CBD Marketing: Get New Customers in 30 Days [Email Strategy]
Let’s examine the most popular email strategy of 2020 that’s used by CBD giants to easily get new customers and why you should start using it too.
1. Who Is Buying CBD Products? (Stressed Out Millennials)
CBD is in a tricky place right now. Despite its legalization, banks, investors, and the largest advertising platforms are still on the fence about it. And while all of that is expected to change, there are still many hoops for CBD businesses to jump through when seeking to market and spread the word of their products.
If you’re also part of the industry and cashing in on the “Green Rush” but not really sure how to market CBD products effectively and legally, then you need to ask yourself — Who’s your target audience?
Although CBD is enticing a diverse group of people from different ages ( heck even pets are using it) we need to focus only on people that are already interested in and consuming CBD.
The largest CBD market research conducted by Brightfield Group shows that:
“The biggest consumer segment that stood out from this survey are “stressed out millennials,” ranging in age from 21 to 35, who are using CBD products for anxiety, depression, and insomnia.”
Of course, the leading CBD companies know this and they too are fighting for this group of people.
2. Top Marketing Channels for CBD Advertising
Since we know the most profitable market segment, let’s see what marketing channels are usually used to reach these people.
Facebook & Google Ads
You can advertise CBD’s on Facebook & Google, you just can’t advertise CBD’s on Facebook or Google!
To do this you need to NOT focus on CBD. Don’t include anything about CBD in the ad copy or imagery and instead, focus on what CBD does — the problems your product solves — the ailments it helps — while never mentioning what it is. Fill your landing pages with the benefits of CBD without advertising CBD, and you’re set.
An approach like this works only for companies with huge advertising budgets since we’re not talking about direct call to action, but instead promoting informative content and praying that it’s good enough for people to convert into customers by themselves. Let’s not forget the risk of having your social or ad account suspended or banned.
3. Email Marketing for CBD Brands — The Overlooked Opportunity
Since paid ads are challenging for CBD brands, many marketers pushed whole businesses in the direction of email marketing, which is a safer and more effective route to go down.
Reports show that more than 60% of B2B marketers believe that email is the most effective form of revenue generation. Additionally, 80% of B2C professionals say that email marketing aids them with customer retention, much better than any other form of digital marketing.
Unfortunately, traditional-digital marketing has always seen email as a way of building/strengthening relationships with existing customers at a very low cost. Monthly newsletters, promo emails of new product lines, or brand reminders are the most common tactics used in email marketing. And they are being used because it’s guaranteed steady cash flow. But an organization cannot grow only on the back of its existing customer base.
Most businesses use only a fraction of the true potential of email as a channel because they believe there is nothing else to do via email other than communicating with existing customers. So to acquire new customers they turn to Google and Facebook ads, which is practically beating their heads against a wall.
But, in recent years we’ve seen a strategy shift among the biggest CBD players, investing in email marketing for growing their market share.
4. How CBD Giants Use Email Marketing to Grow Their Market Share
There are countless strategies online for getting newsletter subscribers, indicating that it’s very hard to get people excited about your brand/product. It’s 10 times harder to get email subscribers for CBD products due to the same legal limitations mentioned before.
So how are big players managing to grow their share using only email marketing?
By purchasing email lists of people that are already interested in or consuming CBD products.
Let be briefly explain how the process of ordering such lists goes:
- The business lays out certain criteria that every person (email) must meet.
- It’s our job to find people that belong it that niche and get their emails
- Next, remove spam traps, catch-all emails, or invalid ones from the list
- Data enrichment with NeverBounce
- Deliver the emails in less than 48 hours, ready to be used
There are very good reasons to use email marketing for CBD products. Everyone uses email daily, the legal concerns are non-existent compared to other platforms, and they get to use the most successful channel to promote their products in front of a relevant audience. Under “relevant audience”, I’m talking about the “stressed out millennials” that are currently the most profitable CBD market.
Getting Emails of Stressed Out Millennials
With over 1 billion monthly active users (130 million of them coming from the US), Instagram belongs to the top 5 social networks worldwide. Can you guess the age range most Instagram users belong to? Yes, it’s 21 to 35, corresponding with the age of the “stressed out millennials”.
Not everyone knows this but 25–35% of all Instagram users have their email addresses publicly displayed on their profiles. The essence of Influencers.club is to extract all of these public emails from Instagram, and find the right people that a CBD business would want to contact.
How to Find Potential CBD Customers on Instagram
Almost every CBD business that reached out to us wants to get the email addresses of people that follow their CBD competitors on Instagram. It’s a simple win-win strategy since you’re getting emails of people that are interested in CBD & who can easily be converted into customers + your competition loses market share.
We also scrape Instagram hashtags for email addresses. Meaning, we can see everyone that’s used #cbdoil (or any other relevant hashtag) in their posts, crawl them, and get their emails. Pretty amazing right?
Here are a few hashtags that we’ve gone over.
Another approach that we’ve seen is to go after the followers of Instagram influencers that have content related to CBD.
Here are some Instagram influencers that our clients wanted us to go over and get their followers’ email addresses.
Additionally, we filter the emails for spam traps, bots, invalid emails, and then validate them through NeverBounce. If you’re interested in using the best Instagram email scraper for your CBD business, schedule a free consultation, and see how we can help you get new clients.
5. The Legal Aspects of This Strategy
Every email address that’s publicly available can be used for promotional purposes, as long as you mention in the message where you got the email from. In this case that would be Instagram. Our clients also include people’s Instagram username in the email (which we also provide) to reassure people that they really did get the email from Instagram.
While being a less risky option than advertising CBD on Facebook, Google Ads, or Twitter, marketers must still abide by state and federal laws when executing an email marketing campaign. As usual, you can’t send out emails claiming that CBD is a “cure-all” product because you risk that the FDA will find your product to be an unapproved drug. But that’s pretty much all the concerns one has when using email for CBD promotion.
6. Results You Can Expect From the Approach
The success rate of our data unfortunately depends on the client’s skills to send out mass emails. It’s not as easy as plugging the lists in Gmail and sending out the same message to everyone. That’s how you end up in the spam folder and never get out.
The process of sending bulk emails is covered in another article that you can check out here:
Getting to 2.5M in ARR by Sending 100 000 Cold Emails Per Day
On average our CBD clients got x12 ROI, meaning that for every $ invested in our emails a $12 return was made!
And unlike paying for ads every time you run them, with email lists you can re-engage with the same people as many times as you want and promote your products until they convert into customers. So in our case ROI is not fixed since with every new email campaign to the same email list/people the ROI percentage increases.
Some clients also reported that they use email lists as custom audiences on Facebook. Unfortunately, we don’t know how they’re doing this but their feedback has been positive.
If you want to see a free data sample (that does not consist CBD users) of the 28 data points we have on every contact we provide, you can leave your email address below and we will send it over.
To Sum Up
Attitudes toward cannabis are changing on a global scale and by getting in at the ground floor with innovative CBD strategies you can establish yourself and your brand before the market gets overly saturated.
Right now email marketing is hands down the most profitable and unrestricted channel for cannabis marketing. Even as the legal ducks fall in a row and more digital advertising opportunities arise, email marketing will remain one of the best ways to connect to and sell to your customer base.
If you want to talk with me about getting emails for your use-case, don’t hesitate to book a meeting on my calendar.
Originally published at https://influencers.club on October 2, 2020.
