Dispensary SMS marketing ROI: what to actually expect

The formula, with the term everyone forgets

Revenue from a campaign is: recipients × delivered rate × redemption rate × average ticket. Cost is recipients × price per message. The term operators skip is delivered rate, and it is the one that quietly destroys the model.

Suppose you send to 2,000 contacts. At 97% delivered, 1,940 people see it. At 84% — a normal outcome on an unmanaged cannabis list after a few months — only 1,680 do. Same spend, 13% less revenue, and nothing in a send-count dashboard will tell you.

So before you model anything, know your delivered number. If your current platform reports sends rather than deliveries, you do not have the input the whole calculation depends on.

Realistic ranges, not vendor numbers

For a well-segmented dispensary campaign, redemption rates in the 2% to 6% band are normal, with win-backs to genuinely lapsed customers often at the top of that range and broad full-list promos at the bottom or below it.

Average tickets in most markets land between $45 and $75. Put those together on a 2,000-person send: at 3% redemption and a $60 ticket, that is roughly $3,500 in revenue against $50 of messaging at $0.025 per text.

Do not annualize a single good campaign. A defensible plan uses two to four sends per month, assumes some overlap between campaigns, and counts only redemptions you can tie to the send. Even conservatively modeled, the ratio stays uncomfortable for every other channel you buy.

Cost per incremental visit is the honest comparison

Impressions, opens, and clicks are not comparable across channels. Cost per additional visit is. On the example above, $50 produced roughly 58 visits — a bit under a dollar per visit, on customers who already know your store.

Compare that with the alternatives available to cannabis. Paid search and paid social are largely closed to you. Local SEO and content are worth doing but produce discovery over months, not a visit this Thursday. Email costs nothing per send but converts at a fraction of SMS and lands hours or days later. Print and in-store signage cannot be targeted or measured.

The other advantage is variable cost. With no platform fee, no seats, and no contract, your downside on a test campaign is the price of lunch, and you can scale into a holiday weekend without buying a bigger tier for the whole year.

How to measure it so the number survives scrutiny

Use a unique offer or code per campaign so the register tells you the truth. Count redemptions inside a defined window — 7 days is a reasonable default — and attribute only those.

Track four metrics per send: delivered rate, redemption rate, revenue per message sent, and opt-out rate. Revenue per message sent is the number to optimize; opt-out rate is the guardrail. If revenue per message rises while opt-outs stay under a few tenths of a percent, you are doing it right.

Watch for the trap of sending more to lift totals. Doubling volume while halving relevance usually raises revenue slightly, raises opt-outs sharply, and damages deliverability for months afterward.

Where the platform changes the math

Three levers move ROI: delivered rate, redemption rate, and price per message. Cannabis Text Marketing works on all three. Deliverability is managed continuously so the first term stays high. AI segmentation reads your POS to raise redemption by messaging the right people and suppressing the rest. And pricing starts at $0.025 per text and $0.05 per MMS, with no platform fee or contract, so cost stays a true variable.

Automations compound it further: welcome, replenishment, and win-back flows produce revenue every month without anyone building a campaign.

Run the arithmetic on your own list, then test it. Create your account, connect your store, and send one segmented campaign this week — the register will settle the question.

A worked example over a full quarter

Single-location store, 4,000 consented contacts, three sends per month, $60 average ticket. Rather than blasting all 4,000, the store sends to targeted subsets: a 900-person new-drop to flower loyalists, a 600-person win-back to customers past their normal interval, and a 1,200-person tiered-spend offer to mid-tier spenders.

That is 2,700 messages a month, about $68 at $0.025 per text, or roughly $203 for the quarter. Assume conservative redemption — 4% on the win-back, 3% on the drop, 2.5% on the tiered offer. That is 24, 27, and 30 redemptions respectively, about 81 incremental visits a month, or 243 for the quarter. At a $60 ticket that is roughly $14,600 in attributed revenue against $203 in messaging.

Now add the automations. Welcome messages, replenishment nudges, and win-back sequences fire continuously on a few hundred customers a month at negligible cost, and in most stores they contribute more total revenue over a quarter than the manual campaigns do — without anyone building anything.

Two cautions keep this honest. Some of those visits would have happened anyway, so treat attributed revenue as an upper bound and watch whether total quarterly transactions actually rise. And the whole model assumes delivery stays high; if your delivered rate erodes 12 points, every figure above shrinks by the same proportion while your reporting looks unchanged.

Finally, set your expectations by month, not by campaign. The first month is usually your best-looking one because the win-back pool is at its largest — every lapsed customer you have ever had is eligible at once. Months two and three normalize as that backlog clears and the program settles into a steady rolling set of newly drifting customers. Judge the channel on the steady state, and treat the first month's numbers as a one-time recovery of value that was already sitting in your database.