Increase your sales by at least 73%, without changing your staff or marketing budget.
“How to increase your dispensary sales by 73% without spending an extra dime on marketing”
Or
“How to increase your dispensary sales by 73% by doing Customer Experience (CX) right”
Or
Boost your marketing ROI by 40% with just 3 hours of effort per year
Use this intro:
In this post, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know so that you can increase your sales by at least 73%, without changing your staff or marketing budget.
Once we have them, they go here – case studies beat testimonials 10 days out of 10. Remember: Case study is what allows us to say “They started at 100k/month in sales. They started using our platform. Within 3 months, they were doing $150k/month in sales.**
Spending at least $25k/month in advertising/marketing
You’ve got a great product selection, good location, happy & knowledgable budtenders, but still most of your sales are happening with new customers, and your repeat purchase rates aren’t where you know they should be.
Or, even worse, you don’t know what your repeat purchase rate is, let alone what it should be.
In short – you’re spending an arm and a leg on marketing, and you’re getting tons of new customers walking through the door, but you don’t have the right practices in place to make sure they keep coming back over and over again.
It’s not your fault – everybody wants to sell you advertising, nobody is invested in helping you maximize the sales potential from your customers. Until now.
You’re one of thousands of dispensaries, and left to their own devices, your customers have no particular reason to give any brand loyalty to you.
What we’ll show you on this page is how to jolt your customers out of that mindset, and to ensure that when it’s time to spend, those dollars are going to you, and not one of your thousands of competitors.
Adding 73% – 150% or more in sales is completely doable in less than 6 months, if you follow the right strategy (which we’ll lay out for you here).
We’re the only company that’s 100% focused on giving dispensaries the tools they need to dramatically improve their sales without spending more on marketing or staff.
At this point, you just made a bodacious claim that aligns to the prospect’s desires. They are likely to question your credibility and look for ways to debunk your claim.
You will use logos, track record, and background story to allay the prospect’s concerns.
Use this language template:
“Before we get into the steps and how tos, here is a quick background on our company, for credibility reasons.
We were founded in ( insert date ). Our partners ( insert achievement ). Our investors ( insert achievement ).
We have worked with ( insert credible company name ). We are endorsed by ( credible company name ).
We received ( insert award ), etc..”
If the sales letter is the first point of contact between you and the prospect, you will likely need to include a quick background story to communicate history.
The background story is used “ground” yourself in the prospect’s mind.
Prospects are wondering why you are putting this content out in the first place. They need to know what your motives are, where you came from, why they should believe you and follow you.
If you are a founder, the prospect needs to know why you started the business in the first place.
You can use the following template when you are writing your background story:
- Founder was an expert at the top of their field.
- Founder encountered a painful problem.
- Founder looked everywhere for a viable solution, but couldn’t find one.
- Founder decided to solve the problem themselves
- The solution worked so well that everyone in the market wanted to use it.
- The founder decided to bring the home-grown solution to market to satisfy a burning need.
“For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Nick Kozmin and 7 years ago, I was engaged as an employee by a startup to quickly grow revenue from a standing start.
I looked everywhere for a strategy on how to do this, but I found nothing other than a few books on the topic.
I decided to take matters into my own hands and run a series of experiments to get the customer leads, and sales, and of course, make the whole engine profitable.
My strategy worked so well, that it shot the company to $1M ARR in only 12 months while being profitable.
Everyone in Toronto started asking me what I did and how I did it.
So I decided to help others with the method and now we service over 700 customers.”
If the sales letter is the first point of contact between you and the prospect, you will likely need to include a quick background story to communicate history.
The background story is used “ground” yourself in the prospect’s mind.
Prospects are wondering why you are putting this content out in the first place. They need to know what your motives are, where you came from, why they should believe you and follow you.
If you are a founder, the prospect needs to know why you started the business in the first place.
Here’s the good news – at the end of the day, there are really only 3 things that you can do to increase sales in your dispensary.
Most dispensary owners only focus on the first one. And that’s a shame, because that first one is by far the most expensive, and by far the least effective ways to increase sales.
Most people have heard (or intuitively know) the old “wisdom” about how it’s 8 times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. In many ways, that’s a stupid saying, because it doesn’t tell you anything about how you keep your customer. Or about how to keep them long enough to make it way more profitable than getting new customers. Or about when you need to focus on driving new customers in, vs. keeping them.
The better way to say it is this:
If you’re more focused on getting new customers than you are on keeping your existing customers, then your dispensary is already dying, you just don’t know it yet.
Your competitors who figure out how to leverage #2 and #3 will bury you. They’ll be able to out-market you every day of the week, because they’ll be happy spending 2, 3, or 5X what you are for every customer they get in the door.
Here’s why “Get more new customers through the door” is such a deceptively dangerous strategy:
In a large scale analysis of dispensaries, here’s what we found:
- 55 will never come back. They spend about $89 on their one and only order.
- 16 will come back once, then never come back. They’ll spend about $198 across their 2 orders.
- 8 will come back 3 times - they’ll spend $323 across their 3 orders.
That’s a total lifetime value of just $10,647 from those 79 customers.
Let’s assume a healthy 15% margin, and say that’s measly $1,597 available for profit.
But don’t count that profit too quickly – given that it takes about $100 in marketing to get a new customer through the door, those 79 customers cost you $7,900. Take off your profit, and they cost you $6,303.
You’re relying on the other 21% of your customers to keep coming back and buying enough to cover the shortfall from the vast majority of your customers.
stop losing customers
- For every $1,000,000 in sales, fully half ($500,000) of it comes from just 10% of your customers (those with 8 or more visits).
- Only $150,000 in sales comes from the bottom 55% of your customers (those with only 1 visit). And of course that majority of customer is costing you big time - as we saw, the profit they generate isn’t nearly in line with the marketing cost to bring them in.
- Every marketing dollar you spend, you’re hoping and praying that it brings you one of those good customers, the 10% who make up half your revenue.
But there’s a better than coin-flip chance that you’re never going to see that customer again.
What you need to do is to rig those odds – to make it much more likely that your customers keep coming back, vs. coming in once and then forgetting about you.
In our analysis of dispensary customers, the amount of customers who ended up spending that much was just over 11%.
As a baseline, 89% of customers are unprofitable.
With that baseline, how does it makes sense to keep spending to try to get more of them in the door?
What you need to do instead is to increase the # of visits, and spend per visit of your customers, so that that 11% of profitable customers grows. By doing so, every dollar you spend in marketing ends up having a much higher ROI.
In fact, you may even find you can cut your marketing spend and still see a huge profit increase, if you’re able to put the practices in place that allow you to focus on bringing in your existing customers more frequently, and buying more when they do come in.
Q and A
[Insert question related to key points in step 1]?
[Insert answer to question].
[Insert question related to key points in step 1]?
[Insert answer to question].
[Insert question related to key points in step 1].?
[Insert answer to question].
Okay, so we know that it sucks to be in the game of spending marketing dollars only to have 79% of customers leave forever after 1-3 visits. We’re going to show you how to rig those numbers in your favor, dramatically enhancing your lifetime sales per customer (and so pour rocket fuel on the effectiveness of your existing marketing), but before we do that it’s important to look at what causes customers to stop doing business with you.
Once you understand the causes, it’ll be easy to see what you need to do in order to keep them coming back.
1. You screw up (they feel insulted, they’re disappointed with the product they buy, they feel ripped off)
2. They find it easier to buy elsewhere (better offer, better selection, better timing from the marketing, better price)
3. They stop needing or wanting what you offer
That’s it
Don’t screw up.
Make it easy to buy.
Obviously you can’t really impact whether they continue to need & want what you have, so you need to focus on the first 2.
Here’s what most dispensaries miss – these things are MUCH, MUCH more important over the first few visits, than they are once a customer already has a long history with you.
If somebody comes in for their 50th visit and the bud-tender ignores them, they’ll think “Dylan must be having a rough day – I hope he’s okay!”.
If somebody comes in for their first visit and the bud-tender ignores them, they’re not coming back.
Similarly, if somebody’s bought from you 50 times and they get an offer from another dispensary, they’re probably not going to abandon you for the other one. They’re definitely not going to play the “permanent price shopper” game.
But if somebody’s bought from you once, and then they get an offer for a better deal from a competitor across the street, they’re probably going there.
So what can you do to put these things into practice?
- Well, the first thing you need is to make sure that you’re not just forgetting about your new customers after their initial purchases.
- Stay in touch with them - remember, there’s a 55% chance they’re never coming back after that first visit. Get good offers out to them early and often in the days after they make their first purchase from you.
- If you can, try to figure out what else they might want / need based on their first purchase, and make them an offer specifically on that (kind of like Amazon’s “Customers who bought this, ALSO bought this” recommendations, with personalized discounts attached).
- Make sure you didn’t screw up - reach out to new customers and get their feedback. Find out how they liked the product, how they liked the shopping experience, how they liked any of the staff they interacted with. If there’s a problem, fix it and then let them know you fixed it.
Don’t worry if you don’t know how you could do these things – we can show you how to do it without any extra effort on your part. For now, just know that you CAN be doing these things, and that the competitors who will eventually eat your lunch are already doing them.
Focus where it matters and put in the work
We’ve given you the 3 ways to grow sales for your dispensary (and the reason that just focusing on ‘get new customers’ is suicide).
We’ve showed you why new customers stop doing business with you, and what you can do to stem that tide.
But none of that matters, if you don’t put it into practice.
Discover how RipeMetrics will help you stop losing customers
- If you want customers who don’t just disappear over the first 3 visits.
- If you want customers who have a better than 11% chance of ever being profitable to you.
- If you want to stop lighting your marketing dollars on fire.
(Don’t worry about the how just yet – just look at everything that needs to get done. We can show you how to do this all effortlessly, or you can figure it out on your own, but either way, this is what you need to do to be wildly successful)
1. Make sure that every new customer gets a follow-up message asking them to give you feedback – many won’t do it, of course, but the ones who do will help you identify what’s working well, and what’s broken. Each of these conversations is a way to build your relationship with these customers, and an opportunity to bring them back in.
2. Figure out what else the customer would love, based on what they bought, and get them personalized discounts for those things within the first 5-7 days after their purchase. Give them every reason to shop with you again – you’re fighting the tide of “normal” here and the “normal” response if for them to never come back (55% of the time).
3. Get good at identifying when they’re never coming back, and reach out to them as soon as possible after that point with a hail-mary offer to keep them shopping with you.
4. Pay attention to their shopping habits, and periodically reach out with questions / feedback requests / offers when it looks like they’re getting ready to stop doing business with you
5. Make sure you’re not just blanket blasting everybody – only message those customers where the messaging will matter.
6. Figure out where your most profitable customers are coming from, and max out your marketing spend in those avenues first. Look, if you find that 50% of your Weedmaps customers stay with you for 10 visits, but only 10% of your [insert other marketing source] customers do the same, you’d be crazy to spend the same on both. So you need to find out how your new customers are finding you, and make sure that the sources that give you the highest ROI customers are the ones that are getting the majority of your marketing dollars.
The summary to this step is simple – you’re busy, and there are a thousand separate demands on your attention at any given time. If you’re not careful, you can waste days, weeks, or even years focusing on things that don’t matter.
Make sure you’ve got a plan in place to ensure that the highest ROI work possible (that of keeping your customers coming back) is always getting done, and never slipping through the cracks.
1. Prioritize customer retention,
2. Minimize easily avoidable failure points, and
3. Consistently put in the work to turn new customers into repeat customers
And you can dramatically enhance your sales without spending an extra dime on marketing or new staff.
There are three things you can do, now that you’ve got this new information.
1. You can continue to operate the same way you always have
Spend $100 on marketing to get a new customer, and hope that the 89% of those who are unprofitable won’t bankrupt you.
If you go this route, might I suggest that instead you just stop doing marketing altogether, take the money you’d spend on that, and just burn it in your parking lot? At least that way, you could toast some s’mores over it.
2. You can do it on your own
This is a viable option. You’re smart, and you can probably figure out how to do everything we’ve talked about so far.
Some parts of it might be harder than others – You may need to hire an expert to help you create the recommender systems to ensure your offers are strong, and you may need another expert to help you create a model to show you when customers are likely to never come back…
But most of it you can do on your own. It’s just a lot of work – I don’t know how many hours a day it’ll take you or your staff to identify the customers you need to reach out to each day, and to craft the messaging to ensure that you’re doing everything in your power to keep them… But if you want to put those hours in, it will make a huge difference in your business.
3. You can let us take care of it for you!
- We’ve spent years specifically focusing on how to increase customer retention. We’ve got experts in machine learning, data analysis, marketing, customer messaging, and customer engagement that have poured tens of thousands of hours into getting all of these things done for you.
- We can identify which of your customers aren’t ever coming back without some nudge, and provide the perfect nudge to bring them back.
- We can get your customers to identify which marketing source brought them in.
- We can get your customers to share their favorite (and least favorite) elements of doing business with you, so you can take action where necessary.
- We can get the customers who love you to share that love with 3rd party review platforms.
- We can do all of this on your behalf without any additional effort on your side. If you want to do even more, we can make it incredibly simple for you to keep in touch with your best customers, to see trends on purchasing patterns, and to immediately handle both positive and negative reviews in real time.
you through Customer Experience
- You’ll be getting a whole lot more “2nd purchases” from your new customers (instead of watching 55% of them never do business with you again)
- You’ll know exactly where to spend your marketing dollars to get the highest ROI
- You’ll stop wasting your money on specials/discounts/deals that aren’t directly impacting your total customer lifetime value
- Your customers will tell you everything they love (and everything they hate) about your store, your products, and your employees
We’ve built RipeMetrics to give dispensaries everything they need to keep their customers happy, and more importantly, to keep them spending..
Before, when you wanted to try to win back customers who were probably lost, you’d send out a blanket marketing campaign to everybody who hadn’t bought in over 90 days, and hope that some came back. With RipeMetrics, you’ll get the benefit of our
Customer Attrition Campaigns – our proprietary machine learning algorithm can determine with 98.8% accuracy when a customer isn’t coming back on their own, and immediately send them a personalized campaign designed to bring them back. It’s literally effortless – you get laser precision with no effort.
Before, when you wanted to get new customers, you’d increase your marketing spend across all of your channels. With RipeMetrics Attribution Analysis, you can see which marketing channels have the highest ROI, and ensure that you’re maxing out your budget on those. This feature alone can save you tens of thousands of dollars per month.
Before, when you wanted to increase your reviews on 3rd party sites, you’d ask your customers to review you, or send out mass emails/text messages asking for reviews. With RipeMetrics, we gauge the sentiment of your customers first, and ensure only those who really love buying from you get asked to leave reviews on 3rd party sites, making it much more likely that the reviews being left are from your happiest customers.
The Platform Curated for You
Now that the prospect understands, the thesis, the benefits, and the features, it is now time to build your offer in front of them. You will need to “anchor” your pricing to some alternative in the market before you explain your offer. Without this “anchoring” the prospect is left alone to determine the relative value.
Once you anchor the price, you will build value for each item in your “stack”. Once the items are mapped out, you will end with a “call to action.”
Use this language template:
“Now if you wanted to get this job done before using [alternative], it would cost you at least [alternative price].
We are only [price or relative price – 1/10th the cost, a fraction of the cost].
Here’s what you get:
[Insert item 1]. This will allow you to [insert outcome].
[Insert item 2]. This will allow you to [insert outcome].
[Insert item 3]. This will allow you to [insert outcome].
[Insert item 4]. This will allow you to [insert outcome].
All you need to do is [insert call to action].”
A warning is used to inject urgency and scarcity. Without urgency and scarcity, the prospect is less likely to take action right away.
Use this language:
“We can only offer [insert limited quantity or time] because [insert reason], so make sure you act now or [insert negative consequence]”
- “We can only take on 20 new customers per month so make sure you grab your spot or you will miss out. ”
- We only have bandwidth to do 40 strategy calls per month, so if you are interested, make sure you act now or you might not get another chance until next month.”
- We can only support 100 clients per month, so if this rings bells, make sure you act now or we might now be able to work with you.”
Bonuses are used to add that extra little bit of pressure to the prospect to get them to act right away. The goal of the sales letter is to put an irresistible offer in front of them and make it seem crazy to wait. Bonuses are the “cherry on top” that can sometimes make a 1-3% difference in conversion rate.
Use this language template:
“Now because you are [reading/listening/watching] this
, we are going to do something extremely special:
For a limited time, we are going to offer you [bonus] if you act now.”
- “Free Strategy Call Worth up to $500”
- “A free month of service”
- “An extra [insert tool]”
“So let’s summarize this offer:
You get:
[Item 1]
[Item 2]
[Item 3]
[Bonus]
[Warning]
All you need to do is [insert call to action].”
“Now some of you may be asking:
Will this work if [insert circumstance]?
Well, [insert answer].
Will this work if [insert circumstance]?
Well, [insert answer].
Will this work if [insert circumstance]?
Well, [insert answer].”
Examples of questions:
Why wouldn’t you just ___ instead of ____?
Are there any long term contracts?
What are the exact terms of the guarantee?
Will this for me if I’m in [country]?
How do I justify the cost to my boss?
How do I know you guys are legit?
