The numbers, without the marketing spin
Dispensary email lands somewhere between 15% and 25% open on a healthy, recently-engaged list. Click rates on a promotional send are usually 1% to 3%. Those are not bad numbers — they are normal numbers for a channel that has to compete with a hundred other messages sitting in a promotions tab that most people check on purpose, when they feel like it.
Text messages get opened at 95%+ and read within a few minutes of arrival. Click rates on a well-segmented dispensary offer commonly run 8% to 20%. The reason is not that texting is magic. It is that a phone puts your message on the lock screen of someone who already gave you permission to be there, and there is no folder for it to hide in.
The cost picture inverts that. Email costs fractions of a cent per recipient. Texting starts at $0.025 per message with us, and MMS costs more. So the honest comparison is not open rate versus open rate — it is cost per incremental visit. When a dispensary sends 2,000 texts at $0.025 ($50) and drives 90 extra visits at a $65 average basket, that is roughly $5,850 in revenue from a $50 send. Email at the same list size might drive 12 visits for almost nothing. Both are profitable. Only one moves your Tuesday.
The practical read: email is your cheap, patient channel for long-form storytelling and low-urgency nurture. SMS is your revenue channel for anything that has to happen today, this weekend, or before a batch sells out.
What email is genuinely better at
Email handles length. If you want to explain a new cultivator partnership, walk through the difference between live rosin and cured resin, or publish a monthly menu roundup with fifteen products and photos, email is the right container. Nobody wants that in a text, and cramming it into MMS costs you money for a message people skim anyway.
Email is also better for the audience you are not sure about. Cold or aging contacts, people who signed a paper list two years ago, customers who have not walked in since last spring — those are exactly the people you should not be spending $0.025 per message on, and exactly the people who will not hurt anything sitting in an email segment.
Finally, email is a good archive. Receipts, loyalty statements, event recaps, educational series — anything a customer might want to scroll back and find later belongs in an inbox, not a thread they will delete.
What SMS is genuinely better at
Time-sensitive anything. A drop landing at 11am, a slow-Tuesday deal that expires at close, a restock of the strain forty people asked about, a last-hour reminder on a holiday promotion. Email arrives when someone opens their inbox. A text arrives now, and "now" is the entire value of those offers.
Reactivation. A lapsed customer at day 45 is a coin flip — they are either drifting to the shop closer to their office or they simply forgot you exist. An email asking them to come back competes with everything else in the tab. A short, personal text that references what they used to buy converts at multiples of the email equivalent, which is why win-back is the single highest-ROI automation most dispensaries turn on.
Two-way conversation. Customers reply to texts. They ask whether you still carry something, whether the deal applies to concentrates, what time you close. Email does not get replies from retail customers; texting does, and those replies are where a surprising amount of same-day revenue comes from.
One caution: because texting is intrusive by design, frequency discipline matters more than anywhere else. Two to four well-segmented sends a month outperforms weekly blasting almost every time, and it keeps your opt-out rate under 2%.
A simple split that works for most stores
Use email for the monthly menu roundup, education content, loyalty statements, and anything aimed at contacts who have not purchased in ninety days or more. Budget: near zero, send freely.
Use SMS for new-drop alerts to the customers who buy that category, slow-day traffic pushes to people within your delivery or drive radius, win-back sequences at day 30 and day 60, birthday offers, and holiday weekends. Budget: real money, so send with intent.
Overlap the two only where reinforcement helps. A 4/20 campaign might run an email teaser a week out and a text the morning of. Do not run both channels with the same message on the same day for the same person — that is how you train people to unsubscribe from both.
One more rule: never treat email subscribers as a texting list. Consent is channel-specific. Someone who gave you an address did not give you permission to text, and importing addresses into an SMS list is the fastest route to complaints, carrier trouble, and TCPA exposure.
Why running both from Cannabis Text Marketing is the easier answer
Splitting these channels across two vendors means two audience definitions, two versions of the truth about who is lapsed, and no way to suppress someone from an email because they already got the text. We built the platform so a single customer record — sourced from your POS — drives both channels.
That means the segment you build once ("flower buyers, 30-60 days lapsed, spent over $200 lifetime") is available to email and SMS, and the system knows not to double-hit someone across both in the same window. Consent is tracked per channel, so an email-only contact never accidentally receives a text.
On the texting side we are cannabis-specific in the ways that matter: carrier-aware content screening, correct 10DLC registration, automatic STOP/HELP handling, quiet-hours enforcement by state, and delivered-not-just-sent reporting so you know what your list is actually worth. AI segmentation reads purchase cadence and tells you which audience deserves the paid channel this week and which one should get the free one.
Pricing starts at $0.025 per text with no contracts and no seat fees, so you can run a heavy holiday month and a quiet February without renegotiating anything. If you are currently running email somewhere and texting nowhere, the fastest revenue you will find this quarter is turning on a win-back text sequence against the list you already have.
Frequently asked questions
Should a dispensary use email or SMS?+
Both, for different jobs. Email is nearly free and good for long-form content, education, and older contacts. SMS costs real money per send but reaches 95%+ of your list within minutes, which makes it the right channel for time-sensitive drops, slow-day pushes, and win-back.
Which converts better for dispensaries, email or text?+
Text, by a wide margin on a per-recipient basis. Dispensary email typically sees 15-25% opens and 1-3% clicks; segmented SMS commonly sees 95%+ opens and 8-20% clicks. Email still wins on raw cost, which is why the split matters.
Can I text everyone who subscribed to my email list?+
No. Consent is channel-specific. An email subscriber has not given express written consent to receive marketing texts. You need a separate SMS opt-in with proper disclosure, or you are exposed to TCPA claims and carrier complaints.
How often should I send each channel?+
Email once or twice a month plus event-driven sends works for most stores. SMS should stay in the two-to-four sends per month range per subscriber, with segmentation deciding who is in each one, to keep opt-outs under 2%.
Does Cannabis Text Marketing handle email too?+
Yes — one customer record from your POS drives both channels, consent is tracked separately per channel, and cross-channel suppression stops the same person getting hit twice in a week. Texting starts at $0.025 per message with no contract.