With cannabis becoming legalized in different states, dispensary owners need to keep on their toes to ensure that their brand is the one every customer wants to visit. That requires the business owner to get clever about how they create a marketing campaign that ensures they keep retaining their existing customers. However, dispensary marketing can be a lot tougher compared to other businesses. There are some restrictions in place that require the dispensary owner to be careful when marketing their products. Primarily due to cannabis being only legalized on a state level and not on a federal level.
While these restoration increases the difficulty of getting people aware of your dispensary, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to succeed at doing so. One of the many ways that dispensaries are capable of getting their name out there is by sending out text messages that allow their customers to know about the latest deals and specials. Text message marketing is an excellent way for dispensaries to provide their current customers with promotions and loyalty points, which ensures they boost sales and increase brand awareness.
Of course, like anything else, text message marketing has its own set of regulations that a dispensary owner needs to follow carefully, or else they’ll be in severe trouble. Even so, these text message marketing campaigns provide an excellent opportunity to get the brand of the stone out there and ensure people keep coming back for some quality cannabis goods.
Think about it, with text messaging marketing, you can reach every single customer and potential customer with a single text blast. Instead of needing to communicate with a single person at a time, bulk SMS marketing provides dispensary owners with a way to reach out to hundreds or thousands of people at the same time. That saves you a ton of time while making marketing your dispensary easier.
As excellent as this sounds, there will be times when your text blast may not work entirely well, and there are several reasons why it’s not going through. For this post, let’s go over some issues you should be aware of when it comes to text blasting.
What Is a Text Blast?
To make sure we are on the same page, let’s go over what a text blast is specifically.
A text blast is an SMS text message sent from a single source to a massive group of individuals at the same time. It’s a marketing strategy that is typically used by the retail industry. Text blasts have been shown to have a positive impact on businesses that wish to connect with customers, increase brand awareness, and boost sales intent.
Aside from the retail industry, plenty of other groups use the service granted by their text blast service to send information to their members. Plenty of people have received a text blaster from their employers, local clubs, political parties, and more. Certain jurisdictions even have emergency systems that send out warnings to the people of those regions concerning imminent threats to safety or life.
So why is my text blast not working?
There might be times when you attempt to text blast your recent specials, and instead of it working like usual, something goes wrong. It can be frustrating not being able to send out your text messages, especially when you are unsure of the reason behind it.
As a dispensary owner, the delay or failure behind your text blast can severely damage your business. It has an awful effect on your marketing and business efforts. It could even be the worst-case scenario, such as breaking one of the many strict regulations placed on dispensaries. In other cases, there could be several other reasons.
Here are several reasons why your text blast is delayed or failed in its delivery.
Flagged as spam
With so many organizations using text messaging as a means of marketing, carriers have begun to protect their subscribers from text spam. If you have ever had any emails transferred to your Spam folder, then you should provide you with a good idea of how a carrier is doing the same thing. However, those text messages are not delivered to the recipient at all, so there is no way for them to check on a spam folder. Instead, the carrier filters them out.
However, when you are texting a person for the first time, your SMS can get filtered. It can happen whenever something you have composed in your text raises a flag for the recipient’s carrier. Furthermore, most carriers have a set of guidelines and strategies when it comes to dealing with spam. Although some general rules do exist:
- The message contains a suspicious link, especially if the URL is using a shortener, such as TinyURL or bit.ly.
- Sending out long messages that surpass that go over 160 characters.
- Sending out too many messages containing the same content
- Writing your messages in all caps, such as “ BOGO ON ALL FLOWERS”.
Requires different phone number
As a dispensary owner, you need to be aware that there are two types of messaging: Application-to-person (A2P) and person-to-person (P2P). These types of messaging require different types of phone numbers.
For dispensary owners sending out messages to their customers, you are more likely engaging through them with A2P messaging. Template or automated messages such as billing confirmations, promotional rewards, and other transactional texts are labeled as A2P. If you have a close relationship with a customer and are not sending out any automated or templated message, then you are engaging in P2P messaging. That means you are texting them like you would any other friend on your contact list.
Since your dispensary is using text messaging marketing, then it’s best described as A2P. You need to ensure that you have the correct type of phone number for it. Toll-free numbers, shortcodes, and some local numbers approved for massive amounts of messaging (known as 10-digit long codes) are suitable for this. Using a standard local phone number to send out thousands of text messages in a short amount of time will cause your SMS to be blocked by the carriers.
Sending too many messages
As stated previously, if you are sending out too many texts and are doing text blasts, your messages could have been intercepted by the spam filter. Dispensary owners need to look up the guidelines on their particular number. That way, they can know how many messages they are allowed to send.
Phone numbers intended for P2P are usually only allowed to send out one message per second. There should be a decent one-to-one balance between sending and receiving a text message. However, if you are sending out hundreds of messages but only gaining ten replies, that’s a red flag and could result in your SMS getting sent to the spam filter.
Roaming number
There will be times when your customers are going to leave the country to take care of business or for vacation. Whenever you send a text message to someone who is currently not in the home country, that often leads to problems. Delivering messages to numbers that are roaming is not guaranteed most of the time. Plus, sending out a text message abroad is usually expensive, particularly if you don’t have an international plan.
Of course, as a dispensary owner, you should not concern yourself with sending out messages internationally since there are strict laws about that when it comes to cannabis-related text messages. The best thing to do is wait until they safely return from their trip.
Unsubscribed from your texts
There are strict regulations in place that businesses need to follow when it comes to sending out messages to their customers. They need to provide an option that allows them to opt-out of these messages. Most text blasting platforms have a built-in system that enables the recipient to unsubscribe from the marketing messages. For example, if someone replies to the message with “STOP,” they will no longer receive texts from your dispensary. Unless they decide to register to your text messages again, they won’t be receiving any of your messages.
“Receive SMS messages” turned off
In this day and age, SMS messaging isn’t the only way people receive messages. Plenty of smartphones allow for internet-based messaging as their primary form of communication. Most people tend to use social networks messaging apps to remain in touch with each other. Thus, it’s not uncommon for a recipient to have their SMS message deactivated, and some people may not even be aware that their SMS has been deactivated.
Sometimes, there is a conflict between the number of applications that receive text messages, causing some applications to not receive any text messages. If they have turned off the option to receive text messages, then they will not receive anything to their phone number.
Conclusion
Text messaging campaigns have become one of the most used marketing tools for every successful dispensary out there. It’s going to remain in use for as long as smartphones exist and people continue to open them up. If you have been having issues with getting your text blasts out there, then there is a good chance that it could be several reasons we mentioned above. The best thing to do is investigate what you are doing on your end to see if you have been sending too many promotional messages.
