time they spent on your website, and the number of pages they viewed. So you can actually connect the data from Google Ads to Google Analytics. Just to be clear, I mean Google really has a full suite of analytics and data tools that you have access to as a dispensary owner. So we really want to leverage them as best as possible. Targeting. We can target based on different categories. It could be cannabis, or it could be a dispensary, it could be a medical dispensary, which is a different category for the medical markets. You can see all the search phrases. So these are all the keywords that people have found or have used to find your business. So over this campaign, 1,744 have seen the ad based on searching for dispensary and 104 clicked on that ad. And we can add or remove ad keywords here at any time.
So if we want to remove some that are not relevant or they just don’t make sense, like Weedmaps Ukiah, I would definitely leave that one. But there’s opportunities here for you to manage what keywords you’re bidding on. And targeting. This is a key part of Google Ads. So we can target based on radius. I want to target everyone within 40 miles of the store. Boom. That may work for this dispensary, but if you’re in San Francisco then maybe two miles, or three miles. We don’t have to target by radius. We can actually target by specific areas. So I can do cities if I’d like to target Lake Mendocino, I can target that. Ukiah, Redwood Valley, Cal Palo [inaudible 00:00:30:12]. I want to target people that are visiting Santa Rosa. There you go. I added that as a market. There’s other markets up here that are … This is a rural area, so if I want to target people in Willis, I can add that. So we can target by city or by zip code. So if I want to target this specific zip code, I can target that. So yeah, it’s really limitless on the way that you can target customers in each of these markets. That’s pretty much it on Google Ads. I’m going to go ahead and hop back to the presentation. Does anyone have any questions in regards to Google Ads that you’d like me to answer right now in between slides? Nope.
All right, let’s hop into geo-advertising. So what is geo-advertising? Geo-advertising or geo-targeting or local PBC or local pay-per-click. These are all synonyms of the same advertising channel. This all refers to the practice of delivering different display advertisements in search results to consumers based on their geographical location on their cell phones. Geo-targeting is often used to advertise to local dispensary customers and prospects. So why is this important to you? Showing ads to customers outside of your relevant local areas, drives wasted impressions and clicks. So this cuts into your marketing budget without offering any kind of return.
So if you’re a local brick and mortar store in Oakland, California, you probably don’t want to advertise in San Francisco to get customers. So relevancy is key. Target who are within the radius of your store that you know people actually will visit. All right, so how many uses this as a dispensary? So like I mentioned before, we can target customers based on the radius or distance from the store. So for Cannavine, we did a 15 mile radius. In other cities we can target based on two miles or so on, or zip codes. So our goal is to reach nearby customers with the campaign, so all based on their geographical location. In store. We can actually target your customers that come in your store and we can find customers that look similar to them. So it’s all based on your existing customers. We can also target your competitors. We can put a fence around your competitors on the specific address and target customers who visit their stores. And I’m going to dive into an example right now.
So here’s a look at San Francisco. As you can see, very saturated. There’s a lot of dispensaries throughout the city. This is a very high traffic area here on the BART line. So there’s probably … I mean it looks like there’s upwards of 10 plus dispensaries all on the same street. So competition is high. How do we target customers? Well, we can put a radius. All right, I’m going to put a one mile radius around Spark as a as if I’m Spark dispensary. All right, I want to open that up a little bit. I want to do a five mile radius and get every customer that’s looking for a dispensary in that. So I’ve opened that up and I can target anyone who’s looking for cannabis in that region.
SoMa. So SoMa is a heavy traffic area. There’s a lot of businesses, the financial district’s right there, this is the highest traffic area in San Francisco. What do I want to do? Put a rectangle around it. Anyone who’s in that area, whether it’s going to happy hour or going to work or going to the gym, whatever it might be, we want them to see our ads. So we’re targeting this whole area. Boom. The BART line. So we know in San Francisco that this is the highest traffic areas on the BART line. I believe the number one station in San Francisco is 24th and Mission, which is right below Purple Star, MD. So if you want to target customers while they’re in the Metro, boom, here you go. What better place to target customers than while they’re traveling? They’re on their phones. You know they’re not doing anything else on the Metro. They’re listening to music and they’re searching online. They’re on social. They’re doing research. So boom, perfect opportunity to get someone in your store.
Competition. All right, let’s say I’m Barbary Coast. I want to target customers who visit all my competitors. Boom, I’m just going to draw a circle around each of these and target them with my ads. So anytime that a customer is on the way to a competitor’s dispensary, at the dispensary, in the parking lot, leaving the dispensary, we have the opportunity to show our ads to these customers.
I slightly mentioned this before, but lookalike audiences. Similar to what Facebook actually uses for their ads. So we can actually re-target customers who have visited your store in the past and show them ads. So someone comes into Barbary Coast, maybe we haven’t seen them for 30 days, boom, we can show them an ad. We can also do lookalike audiences. So we can target customers, our customers, who’ve already visited and find and connect to customers who have the same profile. So age, sex, income level, interests, all these different items are factors that we can use to create lookalike audiences.
Data. So what’s tracked? As far as geo-advertising, since we are tracking location on their mobile devices, we can actually track an ad to a store visit. So as we saw in Google Ads before an impression is someone who’s seen your ad. Clicks is someone who actually clicks on your banner ad. The click through rate is the percentage of people who’ve seen your ad and then clicked on that ad. And a store visit as someone who clicked on your ad and then came into your store. Since we’re tracking at their location, we can track them to a conversion. And depending on what point of sale system you have, whether it’s Trees or GreenBiz or Flowhub or Leaf Logics, MJ Freeway or BioTrack, depending on what provider you’re using for geo-advertising, you can actually track your ad to a conversion and a transaction.
So what’s the price? From our estimates, it costs anywhere between $10 to $30 to get a recreational consumer into your store. And $30 to $60 in medical markets. And recreational markets, it’s more competitive, but there’s higher volume of customers. There’s lower average ticket. So there’s a lot of different factors to consider when looking at the recreational market. This varies depending on which city you’re in. So Las Vegas, we were just there for MJ Biz Con and I would say that in Vegas to get a customer, it’s going to be on the lower end because there’s a lot of tourism coming in. And if you did a geo ad on McCarran airport, boom, you have opportunities to get customers as soon as they land at the airport. Medical markets, they’re usually not … Not usually, but in some cases they’re not in metropolitan areas. So they could be the only dispensary within 30 miles. So the competition is not as high, but the average ticket could be upwards of 75 so $150 the customers can spend. So we want to take that into consideration when making decisions on geo-advertising campaigns. Let’s take a look at some examples. So this is a landing page that we created for a client of ours as a destination URL for the ad. So someone visited, let’s say zillow.com, they saw our ad, and then they reached this landing page. And you’ll want to offer some incentives in your ad. So if you’re just showing an ad that you’re open and we’d like you to come into the store, great. That’s not enticing to me. I want to get a deal. I want to get 20% off. I want to get access to an exclusive event. I want to meet a celebrity, whatever it might be. You need to provide some incentive in these ads to get clicks.
Let’s take a look at the ad sizes. So these are traditional ad sizes for mobile. So this is the 320 by 50 here, which says, “Want your dispensary ad here?” And high season on the right side, 300 by 250 is the two ads on the left side. And then the traditional 720 by 90 is on the bottom here, high season. So these are all ads that can be shown in JPEG format. You can do animated GIFs, you can do HTML 5 ads, MP4s, videos. Pretty much limitless when it comes to types of ads that you can display.
So for example, in Vegas we did a geo-advertising campaign to everyone who visited. And our ad said, “Want your dispensary ad here?” Boom, we have the dispensary flashing white and salmon. And that was our ad. It was an animated GIF. So where are these ads seen? Hi There, Fox Sports, Tumblr, Motley Fool, Weedmaps, Huffington Post, TMZ, ESPN. The number is endless. Your ads would show up on websites, on mobile applications, different publications. There’s a lot of opportunities for you to reach customers outside of the Google and Facebook and Instagram section. Did anyone have any questions on geo-advertising and the power that you have by leveraging geo-advertising?
All right, hop on to SMS marketing. So what is SMS marketing? SMS marketing is a technique that uses permission-based text messaging to spread promotional messages. So customers can choose to receive text message specials, product updates, product drops, daily deals, time-sensitive deals, whatever it might be. So customers are required to opt in to receive this. And this can be through a short code or this can be through a link on your website or through your point of sales system or loyalty program. Formats. So it’s not just text messages. You can actually leverage MMS, which is multimedia messages and animated GIFs as well in your text messages. So this will allow you to get your message out with an image or whether it’s like a daily deals. I can send out one text message on Monday with my daily deals for the entire week instead of sending out seven text messages separately.
So here’s a look at four sample ads from stores throughout the country. I think these are all … Yeah, these are all in Las Vegas. So you can see the difference. The opt-in, which is the requirement for opting in to a SMS campaign is on the left and that’s with Essence dispensary. So people actually have to agree to receive these messages. Planet 13 sends a text there. They have their deals for that day and then they have their order line and delivery up until 10:00 PM. The Source, they’re using an image for their free holiday pipe. So they’re using that as an enticing way to get you in the store. And then Nevada Made looks like they’re not using any links in this text message. It’s just the standard text message.
Compliance. You can never assume that all marketers want to provide you with a qualified experience. So you could receive spam and so on. So we want to ensure that we follow the guidelines by CTIA, which include information on SMS marketing. So this is message and data rates. This is help and stop commands. This is how frequent you should send messages, terms and conditions, privacy policy. These are all suggestions and guidelines but not the law. But the TCPA is the actual law developed by the FCC and they set standards if broken, can result in a slew of legal troubles and fines.
Ease actually is in the lawsuit for text messaging customers without their permission. And that can be a hefty fine for anyone who does this. So be sure that you, in a compliant way, get customers to join you SMS database. Circling back to what we mentioned before, website visitors, where are they? They’re on their phones. 76% of website visitors are on their cell phones. SMS versus email. I mean the numbers are staggering for this. SMS open rates, so that’s someone who actually opens your message, is five times higher on SMS versus email.
90% plus of people open your text messages versus 20% with email. I’ve seen numbers as high as 98% of people open SMS messages within five minutes. So SMS is a really powerful channel for you to use for your dispensary. Few more data points. It takes the average person 90 seconds to respond to a text message. And as far as opt-ins and advertising, 75% of people wouldn’t mind receiving that text message from a brand. 80% of people use texting for business purposes. So the numbers are undeniable as far as the power of SMS.
Return on investment. From one of our partners springbig, they shared some data points in regards to the ROI for sending out text messages. In Washington, for every $1 we spent, it yields $200 in revenue. An average campaign in Maryland generates $9,000 in additional revenue. In California SMS campaigns account for 40% of sales revenue. So the numbers are really undeniable when it comes to SMS marketing.
Data. So what’s tracked? The number of messages that are sent, the number of customers who clicked on a link in that message, the number of customers who have visited your store after receiving the message, and then the amount of money that they spent while visiting your store based on that message. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen one more time and show you an example of a campaign that we’re running for Cannavine. All right, so this is a look at the back end of springbig for the Cannavine campaign. So I’m just going to dive into one of these campaigns. The text message is all … It’s text-based. There’s no MMS, there’s no images, there’s no link, anything included in this. So this is their Friday deals, this past Friday. So this is that information on all the deals that are offered. This was sent to 1,557 people. Since there was no link, there was no clicks here. 70 people visited the store based on that text message. And they spent over $7,000. This message costs $1.50 to send and we made $7,000 in revenue. So the numbers that support SMS marketing are really undeniable. For dispensaries that are doing this the right way and sending text messages to customers with a link and really segmented campaigns, you’ll see numbers far exceed that.
I always like to use the phrase the spray and pray approach, which is what a lot of dispensaries actually leverage in those types of campaigns. They work. But I like to stick with segmented campaigns and give customers really what they want. So in SMS marketing, depending on which platform you use, springbig or Sprout or Data Owl … There’s an endless amount of SMS marketing platforms out there. You want to see how they’re capturing data and then how you can actually use that data. So for example, springbig captures a lot of the data from the point of sale system. So you can actually segment by brand, by average spend, by number of visits, by categories, by their interests. Like it’s unlimited. So for example, if I like the purchase PAX Era pods. In sativa specifically. So if you send me something on dad’s, I’m probably not going to care and I’m most likely going to unsubscribe. But if you send me something on a PAX Era pod, that’s a sativa, I’ll probably come in the store and I’ll probably purchase, especially if you give me 10% off the top. So it’s really undeniable and limitless on what you can do with SMS marketing. And in January we’re actually going to talk about just that. We’re going to focus on SMS marketing and how you can leverage different campaigns within different platforms to drive ROI. Does anyone have any questions? Questions on geo-advertising? Questions on SMS marketing? Questions on Google Ads?
All right, so for today only, we’re going to be offering a select set of deals. So, foot traffic, we do create and manage campaigns for Google Ads, for geo-advertising and for SMS marketing. So we’re offering $100 in ad credit for Google Ads and geo-advertising if you sign up today. And for SMS marketing, given the power of that, we’ll manage your SMS campaigns for one week free of charge, just so we can show you the value of SMS marketing. Does anyone have any further questions?
Let’s see. Got a couple of messages here. So Google Ads. Google ads. Yes, we’re able to advertise. So the question was, can I advertise for my dispensary in Pennsylvania? The answer is yes. We can create ads and get them approved in that region. So the way that we do that is we leverage our partnership with Google and our proven methods to get those ads approved and follow best practices when submitting for those ads.
Geo-advertising. Okay, so there’s another SMS marketing question. How do I get customers to my SMS database or in my customer database? For SMS it depends on which platform you’re using. So let’s say for example, springbig, they pull their data from the POS system. Another way you can generate SMS subscribers is you can print out a, text 777 to Sprout. So we can have a different call to action to get people to opt in. You can have those printed out in the store or you could have them on your TV screens within the store. You could have them on your … I probably wouldn’t have them on billboards, but in other print materials you can have different opt in numbers to generate customers to opt in. Your website. That’s another great place to generate SMS subscribers. You can have a call to action where it’s, “Join our loyalty program so you can receive rewards.” And that’s another easy way to capture SMS subscribers. Within the store you can have an iPad or you can request people’s phone numbers when they’re checking out. That’s another way to get people to join your SMS program. Geo-advertising. Okay, here’s a question on geo-advertising. How do we track the customer that visit the store? Like how do we show that data? Since the customer’s data is being tracked is being tracked through their cell phones, we can actually track the customer from seeing your ad to actually visiting the store. So it’s pretty straightforward and I believe that, depending on which POS system, you can actually track that to a transaction. So it just depends on the software that you’re using. Let’s see, any more questions? Brian, Tanya, Brady, Luis, Renee, any questions? Donny? Yes. So this is all recorded so you can watch this anytime and we’ll be happy to share the video with you after the presentation.
And by the way, the Google Android phones typically come with Google Chrome, Google search, and Google maps as the default apps on those mobile phones. Mobile browsers. So not only does Google supply search engines, it also supplies a browser, Google Chrome. For the Apple iPhone users, they’ll be defaulted to Safari, which is 52% of the total mobile browser market. For Google Chrome, they own about 41% of the market. And Samsung is at 5% of the market share. Let’s take a look at website visitors, so from our data, which is from an average about a hundred unique dispensary websites, the source of a majority of the visitors to a website are through mobile devices. So of everybody that visits your website, 76% of people are using their mobile phones. They’re on the run. They could be driving home from work, picking up cannabis on the home. They might be on the way to happy hour. Whatever they might be, they’re always on the go. What does everybody have in their pocket? A cellphone. It’s the age that we’re living in and it’s mandatory to have a presence on mobile. All right, let’s take a look at Google specifically. The keyword dispensary dominates all searches across Google by flying colors. If you look at the graph, the keyword dispensary in blue, keyword dispensary gets roughly eight times as many searches in comparison to the keyword dispensary near me or Weedmaps and Leafly nationwide. Just looking at this even further, compared to Weedmaps and Leafly, Google is still King. People go to Google first to search for a dispensary. So you’re on your phone, where do I buy cannabis, or where do I buy pot? And you’re going to see Google results based on that. It’s a low percentage of people type in Weedmaps or Leafly and then search on those platforms. As you can see here in this graph. And one thing I wanted to emphasize is that instead of paying Weedmaps or Leafly, why not go to the source and pay Google directly? They’re the source of all the traffic as far as searches in Google and Google search and Google maps. Now transitioning to Google my business and Google in general, they have a robust number of data points and they’re very transparent with that data. So you want to ensure that you use this data to your benefit to make business decisions based on the data points that you observe in Google. Does anyone have any questions so far?
Feel free to ask them in the chat on the right side. I’ll be stopping at each section so we can dive in further as well. Google my business is a free and easy tool for dispensaries to use to manage their business on Google, on Google search, and on Google maps. When set up, it allows dispensaries to showcase their stores in local areas and transforming the process customers take now to find a product or service that they require.
So let’s take a look at Google my business in detail. One of our clients, Cannavine, out of Ukiah, California has given us the opportunity to share their data for the sake of this webinar. So this is Cannavine dispensary out of Ukiah, California. So I’m going to dive in detail to everything on the Google my business side. This is Cannavine dispensary. This is a look at the Google my business profile in action. As you can see it has the Google map view on the right side. It has the photos. If you have a Google 360 view tour, it’ll show that here as well as your business name, your reputation and reviews, your address, your hours of operations, your phone number. You can see your reviews across all platforms. You can see Weedmaps, Yelp, and so on. So this is a look at what customers would see on the front end when searching for your brand, Cannavine dispensary. And if they’re using their mobile phone, they’ll most likely be using Google maps by default. They’ll see the results in the map format. All right, so let’s dive into the Google my business profile now. As you can see, this is the back end of the Google my business listing. So this is your account if you were to register your dispensary on Google my business. You can see and manage all of this data for your dispensary all in one location. So this is all the information about your dispensary. This is where you add everything. Special hours, phone number, your website, any information in regards to your business. Accessibility, anything special about your business.
This is essentially your resume online. This is a primary channel for you to market your business. And when I spoke before about Google and data itself … There’s quite a bit to look at when analyzing what data is provided by Google. If you go into your Google my business profile under insights, this’ll give you a full overview of what data is tracked from your listing. And all this is highly valuable in making business decisions. So in regards to queries or search terms, these are keywords that customers use to find your business. The three most popular keywords that are used to find this dispensary are branded terms. And those are Cannavine, Cannavines, Cannavine. The keywords below that are non branded keywords. So these are general keywords that customers are using to find this dispensary. And these keywords are dispensary, dispensary near me, and Ukiah dispensary. So these are all keywords that are not related to the business. They don’t include the business name. And these are opportunities for us to get customers’ business for general keyword terms. And we can sort this data by the last month or last quarter or last week. So you can see there’s 120 different keywords that customers have used to find Cannavine dispensary. So this gives us a glance at what keywords customers are using to discover our business.
Okay, now let’s take a look at how customers search for your business. So the blue section of the pie chart here is discovery. And that’s customers who find your listing by searching for a category, product, or service. So an example of that would be cannabis store, marijuana dispensary, pot shop, cannabis club. They use general keywords to discover your business. And direct in the green are customers who already know your business name or address. So they’ll type in Cannavine dispensary into Google or they’ll type in the address, 1230 Airport Park Boulevard, Suite 3, Ukiah, California 95482. So for Cannavine dispensary, 91.6 of customers are finding the business through the discovery category, meaning that they’re searching for a cannabis store or dispensary, dispensary near me, and they’re finding the business. So those are all new opportunities for customers to get new customers and business.
Where customers view your business on Google? There’s two places that Google shows your Google my business listing. One is on Google search and the other is on Google maps. Search is what I showed you before. You go to google.com and you just type in dispensary near me. I’m in San Diego. So this is showing local results based on my geographical location. Listings on Google maps. That’s going to be browsing maps.google.com and you can search for the same term, dispensary near me. People can use the same keywords, but it’s just a different application people use to source search for dispensaries. The easiest way to single this out is search is google.com and maps is maps.google.com or the Google maps application on your mobile phone.
Now let’s transition to customer actions. Highlighted in the green here are people who have visited your website. So that means someone has visited your Google my business profile. They typed in dispensary near me. They saw Cannavine dispensary in the results. And from there they decided to click and visit your website with the goal of visiting your website to make a pre-order or purchase online before visiting the store. In yellow, that’s people who actually requested for directions to visit your store. They have intent to purchase, so they’re going to request for directions using the Google maps application and visit your store. So those are high converting customers. They’re people who have intent to purchase and they click on directions to visit your store. Hopefully they placed a pre-order before so they can pick up and skip the line. Calls. So these are customers who are calling to get more information on a product that they’d like to purchase.
Now transitioning to the directions requests section of the Google insights. This is a very small market, so there’s not too many zip codes. But if you were in, let’s say New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles, you would see a significant list of zip codes that customers are using to request for directions to your dispensary. And you can use the zip codes from this data to influence some of the other marketing channels and advertising that you’re investing in across billboards or geo-advertising or Google Ads and so on. It could be guerrilla marketing, it can be billboards, it could be geo-advertising, you can use the zip codes for Google AdWords campaigns. So these zip codes are really important to be leveraged on any of the marketing campaigns. Phone calls. So this is a glance at how many times customers call your business during the week and what the most popular time is. And this also looks at the most popular times people make phone calls. Popular times. So this is a glance at the most popular times of the day and during the week as far as foot traffic to your store. And we can see what time the store is going to be busy depending on what time of the day it is and day of the week.
So typically, you know from 4:00 PM on Thursday all the way through Sunday is really high traffic times in the dispensary. Photo views. This is taking a look at all the photos that have been uploaded by you in comparison to businesses like you. In the graph, the blue line is actually our photos and how many views have been received, and in the red is our competition. And this’ll show you how many times customers have used and viewed that image. So this is when a customer goes to your Google my business listing, goes to your profile, and then clicks on an image. And just viewing the picture and that would be considered a photo view.
So this is an overview of all the insights within Google my business. In addition to the data used to find your business, you can actually look at your reputation and manage all your reviews within the reviews section of the Google my business listing. You can see all of the replies for your dispensary within the reviews section of Google my business. You can edit your responses, you can just maintain that relationship with your customers within the Google my business platform. You have full flexibility into maintaining your reputation online. You can also enable messaging in addition to people calling to get more information about your business. They can actually direct message you directly through the profile and you can respond to them using the Google my business application on your iOS or Android phone. And under the photos section you can manage all your photos and any photography used. You can feature which picture you like to show by default, what logo you like to show by default, what cover image, which 360 view tour you like to highlight when people are looking on your profile. There’s a lot of flexibility here to manage your online presence on your Google my business profile. So we really want to control our presence and brand online and how we showcase our dispensary across Google and all platforms. So we can choose which pictures and videos we’d like to show to customers. Okay, I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen and transition back to the slideshow presentation. Perfect. All right, so Google Ads. Google Ads or Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers can bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in search results. Since advertisers have to pay for these clicks, this is how Google makes money from search. And this is why Google is one of the most valuable companies in the world.
So why is this important? Google Ads gives you the opportunity to increase brand awareness. It works a lot faster than SEO. So since it’s advertising and you’re paying for exposure, that could be seen … Sorry. It can be seen instantly. So if we start an ad today, get it approved, we’ll start to see results right away. Another thing is, someone could invest in SEO and dominate a local market on the organic side, but we can outrank them with ads. So we can be seen at the top, above our competition in a market if we’re opening a new store.
Another thing is that we can influence your audience to make them purchase. So when people are searching for a cannabis store or dispensary, they may see your name or your brand and pass it. They might recognize the name from a billboard or some other advertising that you’ve been doing. And having that ad displayed above the fold or at the top, it’s giving you that opportunity to influence your customer to make a purchase. We can target people based on demographics. So this is specifically with compliance, most of the laws state that we have to show, for California I believe it’s 72% of all ads have to be 21 and up. So we can control that and show your ads to that audience so that you’re compliant legally.
Another thing is you can actually schedule ads. So if your peak time is Thursday between 5:00 PM and midnight, boom, we’ll want to increase bids during that time and show the ads in your market during peak time. And for most dispensaries, from our data, it’s pretty much Thursday happy hour all the way to Sunday 6:00 PM is peak time. That’s when you get the most foot traffic for your business.
So let’s take a look at the organic results. This is a result if someone were to search for San Francisco dispensary. So this is what people see naturally. This is what you’ll see on your phone. This is what you’ll see on desktops. And so this is what you’ll see if you’re paying for an ad. Earlier today I just did a bunch of searches for different dispensaries in different markets. This is San Diego. This is a look at what your ad would look like locally. I did another search for Oakland dispensary. Here’s some of the competition that I’ve seen in Oakland specifically. So these are all ads that dispensaries are paying Google to run local ads and they could be for your brick and mortar retail location or they could be for delivery service.
Here’s another look at Google ads in San Francisco. So Grass Roots Dispensary, Barbary Coast, and The Apothecarium are all organic listings. These are all, you’re not paying for this, you’re getting this exposure for free through Google my business profile. Elevated San Francisco is paying per click to get exposure above the competition. So this is a great way for you to get exposure in your local market. Especially for new dispensaries who are just opening up, you have no reputation. There’s no reviews. You’re starting from zero. So what’s the best way to go to market? Boom, start some Google Ads. Start to get some foot traffic in there. Start to get feedback from customers on their experience and improve your business.
All right. What is tracked? So what are the goals that we have with your Google Ads? And how do you want to use this as a dispensary? We want to drive sales. We want to drive store visits. So these are the top three goals that we would focus on with Google Ads. The first is going to be foot traffic. We want to drive as many store visits as possible when spending money on Google Ads. That’s our number one goal.
Number two, website business. If someone chooses not to immediately request for directions, they may visit the website just to get more information on you. Or they may visit your menu or your deals to see if they actually want to visit your store. So that said, this is another goal that we want to focus on. Phone calls. We can have ads target customers who want more information, so they’ll give you a call. And all of this information is tracked separately. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen and dive into a live Google AdWords campaign. Give me one second here.
All right. Perfect. So this is another example of Cannavine and their Google Ads campaign that is running live pretty much for the last six months with some downtime during the campaign. So this is a look at the preview of the AdWords campaign. As you can see, we’re not using any mention of cannabis or marijuana or dispensary in the ad. We’re using Mendocino’s premier rec shop, cultivated experience, which is their tagline for the business, high quality safely produced products, come visit today for in store specials. Boom. Their address, set to go. So a very simple ad really focusing on getting foot traffic.
And as a marketer this is what’s really valuable to me. The data that Google tracks based on the ads and what is working and what is not and what the cost per acquisition is or CPA is for a new customer to come into your door. The first is impressions. So this is anytime someone has seen your ad in passing, browsing through a webpage, it might be at the top or maybe at the bottom. There’s a lot of different places that the ads are shown on Google search and Google maps. So anytime someone sees your ad that’s an impression. Clicks. Clicks are anytime someone has seen your ad and then clicked to visit your website. So this is immediately visiting your website or clicking on your ad to click on the phone number or call your business.
So we have complete transparency in how much money we spent over this campaign. Nearly $2,400. So we can calculate what the ROI is as a dispensary for this advertising channel. Verified calls. This is confirmed or verified calls to the business from the profile. So Google has tracking capabilities. They have a unique phone number that can be used that we can track these calls separate from all the other calls to your business. Map actions. This is the number of times people saw your ad and they clicked on your business pic on Google maps or got directions to your business. So you know when looking at Google AdWords as a channel to get new customers, I use this metric as a priority indicator for how successful the campaign is. So 2,063 divided by 790 map actions. Just off that metric, we’re paying close to $3 for someone to get directions or see our business and click on it. Which I think is fairly affordable based on the limitations that dispensaries have to advertise. And this is not counting clicks to the website or phone calls. So we spent 2,363. We had 412 clicks to the website, 34 calls, and 790 map actions.
We’ve also connected Google Analytics so you can see how many of the visitors to your website are actually new visitors, how much time they spent on your website, and the number of pages they viewed. So you can actually connect the data from Google Ads to Google Analytics. Just to be clear, I mean Google really has a full suite of analytics and data tools that you have access to as a dispensary owner. So we really want to leverage them as best as possible. Targeting. We can target based on different categories. It could be cannabis, or it could be a dispensary, it could be a medical dispensary, which is a different category for the medical markets. You can see all the search phrases. So these are all the keywords that people have found or have used to find your business. So over this campaign, 1,744 have seen the ad based on searching for dispensary and 104 clicked on that ad. And we can add or remove ad keywords here at any time.
So if we want to remove some that are not relevant or they just don’t make sense, like Weedmaps Ukiah, I would definitely leave that one. But there’s opportunities here for you to manage what keywords you’re bidding on. And targeting. This is a key part of Google Ads. So we can target based on radius. I want to target everyone within 40 miles of the store. Boom. That may work for this dispensary, but if you’re in San Francisco then maybe two miles, or three miles. We don’t have to target by radius. We can actually target by specific areas. So I can do cities if I’d like to target Lake Mendocino, I can target that. Ukiah, Redwood Valley, Cal Palo [inaudible 00:00:30:12]. I want to target people that are visiting Santa Rosa. There you go. I added that as a market. There’s other markets up here that are … This is a rural area, so if I want to target people in Willis, I can add that. So we can target by city or by zip code. So if I want to target this specific zip code, I can target that. So yeah, it’s really limitless on the way that you can target customers in each of these markets. That’s pretty much it on Google Ads. I’m going to go ahead and hop back to the presentation. Does anyone have any questions in regards to Google Ads that you’d like me to answer right now in between slides? Nope.
All right, let’s hop into geo-advertising. So what is geo-advertising? Geo-advertising or geo-targeting or local PBC or local pay-per-click. These are all synonyms of the same advertising channel. This all refers to the practice of delivering different display advertisements in search results to consumers based on their geographical location on their cell phones. Geo-targeting is often used to advertise to local dispensary customers and prospects. So why is this important to you? Showing ads to customers outside of your relevant local areas, drives wasted impressions and clicks. So this cuts into your marketing budget without offering any kind of return.
So if you’re a local brick and mortar store in Oakland, California, you probably don’t want to advertise in San Francisco to get customers. So relevancy is key. Target who are within the radius of your store that you know people actually will visit. All right, so how many uses this as a dispensary? So like I mentioned before, we can target customers based on the radius or distance from the store. So for Cannavine, we did a 15 mile radius. In other cities we can target based on two miles or so on, or zip codes. So our goal is to reach nearby customers with the campaign, so all based on their geographical location. In store. We can actually target your customers that come in your store and we can find customers that look similar to them. So it’s all based on your existing customers. We can also target your competitors. We can put a fence around your competitors on the specific address and target customers who visit their stores. And I’m going to dive into an example right now.
So here’s a look at San Francisco. As you can see, very saturated. There’s a lot of dispensaries throughout the city. This is a very high traffic area here on the BART line. So there’s probably … I mean it looks like there’s upwards of 10 plus dispensaries all on the same street. So competition is high. How do we target customers? Well, we can put a radius. All right, I’m going to put a one mile radius around Spark as a as if I’m Spark dispensary. All right, I want to open that up a little bit. I want to do a five mile radius and get every customer that’s looking for a dispensary in that. So I’ve opened that up and I can target anyone who’s looking for cannabis in that region.
SoMa. So SoMa is a heavy traffic area. There’s a lot of businesses, the financial district’s right there, this is the highest traffic area in San Francisco. What do I want to do? Put a rectangle around it. Anyone who’s in that area, whether it’s going to happy hour or going to work or going to the gym, whatever it might be, we want them to see our ads. So we’re targeting this whole area. Boom. The BART line. So we know in San Francisco that this is the highest traffic areas on the BART line. I believe the number one station in San Francisco is 24th and Mission, which is right below Purple Star, MD. So if you want to target customers while they’re in the Metro, boom, here you go. What better place to target customers than while they’re traveling? They’re on their phones. You know they’re not doing anything else on the Metro. They’re listening to music and they’re searching online. They’re on social. They’re doing research. So boom, perfect opportunity to get someone in your store.
Competition. All right, let’s say I’m Barbary Coast. I want to target customers who visit all my competitors. Boom, I’m just going to draw a circle around each of these and target them with my ads. So anytime that a customer is on the way to a competitor’s dispensary, at the dispensary, in the parking lot, leaving the dispensary, we have the opportunity to show our ads to these customers.
I slightly mentioned this before, but lookalike audiences. Similar to what Facebook actually uses for their ads. So we can actually re-target customers who have visited your store in the past and show them ads. So someone comes into Barbary Coast, maybe we haven’t seen them for 30 days, boom, we can show them an ad. We can also do lookalike audiences. So we can target customers, our customers, who’ve already visited and find and connect to customers who have the same profile. So age, sex, income level, interests, all these different items are factors that we can use to create lookalike audiences.
Data. So what’s tracked? As far as geo-advertising, since we are tracking location on their mobile devices, we can actually track an ad to a store visit. So as we saw in Google Ads before an impression is someone who’s seen your ad. Clicks is someone who actually clicks on your banner ad. The click through rate is the percentage of people who’ve seen your ad and then clicked on that ad. And a store visit as someone who clicked on your ad and then came into your store. Since we’re tracking at their location, we can track them to a conversion. And depending on what point of sale system you have, whether it’s Trees or GreenBiz or Flowhub or Leaf Logics, MJ Freeway or BioTrack, depending on what provider you’re using for geo-advertising, you can actually track your ad to a conversion and a transaction.
So what’s the price? From our estimates, it costs anywhere between $10 to $30 to get a recreational consumer into your store. And $30 to $60 in medical markets. And recreational markets, it’s more competitive, but there’s higher volume of customers. There’s lower average ticket. So there’s a lot of different factors to consider when looking at the recreational market. This varies depending on which city you’re in. So Las Vegas, we were just there for MJ Biz Con and I would say that in Vegas to get a customer, it’s going to be on the lower end because there’s a lot of tourism coming in. And if you did a geo ad on McCarran airport, boom, you have opportunities to get customers as soon as they land at the airport. Medical markets, they’re usually not … Not usually, but in some cases they’re not in metropolitan areas. So they could be the only dispensary within 30 miles. So the competition is not as high, but the average ticket could be upwards of 75 so $150 the customers can spend. So we want to take that into consideration when making decisions on geo-advertising campaigns. Let’s take a look at some examples. So this is a landing page that we created for a client of ours as a destination URL for the ad. So someone visited, let’s say zillow.com, they saw our ad, and then they reached this landing page. And you’ll want to offer some incentives in your ad. So if you’re just showing an ad that you’re open and we’d like you to come into the store, great. That’s not enticing to me. I want to get a deal. I want to get 20% off. I want to get access to an exclusive event. I want to meet a celebrity, whatever it might be. You need to provide some incentive in these ads to get clicks.
Let’s take a look at the ad sizes. So these are traditional ad sizes for mobile. So this is the 320 by 50 here, which says, “Want your dispensary ad here?” And high season on the right side, 300 by 250 is the two ads on the left side. And then the traditional 720 by 90 is on the bottom here, high season. So these are all ads that can be shown in JPEG format. You can do animated GIFs, you can do HTML 5 ads, MP4s, videos. Pretty much limitless when it comes to types of ads that you can display.
So for example, in Vegas we did a geo-advertising campaign to everyone who visited. And our ad said, “Want your dispensary ad here?” Boom, we have the dispensary flashing white and salmon. And that was our ad. It was an animated GIF. So where are these ads seen? Hi There, Fox Sports, Tumblr, Motley Fool, Weedmaps, Huffington Post, TMZ, ESPN. The number is endless. Your ads would show up on websites, on mobile applications, different publications. There’s a lot of opportunities for you to reach customers outside of the Google and Facebook and Instagram section. Did anyone have any questions on geo-advertising and the power that you have by leveraging geo-advertising?
All right, hop on to SMS marketing. So what is SMS marketing? SMS marketing is a technique that uses permission-based text messaging to spread promotional messages. So customers can choose to receive text message specials, product updates, product drops, daily deals, time-sensitive deals, whatever it might be. So customers are required to opt in to receive this. And this can be through a short code or this can be through a link on your website or through your point of sales system or loyalty program. Formats. So it’s not just text messages. You can actually leverage MMS, which is multimedia messages and animated GIFs as well in your text messages. So this will allow you to get your message out with an image or whether it’s like a daily deals. I can send out one text message on Monday with my daily deals for the entire week instead of sending out seven text messages separately.
So here’s a look at four sample ads from stores throughout the country. I think these are all … Yeah, these are all in Las Vegas. So you can see the difference. The opt-in, which is the requirement for opting in to a SMS campaign is on the left and that’s with Essence dispensary. So people actually have to agree to receive these messages. Planet 13 sends a text there. They have their deals for that day and then they have their order line and delivery up until 10:00 PM. The Source, they’re using an image for their free holiday pipe. So they’re using that as an enticing way to get you in the store. And then Nevada Made looks like they’re not using any links in this text message. It’s just the standard text message.
Compliance. You can never assume that all marketers want to provide you with a qualified experience. So you could receive spam and so on. So we want to ensure that we follow the guidelines by CTIA, which include information on SMS marketing. So this is message and data rates. This is help and stop commands. This is how frequent you should send messages, terms and conditions, privacy policy. These are all suggestions and guidelines but not the law. But the TCPA is the actual law developed by the FCC and they set standards if broken, can result in a slew of legal troubles and fines.
Ease actually is in the lawsuit for text messaging customers without their permission. And that can be a hefty fine for anyone who does this. So be sure that you, in a compliant way, get customers to join you SMS database. Circling back to what we mentioned before, website visitors, where are they? They’re on their phones. 76% of website visitors are on their cell phones. SMS versus email. I mean the numbers are staggering for this. SMS open rates, so that’s someone who actually opens your message, is five times higher on SMS versus email.
90% plus of people open your text messages versus 20% with email. I’ve seen numbers as high as 98% of people open SMS messages within five minutes. So SMS is a really powerful channel for you to use for your dispensary. Few more data points. It takes the average person 90 seconds to respond to a text message. And as far as opt-ins and advertising, 75% of people wouldn’t mind receiving that text message from a brand. 80% of people use texting for business purposes. So the numbers are undeniable as far as the power of SMS.
Return on investment. From one of our partners springbig, they shared some data points in regards to the ROI for sending out text messages. In Washington, for every $1 we spent, it yields $200 in revenue. An average campaign in Maryland generates $9,000 in additional revenue. In California SMS campaigns account for 40% of sales revenue. So the numbers are really undeniable when it comes to SMS marketing.
Data. So what’s tracked? The number of messages that are sent, the number of customers who clicked on a link in that message, the number of customers who have visited your store after receiving the message, and then the amount of money that they spent while visiting your store based on that message. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen one more time and show you an example of a campaign that we’re running for Cannavine. All right, so this is a look at the back end of springbig for the Cannavine campaign. So I’m just going to dive into one of these campaigns. The text message is all … It’s text-based. There’s no MMS, there’s no images, there’s no link, anything included in this. So this is their Friday deals, this past Friday. So this is that information on all the deals that are offered. This was sent to 1,557 people. Since there was no link, there was no clicks here. 70 people visited the store based on that text message. And they spent over $7,000. This message costs $1.50 to send and we made $7,000 in revenue. So the numbers that support SMS marketing are really undeniable. For dispensaries that are doing this the right way and sending text messages to customers with a link and really segmented campaigns, you’ll see numbers far exceed that.
I always like to use the phrase the spray and pray approach, which is what a lot of dispensaries actually leverage in those types of campaigns. They work. But I like to stick with segmented campaigns and give customers really what they want. So in SMS marketing, depending on which platform you use, springbig or Sprout or Data Owl … There’s an endless amount of SMS marketing platforms out there. You want to see how they’re capturing data and then how you can actually use that data. So for example, springbig captures a lot of the data from the point of sale system. So you can actually segment by brand, by average spend, by number of visits, by categories, by their interests. Like it’s unlimited. So for example, if I like the purchase PAX Era pods. In sativa specifically. So if you send me something on dad’s, I’m probably not going to care and I’m most likely going to unsubscribe. But if you send me something on a PAX Era pod, that’s a sativa, I’ll probably come in the store and I’ll probably purchase, especially if you give me 10% off the top. So it’s really undeniable and limitless on what you can do with SMS marketing. And in January we’re actually going to talk about just that. We’re going to focus on SMS marketing and how you can leverage different campaigns within different platforms to drive ROI. Does anyone have any questions? Questions on geo-advertising? Questions on SMS marketing? Questions on Google Ads?
All right, so for today only, we’re going to be offering a select set of deals. So, foot traffic, we do create and manage campaigns for Google Ads, for geo-advertising and for SMS marketing. So we’re offering $100 in ad credit for Google Ads and geo-advertising if you sign up today. And for SMS marketing, given the power of that, we’ll manage your SMS campaigns for one week free of charge, just so we can show you the value of SMS marketing. Does anyone have any further questions?
Let’s see. Got a couple of messages here. So Google Ads. Google ads. Yes, we’re able to advertise. So the question was, can I advertise for my dispensary in Pennsylvania? The answer is yes. We can create ads and get them approved in that region. So the way that we do that is we leverage our partnership with Google and our proven methods to get those ads approved and follow best practices when submitting for those ads.
Geo-advertising. Okay, so there’s another SMS marketing question. How do I get customers to my SMS database or in my customer database? For SMS it depends on which platform you’re using. So let’s say for example, springbig, they pull their data from the POS system. Another way you can generate SMS subscribers is you can print out a, text 777 to Sprout. So we can have a different call to action to get people to opt in. You can have those printed out in the store or you could have them on your TV screens within the store. You could have them on your … I probably wouldn’t have them on billboards, but in other print materials you can have different opt in numbers to generate customers to opt in. Your website. That’s another great place to generate SMS subscribers. You can have a call to action where it’s, “Join our loyalty program so you can receive rewards.” And that’s another easy way to capture SMS subscribers. Within the store you can have an iPad or you can request people’s phone numbers when they’re checking out. That’s another way to get people to join your SMS program. Geo-advertising. Okay, here’s a question on geo-advertising. How do we track the customer that visit the store? Like how do we show that data? Since the customer’s data is being tracked is being tracked through their cell phones, we can actually track the customer from seeing your ad to actually visiting the store. So it’s pretty straightforward and I believe that, depending on which POS system, you can actually track that to a transaction. So it just depends on the software that you’re using. Let’s see, any more questions? Brian, Tanya, Brady, Luis, Renee, any questions? Donny? Yes. So this is all recorded so you can watch this anytime and we’ll be happy to share the video with you after the presentation.
