As a cannabis business, you want your operation to succeed. Although there are varying ways to measure success, your return on investment (ROI) is the most important metric to track as a business owner and operator.
The technology you choose to use for your cannabis business can have an immense impact on your ability to drive ROI. In this article, we’ll look at the top 3 cannatech software solutions to help you take your business to new heights.
Why ROI matters in cannatech
The cannabis industry is booming. By 2027 it’s expected that the global legal cannabis market could be worth up to $73.6 billion.
This means that as the market grows, so too does the competition. Being able to differentiate yourself from your peers and maintain a competitive advantage is crucial for customer satisfaction, growth and profitability.
Chances are you’ve invested quite a bit in your cannabis business, and not just financially. You’ve put countless hours of hard work and dedication into a business that you are deeply passionate about. Since you’ve got so much skin in the game, there’s a lot of pressure to succeed. Understanding ROI as a key metric for your business can help ensure that the benefits of your cannatech investments meet or exceed the cost of purchasing, implementing, training and maintaining those technologies.
Now there are a few different ways to measure ROI, and this is largely dependent upon your unique business goals. Some businesses put the highest value on hard money, or revenue and profitability. Others may also consider factors like improved efficiency or customer loyalty as key measures of overall success.
The important thing to remember is that you want to make strategic investments that deliver the biggest ROI in a way that provides measurable, long-term value for the business. That’s where cannabis technology can help you maximize your investment to reap even greater returns.
Reaching your target market
Whether you’re a budding business or an established operation, it’s important that you reach your target customers with the right messaging that resonates with them and encourages them to take action.
Investing in a cannabis-specific website, marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) solution can help you expand your market reach in today’s digital world.
You should think of your website as your homebase. It’s an environment that you control fully and is a vehicle to drive revenue. One of your biggest challenges as a cannabis business is attracting customers. How can they find you? How will they know what you do or how you can best serve them?
This is where having an online presence like a website comes into play. Your website says a lot about your company, your vision and your product offering. It’s a place for you to own your narrative and begin building trust with potential new customers.
It’s also a great way to get prospective customers into your sales funnel. With a solid marketing and SEO strategy, you can continue to build trust, educate your audience and let them know exactly how you can help them. Using your website and marketing you can capture leads and begin to create a customer journey.
If you plan to offer online ordering or delivery, your website is going to be absolutely crucial.
It’s unlikely that you have the time or expertise yourself to handle all aspects of your business’s marketing efforts. Outsourcing your marketing, SEO and website design can help you maximize your investment, streamline your operations and eventually, lead to increased revenue.
Retaining happy customers
However, the work doesn’t stop once you’ve landed the customer. Now comes the nurturing process. Repeat customers are a sign of a strong business with a product that delivers.
Happy customers spend more, and they’re more likely to spread the word to their own networks, thus driving even more revenue.
The only way to know if you’re retaining your loyal customer base is to track it. Manually doing this is likely not worth your time. Your efforts are best focused on managing business operations, employees and the balance sheet.
So how can you automate this? One very easy way is to create a customer loyalty program that regularly engages your customers, reminds them of the value you provide, and provides a personalized experience.
For example, targeted SMS campaigns are one way to encourage repeat purchases, provide access to exclusive customer promotions and digitally build loyalty with perks like punch cards.
Now, we can bet you don’t want to spend your time manually sending text messages to your customer base.
Investing in cannabis-specific customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can help streamline this process and take the burden off you and your staff. By creating a customer loyalty program and tracking repeat customer interactions, you not only grow your revenue, but you gain insightful data on your customers that helps you continually fine tune your offerings.
But it’s important that you find a CRM/loyalty software that integrates seamlessly with your existing software, such as your point-of-sale (POS) solution, to fully automate your customer marketing and avoid unnecessary work.
Maximizing customer spend
Historically, cannabis has been a cash-only business thanks to federal prohibition and market-specific regulations.
But now there are new and emerging banking and payments options that can help you optimize your finances and make transactions seamless for you and more importantly, for your customers.
Research shows that paying with a card over cash can raise your ticket prices. This is because people tend to spend more when they don’t have to worry about carrying the right amount of cash or going through the hassle of withdrawing money from an ATM.
For example, Happy Time Cannabis, a dispensary in Yakima, Wa. saw a 15 percent increase in their customer’s cart total when they switched to card payment and processing over cash transactions.
Digital payments also enable your budtenders to upsell without slowing down the in-store experience. Think about how incredibly inconvenient it is for the customer to have to keep going back to an ATM to withdraw more cash. Not to mention, in-store ATMs usually have additional service fees that the customer has to pay on top of their purchase total.
Finding the right cannatech partners
In short, cannabis technology can help accelerate your business growth and revenue. However, finding the right canntech partner can be a huge headache and can eat into your budget and bandwidth.
That’s where a free cannatech consulting service like MJstack can help point you in the right direction.
We’ll listen to your business needs and make personalized and immediate recommendations that could cut down your vendor search by half and provide clearer direction to your business. This saves you time and effort so you can focus on other aspects of your business.
Request a free consultation and MJstack will help pair you with the right cannatech vendors!
