The difference between a promotion and a discount habit
A promotion should change behavior: bring someone in earlier, get them to try a new category, or recover a customer who drifted. A discount habit just lowers the price your regulars were already going to pay.
The test is simple. If the same customers would have shopped that week anyway, you did not run a promotion — you ran a margin reduction. Store-wide percentage-off events on a predictable weekly schedule are the most common version of this mistake, because customers learn the calendar and time their purchases around it.
Good promotions are targeted, time-boxed, and tied to a specific behavior you want. That is also why texting suits them: you can send an offer to 400 relevant people instead of announcing it to the whole market.
BOGO, tiered spend, and new drops
BOGO works best on a category you want to move or introduce — a new edible line, an overstocked pre-roll SKU — targeted at people who buy adjacent categories but have never tried that one. It converts strongly because the perceived value is high while your cost is inventory you already own.
Tiered spend offers ($10 off $60, $25 off $125) lift basket size rather than cutting price across the board. They work best on your mid-tier customers, who are close to the threshold anyway. Avoid sending them to your top spenders, who would have crossed the line without the discount.
New-drop announcements are not discounts at all, and they are among the highest-performing texts a dispensary sends. Limited quantity plus a genuine reason to come in today beats a percentage off. Send these to category loyalists — the flower buyers for a flower drop — not the whole list.
Slow days, loyalty, and win-backs
Slow-day offers move demand you already have into hours when your staff is idle. A Tuesday-only or before-2pm offer sent Monday evening to customers who live nearby is one of the cheapest ways to flatten a week. Keep the discount modest; the timing does the work.
Loyalty promotions should reward frequency, not spending. A perk at the fourth visit in a quarter changes cadence; a points balance nobody remembers does not. Text is the right channel because the reminder arrives at the moment it can be acted on.
Win-backs are the highest-ROI promotion in cannabis retail and the one most stores never run. Customers who visited three times and then vanished 45 days ago are not lost — they are unreminded. A specific, genuinely good offer aimed only at them regularly outperforms every store-wide event on the calendar.
How to run them without wrecking your list
Keep total send frequency at two to four per month regardless of how many promotion types you use. The way to run more offers is to send each to a smaller, better-chosen audience, not to message everyone more often.
Suppress recent buyers from discount offers. Nothing burns margin faster than giving a coupon to someone who was walking in tomorrow anyway. Suppress non-responders from repeat category offers, too — after three ignored edible promos, that person is telling you something.
Always include a real deadline, a single clear action, and a unique code so the register can tell you what worked. Rotate the type of offer so customers cannot predict the pattern.
Why texting is the fastest way to run all of this
Every promotion above depends on reaching the right subset of customers quickly. Cannabis Text Marketing reads purchase history from your POS and builds those subsets automatically — category loyalists, mid-tier spenders, near-neighbors, 45-day lapsed customers — and recommends who to suppress on each send.
Deliverability is managed so the offer actually arrives, consent and opt-out handling are built in, and redemptions tie back to the campaign so you know which promo types earn their keep in your market.
At $0.025 per text with no platform fee or contract, a targeted 400-person offer costs ten dollars to test. Create your account, connect your store, and run your first one this week.
A twelve-week promotion calendar you can reuse
Rotation matters more than creativity. If customers can predict your offer schedule, they will time purchases around it and your margin absorbs the difference. A simple twelve-week rotation of four offer types, each to a different audience, keeps the pattern unlearnable.
Weeks one, four, seven, and ten: a new-drop announcement to loyalists in the relevant category. No discount, limited quantity, one clear reason to come in this week. Weeks two, five, eight, and eleven: a win-back to customers who have crossed their own lapse threshold, with a category-matched dollar-value offer. Weeks three, six, nine, and twelve: alternate between a tiered-spend offer to mid-tier spenders and a slow-day offer to customers who live nearby.
That is three sends a month, each to a subset of a few hundred to a thousand people, with total monthly spend that stays under a hundred dollars for most single-location stores. Layer loyalty perks on top as automations rather than campaigns — a reward at the fourth visit in a quarter, delivered when it can be acted on.
Review the rotation quarterly on revenue per message sent, not total revenue. Drop the offer type that consistently lands last and replace it with a variant of your best performer aimed at a different segment. Within two quarters most stores find two promotion types that clearly outperform in their market, and the calendar tightens around those.
One rule to hold onto through all of this: a promotion that cannot be measured is a guess with a budget. If the register cannot tell you which offer produced a visit, you will end up repeating whichever campaign felt busiest rather than whichever one earned most. Unique codes, a defined redemption window, and revenue per message sent turn promotions from a habit into a system that gets better every quarter.
Frequently asked questions
What kind of dispensary promotion works best?+
Targeted win-backs to lapsed customers and new-drop announcements to category loyalists consistently outperform store-wide percentage-off events, because they change behavior rather than discounting purchases that would have happened anyway.
How often should I run promotions?+
Keep total sends to two to four a month. Run more offer types by narrowing each audience rather than by messaging the whole list more frequently.
Do BOGO offers hurt margin?+
Not when they are used to move overstock or introduce a category to customers who have never bought it. The cost is inventory you already own, and the visit is incremental.
Should I discount for my best customers?+
Rarely. Suppress top spenders and recent buyers from discount offers and give them access, early drops, or perks instead — they were already coming in.
How do I know which promotions worked?+
Use a unique code per campaign and count register redemptions inside a set window. Judge each promo type on revenue per message sent, not on total revenue.