Your most profitable customers are already in your point-of-sale system. We run your loyalty program, email and texting end to end, and report what every message actually made you.
Most dispensaries pay for a retention platform: Alpine IQ, Springbig, or the loyalty tools bundled into their point-of-sale system. Very few use even half of it. The platform can send eight kinds of automatic messages, thousands of texts a month, and a welcome series to every new sign-up. What it usually sends is a birthday text. And many shops don't ask online at all: in our check of 96 dispensary websites, 24% gave customers no way to sign up for texts, email or a loyalty program.
Here's what we found the day we took over a real account, at a single-location Colorado dispensary that was paying for a full retention platform:
That last number is the important one. Over 90% of the program's revenue came from a handful of automatic messages nobody had touched in months. Not because those messages were brilliant, but because they were the only thing running. The gap between what you pay for and what actually runs is the cheapest revenue you'll ever recover. No new customers required.
Retention marketing is three channels working as one system. Here's what that looks like in practice:
Weekly or twice-weekly campaigns to your opted-in list: deals, drops, events, holidays. Planned a month ahead, written to carrier content rules, and sent to the customers most likely to act on them rather than blasted to everyone.
These are the "set it and forget it" programs most platforms support and most dispensaries never build. We build all of them, in this order, because this is the order they pay back:
Your platform knows what each customer buys, how often, and how much. We use that to split your list into groups (lapsed regulars, flower-only buyers, high spenders, new sign-ups) and write to each one. A 20%-off blast to your whole list discounts the people who were coming in anyway. A targeted message doesn't.
None of this works on a list that isn't growing. We audit every place a customer could opt in (at the register, on your website, on your online menu, on social) and fix the ones that are broken or missing. Social media is how most new names get onto the list; retention is how the list turns into revenue. Our guide to dispensary email marketing covers where the addresses come from and what your state lets you offer for signing up.
Your loyalty program is the reason customers hand over a phone number and an email address in the first place. Most dispensary programs run on points: customers earn on every purchase and redeem for a reward. The program itself is rarely the problem. The problem is that nobody reminds customers what they've earned.
Two things make cannabis texting different from texting for any other business, and both are handled for you:
TCPA (the Telephone Consumer Protection Act) is the federal law on marketing texts. It requires written permission before you send a customer marketing texts, a working way to opt out, and sending only during allowed hours. Violations are a real lawsuit risk. We make sure your opt-in language, your forms, and your sending windows are right.
10DLC (10-digit long code) is the mobile carriers' registration system for business texting. An unregistered or badly registered number gets filtered. Your texts simply don't arrive, and the platform may not tell you. We check your registration status on day one, and we write messages the way carriers require: neutral text with the offer on a landing page, not in the message body.
And the reason all of this routes through a cannabis-specific platform in the first place: the big general-purpose texting companies (Twilio, Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript) prohibit cannabis texting outright. That's why Alpine IQ and Springbig exist, and why we're certified on Alpine IQ specifically.
For the full rundown, including what a text can say, when you can send it and what texting costs, read our guide to dispensary text marketing. For email, including which platforms allow cannabis and the federal CAN-SPAM email rules, read our guide to dispensary email marketing.
On day one we document where your account starts: revenue attributed to messages, how many customers are actually reachable (opted in, not just in your database), which automations are live, how many messages deliver versus get filtered. That's your baseline, and it's written down before we change anything.
From then on, every result is measured against it, inside your own platform's dashboard, which you can open any time. We use the platform's strict attribution setting (a sale counts only when the customer engaged with the message), not the broad one, which counts a sale from anyone who received it. Clients on our pay-on-results option pay a share of the growth, so we have every reason to keep that number honest.
| You're on… | What we do |
|---|---|
| Alpine IQ | Our home turf. We're certified and run a live account daily. See Alpine IQ management. |
| Springbig | We run it. We'll also give you an honest read on whether it's still the right platform for you. |
| Dutchie or other point-of-sale loyalty | For smaller stores these built-in tools are often enough. We'll make them work before we ever suggest spending more on a platform. |
| Nothing yet | We'll recommend a platform for your size and budget, set it up, and handle carrier registration. |
Tell us your dispensary, your point-of-sale system, and your loyalty platform. We'll send a free written report on what your marketing is getting right and what it isn't, in 3 business days, no call required.
Get Your Free AuditPrefer to just talk? Book a call · or email matt@greensparkmedia.com