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Most cannabis dispensaries have a POS (point of sale) system in place to, at the very least, accept and track payments. What many dispensaries are missing is CRM (customer relationship management) software.
CRMs are critical if you want to get serious about marketing and gain an edge over your competitors.
That being said, what is customer relationship management software? To put it simply, CRM software tracks customer interactions and helps drive sales with that data.
While not all CRM software is made equal, CRMs designed for the cannabis industry will have a similar set of abilities, including:
● Tracking and analyzing customer interactions—transactions, phone calls, messages, etc.
● Full-fledged loyalty programs that track customers’ benefits and allow dispensaries to manage customer rewards
● Compliance tracking to enforce customer purchase limits
● Automated marketing features
All this is well and good, but is it worth the hassle of learning and integrating a new software into your workflow? Yes. Let’s go deeper and get practical.
Customer tracking doesn’t mean much if all that data isn’t organized and presented in a useful way. Most CRMs will do that in two major ways:
These analytics are critical for effective marketing. While marketing isn’t an exact science, there is a science to it.
With customer profiles, instead of sending generalized promotions and ads to your customers, you can send targeted ads by demographic or even by customer, targeting their unique interests.
Time is money, and money is money. Generalized promotions waste both. Targeted promotions don’t and are far more likely to generate sales—not to mention that automated customer analytics saves time.
Customer retention. That’s the aim of loyalty programs, and CRMs often include loyalty programs along with all the tracking and processing needed to operate one.
That said, loyalty programs are most successful when they target the customer’s interest. Sounds obvious, but what’s not always obvious is what the customer actually wants or may want—but that’s okay. Dispensaries can use the customer profiles and behavioral insights here as well.
For dispensaries, compliance is huge, and failure could result in serious penalties. CRMs can help with this by tracking customer purchase limits to ensure that no mistakes are made. Plus, unlike manual methods, all of this is done in real-time.
Marketing… it's critical but often tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. With a CRM, however, dispensaries can send automated and personalized messages to customers with reminders to reorder a product or to feature a special deal that is likely to interest the customer.
Yes, a CRM will involve some work to learn and integrate into your existing workflow. However, it will save plenty of time in the long run, especially when it comes to tracking customer orders and routine marketing efforts. It will also help ensure compliance and, if used correctly, will be a serious help in the marketing department.
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