The difference between a generic marketing strategy and a winning marketing strategy is how retailers use their tools to attract customers, keep them coming back, and increase average order value.
Key Takeaways
- Seven advanced tactics used by multi-state cannabis operators, each broken into actionable steps for immediate takeaway.
- The value of personalized push notifications that have a 99.7% delivery rate, so that messages land in your customer’s inbox, not their spam folder.
- An inside look at how Sweed operators drove $600K in sales on 4/20 with 23% of sales originating online.
- How gamified approaches with a visible finish line turn casual shoppers into repeat buyers with higher basket sizes.
- How behavior-triggered email drips increased unique clicks 50% quarter over quarter for one retailer.
- Leveraging dynamic storefront carousels that adapt to each shopper to lift sales.
- Implementing UTM conventions and cohort tracking to pinpoint which tactics are worth the investment and where customers are dropping off in the funnel.
How to choose a dispensary marketing strategy
Choosing which marketing strategy to implement is a critical decision for any cannabis dispensary team, given the time, resources, and spend that go into strategizing, launching, and measuring a marketing strategy.
While many tried-and-true best practices exist in the industry, every business is different, with a unique customer base, product selection, and brand relationships. This can be especially difficult for multi-state operators navigating the dynamics of many different stores with their own challenges.
To support the continued success of Sweed users, we’re rounding up five case studies that take a deep look at the successful marketing strategies dispensaries on the Sweed platform have used to drive ROI, increase customer basket size, and drive repeat business. All while highlighting the tools behind the strategy, with actionable recommendations for operators to implement them in their businesses today. Let’s jump in!
Personalization That Starts With One Source of Truth
In today’s environment, customers get so many marketing text messages, nudges, emails, and other notifications from businesses and brands that they’ve learned to tune them out. The ones that cut through the noise are direct, personalized, and offer the customer something beneficial that keeps them receptive to future communications.
A critical component of understanding the marketing your audience will be receptive to is understanding your customer and their customer journey. For example, if you’re sending them a marketing message for something they were browsing for online, because you weren’t able to track that they already purchased that item in-store, your message is going to fall on deaf ears. You’ll lose their trust and the value of your messaging in the eyes of your customer.
In comparison, if you’re able to connect your marketing, eCommerce, and POS to see in real time what marketing triggers pushed your customer to take an action, what they were browsing for online, and what they ultimately purchased in store, you’re better able to create a personalized strategy for your customer.
Case Study: Aroma Hill
For Aroma Hill, this extreme personalization came from their ability to get a complete view of their customer across the multiple places where the customer interacts with their brand. This holistic approach enabled Aroma Hill to get smarter about marketing, reduce tool costs, and eliminate messy platform integrations.
"With Sweed, we went from managing five vendors to one platform – and that's changed everything. The time savings, the automation, the ability to directly connect marketing efforts to sales – it's all there. I've become a total cheerleader for the system." — Anthony Roldan, Aroma Hills
Aroma Hills achieved a 99.7% delivery rate for their push notifications, shifting from “did they not open this message because they didn’t get it?” to “they didn’t open the message because they didn’t see the impact.”
While this shift may seem small, in the cannabis industry where marketing resources are scarce and restricted, being able to completely trust the tools you do have at your disposal to tell you what’s working (and what isn’t) is a critical change.
From Generic Blasts to Value Adds
SMS remains the most reliable channel for dispensary marketers. No algorithm decides who sees it and who doesn’t, and there are no restrictions around the word “cannabis.” However, instead of using this tool as a revenue trigger, dispensaries often use SMS like a social media account: new drops, general deals, store hours, and holiday wishes.
The most successful texts include a strong CTA that sends customers to a curated menu, product, or promotion. The path from message received to purchase should take only a few clicks. When paired with an intentional inventory strategy that favors high-margin SKUs, customer preferences, and bundled products, this marketing channel unlocks a lucrative revenue stream.
Case Study: 4/20/2025
In 2025, Sweed worked directly with retailers to ensure they implemented winning text message strategies for 4/20, ultimately sending more than 7 million messages, with promotional landing pages behind every link. These messages spotlighted high-margin products and leveraged 10DLC compliance to ensure deliverability on the busiest day of the year. These tactics yielded the following results:
- $600K in sales attributed to SMS
- 7.4K+ orders
- 23% of all online orders came through SMS
- 110K clicks
The winning strategy? Landing pages built around products and promotions that are then shared through SMS via Marketing → Workflows → SMS for channel → copy and paste the landing page link.
Drip Campaign Automated Messaging
A drip campaign is a series of messages that are triggered when customers take or don’t take an action. They opened the last email or ignored it, clicked something or scrolled through, filled their cart and walked away, or purchased. Drop by drop, drip by drip, these small signals create a complete picture of a customer and what influences them, and what goes ignored. With the right systems, it stays automated and keeps working when you don’t.
Case Study: Abandoned Cart Automation
One of the most basic, yet most effective, drip campaigns is the abandoned cart workflow, triggered when a customer adds products to their cart but doesn’t check out. Abandoning a cart can result from many things. They may be planning their next visit and waiting for payday, stocking up before their current stash runs out, or they may have gotten distracted and never completed the order. With abandoned cart automations, a message is automatically triggered when a customer adds products to their cart but never checks out, bringing them back to their order and offering a frictionless path to check out.
From January 2024 to July 2025, retailers on the Sweed platform turned lost intent into $1.08M in additional online sales with abandoned cart automations that made checkout seamless for customers who had already built their cart and were missing only the final step.
This tool uses instant triggers, so messages fire immediately. At the same time, intent is still fresh, product-level personalization with messages that feature the exact items the shopper left behind, one-tap return via push and SMS that opens straight to the saved cart, and closed-loop reporting that ties recovered carts back to revenue.
Gamified challenges instead of flat rewards
Points-per-dollar loyalty programs are table stakes, and shoppers have stopped noticing them. But introduce a challenge with a visible finish line – and you’ll see the clients behaving differently. It builds momentum and gives people a reason to come back before they were even planning to.
Case Study: Altius
Altius tested this tactic and set a specific target: $300 in spend per customer per month. Instead of dripping out points, they built a virtual punch card—four milestones at $75 each, and a $25 reward at the end. The mechanic is simple, and the framing is what does the work. "Two more punches to your $25" is a concrete goal.
This campaign resulted in more unique buyers, higher spend per customer, and stronger retention.
“By combining Altius’s incentive structure with Sweed’s enabling technology, the dispensary turned casual visits into repeat business and built a reliable engine for growth” - Altius Team
Dynamic hot deal carousels
In today’s hyper-competitive, hyper-personalized shopping environment, customers expect the most out of their retail experience.
Static promo rows show every shopper the same six products. Dynamic carousels reorder themselves based on the customer’s purchase history, surfacing products and product types that align with their preferences, not with generic promotions.
Case Study: CloudHaven
CloudHaven combined behavior-driven hot deal carousels with automation campaigns that tracked opt-ins and folded discounts directly into the shopping experience. The carousel adapts as the session goes, so the deals a flower buyer sees aren't the deals a vape customer sees.
The results speak for themselves: a 35% increase in sales driven by smarter marketing, eCommerce personalization, and loyalty.
They found that personalization needs a data source, and the bigger the source, the better. They then connected their carousel logic to purchase history rather than sitewide bestsellers, so customers saw a personalized assortment of products instead of a generic view.
Bonus Tools: Analyzing and Optimizing Your Cannabis Marketing
Running the tactics is the easy part. Knowing which ones earned their budget is where most dispensary marketing strategies fall apart. Here are tools and strategies in the Sweed platform to help you analyze and optimize your cannabis marketing so you can see where customers dropped off instead of guessing.
UTM Tracking
Link tagging that ties campaign traffic back to the send that produced it, so you can tell which tactics actually paid off. To properly configure UTMs, use source/medium/campaign conventions as global defaults, then override the campaign parameters per send. In Sweed, UTM settings live with your links and are set up under Settings during User Workflow creation, so there's no building UTMs manually or copy-pasting from spreadsheets, and fewer chances for mistakes.
Cohort Analysis and Conversion Tracking
Sweed offers a funnel view that shows how many customers advance from one step to the next in the omnichannel communication sequence (SMS, email or push notifications). This helps uncover the hidden drop-off that gets lost in aggregate numbers. In the platform, the cohort counts appear directly on the campaign canvas. Each block in the sequence carries a badge with an absolute count and a percentage of everyone who entered. Clicking a badge opens step-level detail (delivery, open, click rates, and filter reasons like unsubscribes or invalid addresses), over a rolling 30-day window for streaming workflows or per-run for scheduled ones.
Sweed Marketing Dashboard
Reporting that sits on top of inventory, sales, and operations data rather than in a separate marketing tool, so campaign results read against real stock and margin without reconciling against POS later. Results break down by store, product, channel, and budtender, showing which locations convert campaign traffic and which staff drive sign-ups, redemptions, and upsells at the register.
Where to start building your cannabis marketing strategy?
Pick one strategy and try it. Teams that try to launch too many campaigns in a quarter get muddied results, making it hard to tell what worked and what to drop.
If you’re looking to increase revenue, start with SMS nudges. The build is short, attribution is clean, and results can be measured month to month to ensure your strategy is working.
If retention is the problem, build a campaign that prioritizes gamification. While the results take longer to measure, this strategy changes customer behavior for long-term impact and provides incentives that general discounts can’t.
If you’re looking for better specifics on which channels are driving results, and which can be adjusted, implement UTMs. Try implementing changes in 30-day increments so that you can ensure you have the best one-to-one data, and then adjust accordingly.
No matter what strategy is right for your business, having the right tools and technology in place is critical to the success of any dispensary operation. Sweed partners with you to power marketing campaigns that drive ROI, while enabling teams to do more with fewer integrations and less clunky software.
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