Email Marketing Best Practices For Cannabis Brands
If you’ve spent more than two seconds on social media, you’ve probably noticed the algorithm isn’t exactly in our favor at the moment. Many of us with high-value canna-brands are finding ourselves having to “dumb things down” or create trending videos just to get eyes on our content, which sucks.
But this is also a reminder to us small business owners that our social audience is borrowed, and if we want to show up more authentically for our audience, we need to find new ways to communicate our offers.
Which brings us to email marketing — a direct line to a warm audience who wants and needs your offer. But like all things in cannabis, there are rules we need to abide by if we want to avoid our accounts getting burned.
Here’s our list of the best email marketing practices that cannabis brands can follow to scale their email list in 2026:
Use a cannabis friendly email marketing platform
Implementing email marketing best practices begins with using a cannabis friendly platform. Because there’s nothing more terrifying than losing your list and hard-earned sequences because you forgot to read the fine print.
Our most-used and most-recommended cannabis email platform is Klaviyo. Not only does it openly welcome cannabis brands, but it also has the best tools for segmentation, A/B testing and data collection. Second on the list is Flodesk, another canna-friendly platform, with a slightly lower price tag. Our third most frequently-used platform is Kit.
There are others out there, but we only recommend products we’ve used firsthand. Feel free to check out our breakdown on Klaviyo vs Flodesk for cannabis brands for more deets.
Use double opt-in
Nobody likes being forced to subscribe to an email list, which is why we want to make sure they’re “opting in.” So, what about double opt-in? Well, double opt-in is the process of giving your client two options to confirm their agreement to join your email list.
There are a few ways you can set up a double opt-in for your cannabis brand:
- Send a confirmation email to their account after they sign up for your list, asking them to click a link to confirm their signup.
- Setting up an incentivized double opt-in by promising a lead magnet and offering it only after the client clicks the confirmation link.
- Using a confirmation button or email that sends users to a separate page where they can choose their content preferences.
Segment Your Audience
Next on the list, and arguably the most important practice in any email marketing strategy, is segmenting your audience. If you’re new to email marketing, that means creating various lists of subscribers based on different behaviors.
For example, you may have different audiences based on lead gen forms, click rates, location, buyer behavior and more, which allows you to create hyper-specific offers and cater to your audience’s preferences.
The earlier you jump on this, the better, because segmenting a massive email list is quite the tedious task. Been there, done that. 10/10 don’t recommend it.
Conduct AB Testing Regularly
Every good email marketing strategy comes down to collecting a ton of data and refining things as you go. Why? Well, every audience is different. Some brands have a high success rate with insanely long emails that read like novels, while others do well with image-based emails and minimal text.
Some things to consider AB testing in your cannabis email marketing include:
- Email subject lines
- Short vs longer emails with the same CTA
- Different types of CTA copy
- Email formatting and design
- Send dates and times
- Media formatting (static images vs. GIFs and videos)
The only way to find out what your audience responds well to is to test things over time, document the results and keep pushing forward.
Optimize for Different Devices
Just like a website, emails need to be optimized for responsiveness, meaning they should look good on desktop, tablets and mobile devices. This is relatively easy to do but if you’re sending highly stylized emails, you’ll need to be more careful that everything translates correctly.
Another best practice for email marketing is to consider how your email will look in dark vs light mode. Studies show that over 80% of tech users prefer dark mode on their devices, which means the colors and icons you’re inserting into your emails might not translate well. Be sure to test this out before clicking send!
Send More Than Just Sales Emails
Getting bombarded with sales emails is sort of like being harassed by an ex-lover. Even though you’re clearly not interested, the messages just keep comin’. And eventually, you hit ’em with a swift block, or in this case, an unsubscribe.
If you don’t want your audience to be annoyed with your emails, the best thing to do is give them a variety of content to chew on.
Some of our favorite emails to send are:
- Welcome Series
- Educational Emails
- Exclusive Insights
- Newsletters and Company News
- Freebies
- Founder Led Emails
- Case Studies and Client Wins
Best Email Practices Pro Tip: Set your flows up to include a variation of emails, with your hard-selling offers toward the end of the flow. This way, your audience will be fully warmed up before you ask them to pull out their wallet.
Set Email Subscriber Expectations Early
When someone subscribes to your email list, it’s always best practice to hit ‘em with a welcome series that congratulates/thanks them for joining your inner circle and lets them know what they can expect from you.
Setting email subscriber expectations early can help reduce unsubscribe rates and weed out the people who never wanted to be there in the first place.
A good rule of thumb is to send at least three emails in your welcome series, but depending on your business and how much information you have to cover, it may be better to send five or more. Smaller, more frequent emails can be easier to digest than a 1,000-word novel.
Personalize Subject Lines and Content
One of the best cannabis email marketing practices to date is personalization. Research shows that personalizing an email subject line can increase open rates by nearly 29% and click-through rates as much as 41%!
You can also add personalization throughout your email body. Once at the beginning of the email to call out your reader, and a few more times further down the page to keep them engaged.
Follow GDPR/CAN-SPAM and State/Local Cannabis compliance email marketing rules
It should come as no surprise that there are quite a few compliance rules to follow when it comes to email marketing — especially for us cannabis brands who are already walking somewhat of a gray line.
GDPR (EU) requires explicit consent before sending any emails to your subscribers. And you don’t have to live in the EU for this to apply. It’s the internet, and just about anyone can access your site at any time, so be sure to comply!
CAN-SPAM (US) does allow for brands to send unsolicited commercial emails without prior permission…but is it considered an email marketing best practice? We’d say absolutely not. Regardless, you need to make sure that it’s easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe at any time.
There’s quite a bit more info to cover, and we don’t want to bore you. But if you’re interested in learning more, here are the links for the official GDPR and the CAN-SPAM websites.
And of course, you should always follow cannabis advertising and marketing compliance rules for your state and local area. This is crucial for not getting shut down or facing legal issues.
Bring in the cannabis email marketing pros
We’ll be blunt… It sounds like a lot because it is. Understanding the best email marketing practices for cannabis brands is a huge undertaking. If you have the time to buckle down and slay the dragon, do it. But if you’ve got better things to do, which you probably do, you can hire us to handle it for you. Don’t worry, we’re team players, which means we’ll game you up on canna-email knowledge and collaborate with you fully to make sure your campaigns are nothin’ short of DOPE.
Have questions? We’ve got answers. Check out our email marketing packages and if you’re into it, book a free call to find out how we can be of service!