How to Unlock the Power of Your SMS Marketing to Reach More Customers

If you’re like many cannabis businesses, SMS marketing has been key to reaching your customers and getting them to come back and place another order. When it comes to building a loyalty program and contacting customers who have shopped with you before, SMS is a powerful tool. But did you know you can also use your SMS customer database as a way to build out new marketing channels?

This is an important next step for cannabis brand and dispensary marketing strategies: unlocking the full potential of the SMS customer list to build an omnichannel advertising campaign.

When you upload your SMS customer database into Surfside’s cannabis advertising platform, you can serve digital ads to new and existing customers across web, mobile, and CTV channels.

Here’s how Surfside transforms your SMS marketing program into an omnichannel ad campaign:

1. Customer Data Enrichment.

Got a phone number? No name? No email?

You’re not alone. A lot of data collection can be fragmented. You may just know a phone number and not much else, but maybe that’s one of your most loyal customers.

To reach your SMS customers beyond just text messages, you have to build a complete customer profile. In data lingo, that’s often called “enriching” your existing customer data - which means filling in the blanks for each customer profile so you can personalize your messaging and advertising offers better.

When you upload customer data to Surfside, it’s enriched through the Surfside Experience Graph, which matches your data across 280 million consumer profiles and connects your first-party customer data across every touchpoint. This allows you to reach your SMS customers with digital ads on websites, mobile apps, and more.

2. Advanced Segmentation.

When your SMS customer data is enriched through the Surfside platform, you can build audiences from 48,000+ pre-defined cannabis segments and personalize customer groups based on 25,000+ attributes.

Want to launch a digital advertising campaign to show ads to lapsed customers? Edible buyers? Specific zip codes? Specific website or purchase behavior? Someone who looked at your website but didn’t buy anything?

Surfside can help you serve ads to the exact audience you need to reach, whether you want to target by audience, behavior, location. This could be a core group of your existing customers or you could choose to create lookalike audiences that share similar characteristics to your SMS customers.

3. Lookalike Audiences.

The hardest part about SMS marketing is incentivizing new customers to sign up. Often, cannabis businesses will ask for phone numbers at the point of purchase, whether on the website or in-store. But those are still people who already know about your business.

With the Surfside Platform, you can build lookalike audiences. That means creating audiences based on the best SMS customers you already have and then serving digital ads to them on mobile apps and websites.

4. Omnichannel Ad Campaigns.

When your customer data is uploaded to the Surfside platform and you’ve built your audiences, you can launch a digital ad campaign beyond SMS to create a complete customer journey. Surfside can deliver digital ads across more than 1 million websites and apps. Through highly personalized digital ads, we can connect you to new and existing customers across more touchpoints than ever before.

And, with Surfside’s Attribution Dashboard, we can constantly optimize which ad experiences are working and which audience segments are converting the most.

5. A Customizable Attribution Dashboard.

Surfside can measure everything that matters to your cannabis advertising campaign: from in-store visits and ecommerce orders to return on ad spend, web traffic, and engagement and awareness metrics.

Through our direct integration with dozens of ecommerce sites and point-of-sale systems, we help build a precise, transparent dashboard that makes it easy to track the effectiveness of all your ad channels in one place.

A Full Journey for the SMS Cannabis Customer

Let’s face it - any ad can get overlooked. So can any text message.

By building an omnichannel ad strategy starting with your SMS customer database, you can reach customers across the other channels where they spend their time, creating a full journey for each customer and prospective customer. And, by enriching your customer database with more of the things that matter to each audience, you can also make sure that all your messages are more relevant, personal, and useful than ever.