Modern cannabis customers expect the dispensary sales experience to be like any other retail industry — fast, easy, efficient, accessible everywhere. To fully capture every potential customer, dispensaries should offer a seamless customer experience, no matter where they're buying your products. This approach, which is designed to delight customers in every sales channel (online, via delivery, in-store, or curbside pickup) is called Omni-Channel:
> "Omni-channel sales is a sales approach that focuses on providing seamless customer experience across all of your sales channels, whether the customer is shopping from a smartphone, a personal computer or directly in your cannabis retail store. Customer relationship management and marketing channels work together with these sales channels to improve customer experience and customer retention."
Why are Omni-Channel Sales So Important for Cannabis Retail?
It is important to meet your customers where they shop, as opposed to forcing them into a narrow customer journey. A Harvard Business Review study indicated that 73% of customers shop using multiple channels during their customer journey. Providing the customer with more flexibility throughout the ordering process leads to more sales and traffic both in your cannabis retail store and online.
Omni-channel sales also greatly improve customer loyalty. A consistent brand experience across multiple sales channels results in repeat visits to your website and/or your brick-and-mortar shop, as well as a higher rate of recommendations to friends and family.
One of the most important aspects of an omni-channel strategy is that it allows you to make informed decisions based upon your own proprietary sales data. When you can easily see where your customers shop (online only? always for express pick-up or delivery? a mix of in-store and online?), it helps you better understand your customer demographics. Armed with more data about who your customers are and how they like to shop, you can then strategize on how to best market to these different segments of shoppers, and craft marketing campaigns to help re-engage with different segments of your customer base.
Meadow Makes Omni-Channel Sales And Dispensary Inventory Management Simple
The true power of Meadow is in our connected cannabis retail software; you can easily get insight into your entire operation and put your data to work to help grow your business.
With Meadow, from a single inventory reception via a Purchase Order, you instantly make products available for purchase across any or all of your dispensary sales channels: in-store, online ordering, delivery, pickup, Weedmaps, etc. If you want to offer a product as available in-store, but not on Weedmaps (i.e. a penny pre-roll next to the register), with the click of a button you can hide it from your Weedmaps menu. It's easy to decide where products will appear.
With each sale, your inventory automatically updates in every single sales channel, with no manual labor required.
Every customer who places an order has their information directly populated within Meadow's native CRM (customer relationship management software), where you can offer loyalty points or add them to a customer group for future automatic discounts.
Over time, this collection of CRM data continues to become more valuable to dispensaries, as it gives you real data about your consumers (average basket sizes, frequency of purchases, which sales channels they use, which categories they typically buy, and more).
Where you're really able to make gains and increase your ROI is when you're able to put this historic customer and sales data to work. With a built-in cannabis marketing suite in the same platform, you can segment your customers based on different layers of information like average basket size, categories, loyalty points and send targeted text marketing campaigs. These campaigns funnel customers directly back into your sales channels, helping you boost ROI and customer retention by keeping them happy and sending them relevant deals and discounts and VIP access that feels tailored to their needs and wants.
With Meadow's connected dispensary software, you unlock a complete set of revenue streams with in-store POS, online ordering, pick-up, and cannabis delivery in one simple-to-use platform. Smart workflows and fewer clicks to navigate the system mean everyone from budtenders to managers and accountants are happier when they upgrade to Meadow's streamlined dispensary software solution, built specifically for California's unique cannabis compliance requirements.
