The holiday season is fast approaching and now is the perfect time to draw in customers with your best deals. While you likely run discounts, promotions, and cannabis events all year round, there’s a unique opportunity during the final month of the year. Holidays like Christmas and New Year’s Eve, draw in bigger crowds and these customers are ready to spend their gift money. Crafting dispensary discounts takes some creativity, some planning, and great cannabis software to support it. Let’s explore how you can create these holiday discounts for your business.
Gift Cards
Gift cards are a mainstay in the gifting world and becoming increasingly popular. In 2021, the market saw a 10x increase in gift card use at cannabis dispensaries. At BLAZE, we saw this same trend with gift cards in 2022 with our customers. This is a huge area of potential sales for your dispensary. Gift cards not only bring their recipients into your store (and these are potential new customers) but also bring the gift card buyer to your shop, where you have the opportunity to up-sell to them. Lastly, sometimes gift cards aren’t ever redeemed, bringing profits to your store without parting with any inventory.
“Creating customer stickiness through gift card programs and loyalty rewards is one of the top ways dispensaries can engender ambassadors that come back often and bring their friends.” – James He, Product Manager for BLAZE Insights.
Gift cards offer many advantages and are easy to incorporate into your holiday discounts, promotions, and loyalty programs. Take advantage of their popularity with customers and advertise your gift cards throughout your store, site, and check-out. Consider creating incentives around gift card purchasing as well. For instance, a customer who buys a gift card of a certain value may receive a discount on their total purchase or specific items in your store.
“Interestingly, we see gift cards already purchased increase in redemptions during the holiday seasons. Implementing gift cards is a great way to stay top of mind with customers when less frequent shoppers decide to come out”
Holiday Sales and Dispensary Discounts
Holiday sales may seem obvious for a post about holiday discounts, but we wanted to flesh this out a bit more. Holidays are perfect for creating an impetus for customers to visit your store. Whether they’re looking for products to better enjoy events and time with friends or something to take the edge off family engagements, your store is the solution. Lean into the buying mentality and built-in themes of holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah, etc…. These help to craft engaging promotions and marketing campaigns that drive business.
When creating your holiday sales, it’s important to consider what the goal of the sale is. Are you trying to boost sales of popular products? Push low-selling items? Obtain new customers? Zero in on what you want your sale to accomplish. Utilize sales data and see what your customers are gravitating towards. From there, separate groups out based on things like cart sizes, number of visits, and demographics. The more tailored your sales are, the more likely they are to resonate with your customers. By having a focused approach, you can better dedicate resources to making the most of your promotional efforts.
Loyalty Rewards for The Holiday Season
While new customers are an important part of your revenue and the longevity of your dispensary, your loyal customers are the ones that will make or break your dispensary. Loyal customers bring in more business and serve as brand advocates for your dispensary. Rewarding your loyal customers is a key component of any dispensary discount strategy. There’s no better time to reward your best customers and drive their sales than the holidays.
Create specific discounts and promotions for your loyal customers and reward members. Doing so will strengthen customer satisfaction and loyalty for the coming year and drive their business for the end of your fourth quarter. These promotions should run separately from your general holiday sales and amp up the discounts and savings. Just as with your other sales, further distinguish your rewards based on your customers’ product preferences, demographics, and average spending. Doing so will net you more profits and successful reward programs.
Year-End Sales/New Years Promotions
As the year draws to a close, there’s one final opportunity to make the most of your sales goals, New Years. End-of-the-year sales are a final way to cap off a successful year or make up for lost revenue. A holiday like New Year’s Eve drives customers to grab some cannabis before a night of partying and allows for easy marketing campaigns built around it. More so, the closing of the season brings an opportunity to create a running clock for dispensary discounts and promotions.
Time-sensitive campaigns are a powerful tool for dispensaries. Customers feel the approaching deadline and don’t want to miss out on savings. While other times of the year may not warrant such deep discounts, the end of the year is the perfect time to create promotions with better savings for your customers. More so, the end of the year gives you a chance to push old and unpopular inventory to make room for new products that you’ll be featuring in the Spring. These sales can also lead a couple of days into the new year to encourage traffic after the holiday rush.
BLAZE Insights Advanced
A successful holiday season requires great software. Your data is a powerful tool for creating promotions and reaching more customers and your software should give you full control over that. We have the solution. For BLAZE users, BLAZE Insights and BLAZE Insights Advanced puts powerful reporting and analytics in one easy-to-use dashboard. BLAZE-powered cannabis retailers can weaponize their data to give them a competitive edge with the ability to drill down into reports and make data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
The holiday season is an important time for cannabis brands to drive sales and offer dispensary discounts. Making the most of the season comes down to smart, targeted promotions that incentive new customers and reward loyal ones. Use your sales data to tailor your campaigns to your customers’ unique differentiators and make the most of cannabis tech like BLAZE Insights. We wish you a successful end to your year and happy holidays. If you’re looking to start the new year by choosing a dispensary POS for 2023, we’re here to help. Explore our leading software like BLAZE Retail and BLAZE Insights, and feel free to book a demo with our team, and let’s get started!
