4th of July’s Most Successful Dispensary Marketing Campaigns on Happy Marketers

On really big sales holidays like the 4th of July, we not only like to tip you off to the most successful campaign ideas and strategies from the last year, we also want to share with you how this one went.

What data are we seeing to show sales lift among the retailers using Happy Marketers? How well did the platform perform for them? What were their most successful text marketing campaigns?

We got you. Read on.

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Performance Data

• Delivery Rate: our average customer received an 87% True Delivery Rate on texts sent to customers between 7/3-7/7.
  
  True Delivery Rate means our texts were seen as intended, with imagery and no links customers have to click to read them. When we say something is delivered, it’s truly delivered.
  
  
• Sales Per Store: our average customer made $7,300 in immediate sales via text over those 4 days (sales that happened in less than 24 hours after receiving a text). They also generated an average of $6k in immediate sales using email.
  
  They each recaptured 11 lost customers via text and 17 via email, on average.
  
  
• Total Sales Lift: the average Happy Marketers customer saw 2.8X more sales in this period than in a comparable week, typically.
  
  This is not saying all retailers saw 2.8X in sales over the July 4th holiday week, just those using our best in class marketing tool to guarantee their victory over their competition.

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This success, compared to last year’s 4th, is due in large part to our new Campaign Success Prediction feature. It flags campaigns that are going to under-perform and helps you fix them before you hurt your sender reputation on a large scale.

That alone accounted for a 30 point lift in our campaign delivery, which translated into many more dollars for our retailers.

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Successful Campaigns from July 4th

We looked through the top examples of successful campaigns over this holiday to help you immediately learn and calibrate your strategy for future campaigns and planning.

However, regardless of the specific campaign, the most successful campaigns typically followed a few best practices equally:

1. They sent uniquely worded messages to many small segments, rather than one massive send.
   
   This doesn’t mean you need to be coming up with the most original content ever, just slightly different, uniquely worded content to each small segment. Our ChatGPT integration, trained on your content and voice, helps here.
   
   Say you want to target all of your recent shoppers from the last 6 months, and that’s a big list of 5,000 people. If carriers see you sending the same text to 5000 people, they flag it as spam. When they see 5 uniquely worded messages to 1000 people, it flies under their radar.
   
   
2. They all contained clean messages & image content - nothing that violates carrier filtration rules. This is basic but important to note.
   
   
3. They built a good sender reputation (it gets better the more you follow best practices over time).
   
   Retailers on Happy Marketers have learned these things and been trained up on what not to do. When you don’t know what not to do, the system tells you immediately what the issue is by flagging your campaign before you blast your list.

Some of our most successful campaigns hit the same main points in their content:

• Communicated their hours (they were either closed on the 4th or the 5th or had reduced hours)
• Explained WHY they were closed, like “We’re giving our staff the day off to rest and celebrate” (focus on employees, generates goodwill with customers)
• All had imagery - this made delivery and conversion higher on average

Commonalities for Success

So, you probably think the most creative texts with the sexiest designs did the best, right? What were those campaigns like?

Hopefully you’ll find this news liberating: there was nothing particularly special about the messages or graphics in the top performing posts.

In fact, our top 3 most delivered texts with the most ROI generated all had fairly generic messages. 

The graphics were ALL OVER the place. Some were crammed full of deals and text, some were very well branded and designed, one featured a taco as the largest image in the graphic over any of their products!

One of our favorites featured a dog wearing a hat with a party blowout in its mouth and text that said “Think about our furry friends on the 4th!” to promote their pet products in store.

Regardless, it seems it didn’t matter what the graphics looked like, so long as they didn’t contain imagery that included terms carriers look for and flag. They use optical character recognition (OCR) scanners to read the text on the image.

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The Lesson

You don’t have to craft the most perfect and creative message and image to achieve success with text and email marketing.

Don’t overthink it, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Just follow the fundamentals that we guide you on. Do the work, send the messages, and get back to the other 328 things you have on your plate to do for the day.

With Happy Cabbage keeping you within the rails (like with our Campaign Success Prediction feature and our incredible Customer Service staff to guide you) and simple, straightforward messaging, you’ll succeed.

This doesn’t mean be boring, or give up on fun! One of our most successful retailers leans heavily into being silly, verbose, self-aware and self-deprecating. One of their 4th of July messages was 1,300 characters long! They have a staggeringly low opt-out rate, in case you think customers hate long messages.

Point is, you can use the message and image to present your brand and identity and strengthen your relationship with customers, but it’s not required for success in text and email marketing.

Following the fundamentals we preach and getting it done, that’s the path to success.

Achieve it first. Then start to spread your wings a little and get funky with it.