Anna Shreeve wears many hats in the industry. As president of Urban Paragon Inc., Targeted Intent. Inc. and The Bakeréé, she oversees retail stores, cultivation and processing and CBD product creation.
On the retail side, The Bakeréé has two dispensaries in Seattle and a third set to open in the city. To keep customers in the loop with product and events, Shreeve and her team have implemented business practices that keep the customer in mind at every point in the company’s marketing strategy.
RELATED: How The Bakeréé in Seattle Teaches Customers and Staffers About Cannabis
Cannabis Dispensary: What are some of the main digital marketing techniques that are getting people in the door at The Bakeréé?
Anna Shreeve: The text marketing, so the loyalty marketing—we utilize springbig so that we have probably 7-8,000 customers signed in with the loyalty program. It allows you to segment and be very specific about your messaging, and it works with our POS system, so we're able to see historical purchases and basically segment the data however we need to, to send out outbound messaging. It's MMS, which is a picture, and it's SMS—it's both, or can be both.
CD: With text marketing, do you find that you're more often sending information about sales you're doing, or is it more product information?
AS: It's both. We basically have four different categories. There is a “new drop,” which is new product that's coming on—usually flower or concentrates that are very popular brands that we cannot keep on the shelves. When those come in, we send out a text message to provide our loyal customers with an advantage of coming in right away or reserving it. Then we have something we call a “flash sale,” and a flash sale is kind of what you're talking about—“20% off concentrates all day today” type of thing. Then we have a “vendor of the week,” which can be one or two vendors, non-competitive vendors, so for example, one in flower and one edible or one concentrate, and they are featured for the entire week, visually, in display.
Also, our POS has a digital monitor on the other side of it, where the customer sees their receipt, but they can also see advertising. We also have that same advertising on digital screens, which also hold our menu. We have both video and still photography in those two other sections—one in front of each POS station. It's a small screen, probably 6 by 8 inches, so it's literally in your face. Then multiple screens inside the store can also carry a message, and we rotate those. All of those are coordinated with our POS system.
CD: What are some other techniques to get customers to originally sign up for text marketing? Do you add customers from one list onto another, or do you try to keep them segmented and just know that certain people are more interested in discounts, for instance?
AS: The loyalty program is one big discount. You're earning points per dollar, so your purchase equals the number of points that you receive. Those points add up to the discounts you can take in the future. The more you shop, the more points you receive and the more you can redeem those points for discounts. There’s definitely [also] the person that wants to be part of loyalty because of the discount.
There's also a pretty significant segment of our population that we have, because we have a bit of a younger audience—we have super premium products. We specialize in flower, so we have all the hype brands, hard-to-get brands, so we're just really about the premium cannabis, to be honest. Because of that, there are people that want to know when the Cookies strains are coming out, or the Jungle Boys or certain brands that they love. The best way to be a part of that is to be a part of the loyalty program.
We also do community events, so we double as an art gallery. We can inform people when the artist is changing. We do a lot of music events for free and with pretty big acts. We usually do that in collaboration with other sponsors that are the brands. We provide people entrance [using] a QR code, which we scan at the door, for them to come into the event. That would be the other reason why people would want to get these messages. It isn't only one thing—people are different.
CD: Do you find that it is mostly consumers who are focused on brand?
AS: I would say no. I think there are just different types of consumers. There are consumers that consider themselves more of a connoisseur and more brand-centric, and then there are people on the other end of the spectrum that want a $20-dollar eighth. But they want the best $20-dollar eighth they find.
We do a lot of organic SEO, blogs, things like that in our digital representation in general. We do digital advertising. 85% of our customers find us via their phone. Maybe it's a Seattle thing, I don't know. But our statistics show that people that look for us are on their phone. People … ultimately [have] heard of us or they've seen advertising. They click. They want to know where we're located, so they're going to open up Maps or they're going to call directly or they're going to go look at our menu or whatnot. We see that as really something essential that we need to continue doing, which is advertising on digital.
CD: As far as the text marketing aspect, there are some regulations in certain states on if dispensaries can send out texts, and if so, what can be in those texts. Are there a lot of hurdles with that?
AS: There are things that you have to work around. In our industry, it's important that you're resilient. Probably about 18 months ago, the liquor control board [Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board]—our governing body—decided that you needed to have all the disclaimers, like you would on a label of a product, in the text message. That quadrupled the price of texting because that disclaimer needed to be there. springbig came up with the utilization of MMS, which is a slide, and basically when you read the rules from the liquor control board … the disclaimer, at least in our state, can only be a tenth of the largest font size. If you do that right and make sure your creative is right, that's a pretty small font size that will then not overly increase, because that would be one segment—the MMS, the graphic.
[For] vendor of the week … we created a custom graphic, and then through Illustrator, we just lay in the logo of the client or typeset it in and then just make sure that the disclaimer is in very, very small print. We typically are not as concerned about the color of it. It is still readable, but we're not focusing on having it stand out. Then it just becomes background. It's there, it's legal, but it's not something that draws your eye to 'Do not use if you're pregnant,' 'Do not operate a moving vehicle,' the list of do-nots.
CD: What do you hope attendees to our conference will bring back to their business from your session on text marketing and digital marketing?
AS: Just some really simple strategies that are cost-effective that drive your business and drive customer acquisition.
