Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect with cannabis and hemp license holders and businesses. However, if you’re not effectively segmenting your email list in order to send the most relevant marketing messages and offers, your results will suffer.

Research shows that segmented email campaigns get 100.95% more clicks and 14.31% more opens than campaigns that aren’t segmented for specific target audiences. In fact, marketers have experienced an increase of 760% in email marketing revenue from the segmented campaigns they send to targeted audiences.

To help you get started, following is an introduction to key segmentation strategies that B2B email marketers can use when crafting messages for the cannabis and hemp industries.

3 Key Segmentation Strategies

All segmentation strategies rely on data, so you need to use the right tools in order to extract useful data about the people on your email list, Without the right data, you can’t effectively target leads and market to them. The three most popular and effective segmentation strategies are demographic, behavioral, and psychographic.

Demographic Segmentation

Demographic segmentation involves segmenting your email list based on population statistics. Some of the criteria B2B email marketers in the cannabis industry can use to segment lists using demographic information include factors like location, occupation or position, type of business, business revenue, age, gender, income, education status, and so on.

Of course, not all demographic data is useful to every marketer, so you need to determine which factors are the best for you to focus on to build targeted lists for your purposes.

‍Put the Strategy into Action: If you’re trying to connect with cannabis license holders to sell your products or services to businesses operating within the marijuana industry, there are several ways you can use the data within the Cannabiz Media License Database to segment your audience and create laser-targeted email lists for specific, high-converting campaigns.

For example, if your business sells a product like a point-of-sale software tool, display products, or security products, you could use the targeting features within the Cannabiz Media License Database to create a list of dispensaries and retailers with active licenses that are located in specific geographic areas.

As another example, if you’re trying to sell a product or service to licensed cannabis cultivators, you could target based on factors like size of canopy, type of lighting used, whether the facility is an indoor or outdoor grow environment, number of employees, and more.

There are dozens of criteria to segment your list using the Cannabiz Media License Database and even more combinations to create the best performing list possible.

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Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation focuses on segmenting your email list based on specific actions that people have taken with your previous email messages, website, online ads, and more.

For example, people who open your email messages are definitely interested in your content, and are viable leads. People who actually clicked on links inside your messages are likely to be even more interested and can be considered marketing qualified leads (MQL). People who clicked on a link to buy or contact you are probably in the final stages of the buyer journey and very hot sales qualified leads (SQL)! 

Therefore, it makes sense to target these engaged people on your list with personalized messages that are tailored to their wants and needs based on their previous behaviors.

‍Put the Strategy into Action: There are many ways to target cannabis and hemp license holders based on their engagement with messages you send, but you do need to track their engagement in order to develop segmented and personalized campaigns to send to the right people at the right times.

For instance, it’s easy to identify your hottest leads in the Cannabiz Media License Database based on their previous behaviors and create a targeted email list to market to them. Tags allow you to track who opened or clicked on your message, find engaged contacts, and push contacts through the marketing funnel with hyper-relevant messages and offers.

You can even create tags to track specific behaviors and boost your email marketing ROI even higher. After you’ve tracked engagement over the course of several email campaigns, you can score your leads to determine what to send them next. 

Earn Your Free Email Marketing Data & Lead Scoring Specialist Certification from Cannabiz Media and become an expert at tracking results and scoring leads to maximize ROI!

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation involves targeting people based on psychological attributes such as attitude, opinions, goals, and personal preferences. This is the most difficult data to obtain, but it can be very useful in targeting people with the best messages to move them to action.

‍Putting the Strategy into Action: Targeting by psychographic criteria is more complex than demographic or behavioral targeting, and it requires analysis to segment using this type of data. Fortunately, there are some ways to do it using the Cannabiz Media License Database.

As an example, if you’re selling accounting services to cannabis license holders, you can track how people engage with the email marketing campaigns you send over time to determine which topics they’re most interested in. 

For example, you could segment dispensary contacts who show an interest in payroll topics (because they’ve opened prior messages and/or clicked links about payroll) separately from dispensary contacts who show an interest in tax topics. You can then send each audience more messages and useful content related to the topics that they’re most interested. This is a much more effective strategy than annoying them with messages about topics that they’ve already shown they’re not interested in based on their previous lack of engagement.

The goal is to keep your brand top-of-mind for the right reasons and help guide leads through the buyer journey. You can’t reach that goal if you’re not sending messages that people want! 

Pay attention to what they’re interested in by tracking results and using tags in the Cannabiz Media License Database to create highly targeted lists. Once your lists are made, you can create personalized content for each audience that drives the results you want.

Earn Your Free Email Marketing Content Certification from Cannabiz Media and become an expert at writing and designing highly successful email marketing campaigns!

Key Takeaways about Email List Segmentation for the Cannabis Industry

Email list segmentation is one of the best ways to improve your brand’s reputation among cannabis and hemp license holders and boost your email marketing results. The key is to create laser-focused audience groups and send each prospect the most personalized message possible. Remember, the best email message won’t convert if the wrong people see it.

Want to learn more about how subscribing to the Cannabiz Media License Database can improve your email marketing results to cannabis and hemp license holders in the U.S. and international markets? Schedule a demo to see it in action!

Originally published 7/14/20. Updated 2/24/23.