Panacea Payroll is a payroll processing company and business services solution provider focused on helping companies in the cannabis and hemp industries run their businesses more easily, efficiently, and profitably. With over 30 years of experience, the founders of Panacea Payroll deliver payroll processing, workforce management, and human resources services to businesses operating across the cannabis and hemp supply chains.

To connect with cannabis and hemp license holders throughout the United States, Panacea Payroll subscribes to the Cannabiz Media License Database and uses it to support its sales, marketing, and business development initiatives.

The Problem

Panacea Payroll was wasn’t getting the open rates from their email marketing campaigns that they needed to build brand awareness among cannabis and hemp license holders in order to generate, nurture, and qualify sales leads.

The Solution

Panacea Payroll’s account manager at Cannabiz Media introduced the Cannabiz Media Email Success Team to Owner & President Jennifer Scotese, and she requested that the team complete an email analysis to understand any email marketing areas she was unaware of that Panacea Payroll could improve in for the future. 

After reviewing Panacea Payroll’s email marketing history and results through the Cannabiz Media License Database, the Email Success team met with Jennifer via Zoom to present their findings. 

Through their research, the Email Success Team discovered that a large amount of the email marketing messages Panacea Payroll had been sending were going to recipients’ spam and junk folders rather than inboxes. In fact, Panacea Payroll’s domain reputation was damaged, so the results they’d been getting from their email marketing campaigns were significantly limited.

The Email Success Team identified three key ways to improve Panacea Payroll’s email marketing open rates and results in the future:

1. Complete a domain remediation to rebuild the current sending domain’s reputation or set up a new domain to send future email marketing campaigns.
2. Improve list segmentation so future email campaigns don’t go to recipients who are not interested in payroll services, workforce management, or human resources.
3. Improve copywriting in subject lines and message content to be more relevant and valuable to recipients based on list segmentation.

Implementing the Solution

After digesting the report from the Email Analysis session, Jennifer began implementing the solutions recommended by the Email Success Team to improve her email marketing results. 

1. Complete a Domain Remediation or Set up a New Sending Domain to Improve Deliverability

“We thought we were getting decent open rates,” explains Jennifer. “It wasn’t until the Email Success Team took a look that we found out all of our email to Google users was not even getting to recipients. It was all going to spam.”

The Email Success Team provided Jennifer with deliverability reports for multiple email service providers, which showed her the domain she’d been sending emails from had a damaged reputation. In other words, multiple email service providers no longer trusted her sending domain, so they were sending all or most of her messages to spam or junk folders rather than inboxes.

“For Panacea Payroll, the only way to market in this industry is email through the Cannabiz Media License Database,” shares Jennifer. “You can’t just look up contact information online in this industry. It’s hard to find, so the email marketing tool in the Cannabiz Media License Database is fabulous. It makes it so easy to build a campaign. 

“I thought I’d just make a list and send to 3,000 people or 10,000 people at a time. Not a good idea. I had no idea about Google’s algorithm or that messages are automatically sent to spam. That was a huge eye opener!”

With this new information in hand, Panacea Payroll decided to start sending email marketing messages from a new domain so they could build a positive domain reputation and improve deliverability. 

2. Segment Lists into Targeted Audiences and Exclude Uninterested Recipients

Panacea Payroll had been sending email marketing campaigns to large lists of diverse recipients. As a result, many people who were not likely to be interested in payroll processing, workforce management, and human resources received the company’s email messages. Based on Panacea Payroll’s engagement results for those campaigns and its damaged domain reputation, many of those recipients reacted negatively when they received those campaigns.

To solve the problem and protect Panacea Payroll’s new domain reputation going forward, the Email Success Team recommended a variety of list segmentation opportunities using the filtering criteria available in the Cannabiz Media License Database to ensure only the most interested people will receive future messages.

“We were sending our messages to everybody with a license regardless of their role,” shares Jennifer. “With the help of the Email Success Team, I realized that was not smart because someone in purchasing doesn’t care about payroll. Someone in inventory or the science officer doesn’t care about payroll. They care about getting paid, but they don’t care about and aren’t making the decision about payroll. Learning about segmentation and finding out what I was doing incorrectly was a huge benefit.”

With the insights from the Email Success Team, Jennifer set out to improve her list segmentation. She explains, “I focus more on roles and certain states Panacea Payroll wants to be in or target. Now, we take purchasing managers, inventory managers, science officers, and so on out of our lists. I segment by job titles and weed out irrelevant roles, which is good because before, those are definitely the contacts who unsubscribed or marked the message as spam because they don’t care about the content. Segmentation was a big thing for us.”

3. Improve Copywriting in Subject Line and Content to Improve Audience Relevancy

Cannabiz Media’s Email Success Team also discussed recommendations to improve copywriting in Panacea Payroll’s email message subject lines and content to boost open rates, clicks, and positive engagement, which would help them get better results and protect their domain reputation in the future.

“Before, our messages were too salesy, which I didn’t realize,” says Jennifer. “I wanted to talk about us, but the Email Success Team taught me I needed to shift my mindset to educate recipients first. I don’t like to be sold to. The emails I get that are straight sales, I get rid of. Now, I get it, and I don’t want to be doing that anymore. 

“I try to make our messages educational now, which has also helped us build the content on our website, newsletter, and blogs. Whatever I publish on the website, I try to link the email to our site, so recipients can visit and say, ‘Hey, this is what they do.’ That was the first hurdle, so the biggest difference now is our messages are either educational or informational.”

Jennifer also worked closely with the Email Success Team after the Email Analysis session to improve the copywriting in her message subject lines and content. She shares, “The messages I would put together would have been okay, but just a couple little suggestions from the Email Success Team would make a huge difference to our results.”

The Email Success Team also recommended free tools that Panacea Payroll could use to learn to write better subject line and email copy, which Jennifer has been using to consistently improve her open rates and positive engagement with the messages she sends. “I didn’t even know the tools that the Email Success Team recommended existed, but they just make things easier.” 

The Results

With a new domain and better domain reputation, targeted list segmentation, and improved subject lines and message copywriting, Panacea Payroll’s email marketing open rates through the Cannabiz Media License Database jumped 14X higher.

Prior to implementing the solutions recommended by the Email Success Team, most of Panacea Payroll’s email marketing campaigns were getting open rates between 4% and 6%. Now, open rates for most campaigns are between 50% and 58%. 

“I was like, ‘Wow, you can actually get open rates like that,’” says Jennifer. “It’s thanks to the Email Success Team who helped me tweak the content and more. Aside from the license information I get from the Cannabiz Media License Database, the most valuable thing to us is the help and guidance from the Email Success Team.”

Panacea Payroll’s website traffic has also gone up since they improved their email marketing. Jennifer shares, “We’re getting much higher clicks to our website, which I think is just because of the emails we send to people. I can tell they’re actually clicking on the links in those messages.”

Jennifer and the team at Panacea Payroll aren’t done making improvements to their email marketing. “It gets easier each time,” Jennifer explains. “You don’t have to fix everything all at once. Once you take a breath and take your time to go through everything the Email Success Team recommends, it’s not too overwhelming. I’ve been focusing on a few key things and implementing things in little bits.” 

With open rates already 14X higher, Panacea Payroll is on track to continue getting great results from email marketing via the Cannabiz Media License Database!

To learn more about how the Cannabiz Media License Database and the Email Success Team can help you connect with cannabis and hemp license holders like Panacea Payroll, schedule a demo today.