Brad Bogus

2024 Yearly Planning for Retail Cannabis Dispensaries

Look, we see you. Almost no one has their 2024 yearly planning done by the end of January. It just is what it is.

You’re likely still in the throes of planning, or rounding out the end of the process. For those that are already done, ok overachievers! Calm down.

However, evaluating who your tech partners are going to be for the year is often part of that process. So, we want to help you figure out who your partners in marketing and inventory purchasing tech should be this year.

Marketing - Delivery Rates

Do you know the delivery rate of your text marketing from December?

One of our sales people just talked with an unhappy customer leaving another cannabis text marketing platform where they were getting only 10% of their messages delivered. 

10%. 

Of course, they were paying for every message sent because of the way the other platforms charge.

We know most people don’t enjoy math, but we’re going to walk you through a simple equation because it’s clear and revealing.

Are you paying for undelivered messages? How much? Let’s find out.

How many texts did you get charged for in December? Write it down. Also write down your total fee paid to send those texts.

Next, write your delivery rate under it. 

Now write this number down: 75% delivery rate. 

That’s the number that the average retailer using Happy Marketers achieved in December of 2023.

There are so many fluctuations in the market that cause rates to change from month to month, so we chose the most recent month from which to pull that data. However, you can see how we’ve transparently shared our delivery rates plenty over the last 3 months by going through our blog or LinkedIn page.

Ok, now we subtract our delivery rate (75%) from 100%, which leaves 25%. Write it down.

Multiply your sent messages fee in December by that percentage. That’s what you’ll save monthly in send fees if you’re an average Happy Cabbage client.

One last equation, we promise. 

Subtract your delivery rate from ours. Multiply the remaining % by your total texts sent in December. What was the answer?

Would you like to see that many more messages delivered for less money?

Ok, we get it, you didn’t write that down. Here’s an example:

100,000 texts sent

50% of them delivered

$5,000 spent

25% of $5,000 = $1,250 saved monthly

75% - 50% = 25% more messages delivered

25% of 100,000 = 25,000 more messages delivered

Bottom line, we are more effective in both delivering your messages and in generating powerful revenue and ROI. One must ensure the most amount of companies are getting messages delivered to generate strong revenue, after all.

Below is the distribution of delivery rates that Happy Cabbage customers achieved in December. 

You’ll see the majority of them are achieving over 75%, with 86% of them achieving over a 50% delivery rate.

a graph representing the percentage of Happy Cabbage customers using Happy Marketeres for their dispensary text and email marketing alongside their respective delivery rates

Very few of our customers get below a 50% delivery. Even fewer are seeing very low delivery rates. When they do, we work with them, hand-in-hand, to help raise those rates and see more revenue. In fact, we have to, as we eat the cost of undelivered messages.

If you’re sick of not getting your texts delivered at these rates, and you’re sick of paying for messages that don’t make it to their destination, let’s talk now, before your yearly plans are locked in.

Inventory Purchasing

How do you plan to tackle better inventory management this year? Want to know where the biggest cash opportunity in retail cannabis is?

Excess inventory locking up immense amounts of money on your shelf. We see stores that easily free up hundreds of thousands of dollars in overstocked, aging, or worthless inventory.

There are a number of questions to ask about how inventory is stocked in your stores and what kind of money you might be able to free up that is currently locked up on the shelf.

The one to ask, first and foremost is: How are you making purchasing decisions at the store level?

What we see most often is someone exporting a weekly inventory report from their POS, evaluating how many items of each SKU was purchased over that week, and for items in low or out of stock, then reordering by the amount sold in the week.

There are problems lurking behind this process, however! Here’s a quick (and overly simple) example of one that we see all the time, where weekly data gives you the wrong conclusion when weighed against daily data:

  1. WEEKLY data will show you that you sold 7 units of Wyld gummies in a week.
  2. Naturally, you'll probably restock another 7-10 units to keep from going out of stock next week.
  3. DAILY data will show you that you sold 3 units on Sunday, 4 units on Monday, and were out of stock for the remainder of the week.
  4. DAILY data will show you that you might sell ~3.5 units a day, and your reorder should actually be another 25 packs for the week to keep from going out of stock and to fulfill demand.
  5. DAILY data will update that avg. as you move through the week, accounting for high sales days and slow days.

Keeping that daily average in mind helps you monitor for fluctuations like seasonality, weekend upticks, discounts on a brand, etc.

As you plan for how to increase your sales and decrease the amount of cash you have locked up in excess or aging inventory, ask yourself how you can scale up your operation to manage your data on a daily basis?

For most, it requires hiring a full time data analyst. 

Even using some of the leading data companies out there to manage this process is cumbersome and requires an employee highly proficient in data analysis to achieve the right insights.

This is what Happy Buyers is built to do. We identify massive revenue opportunities in your inventory. We provide you a true representation of your inventory data and help you meet demand exactly, as well as help you reduce bloated inventory.

Using a tool like Happy Buyers to manage this process can easily free up $10’s of thousands a month in your store’s inventory. The financial opportunity of intelligently managing inventory and restocking is larger than we can calculate. Some stores have hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory every year just locked up on the shelves.

So, do you know how much cash you have on those shelves ready to reinvest back into your business?

Reach out to us and see the power of this tool and to see the data for yourself.

Learn how Happy Cabbage can help you make more money in the most effective way possible.

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