How We Recovered $359,760 In Lost Dispensary Revenue In 6 Months
(With $0 Ad Spend and
0 New Customers)
Last updated on March 4, 2025
We used the 4-part strategy in this post to generate $359,760 in revenue in 6 months without spending a penny on ads.
Before you read this full case study…
If you don’t have the bandwidth to write regular emails and/or send SMS messages to recover revenue from customers who haven’t shopped in 60+ days, but would like someone you can trust to do it for you…our team can create the type of campaigns shown in this case study.
Our service includes:
- Identifying your lost revenue
- Creating the campaigns for you
- Tracking and optimizing campaigns to maximize revenue
To be fair, this strategy doesn’t work for all dispensaries.
Our best results come from stores that:
- Average $300k+ monthly revenue
- Have a database of at least 3,000 customer email addresses
- Have been open at least six months
- Have a CRM w/ messaging (e.g. Alpine IQ, SpringBig)
The kicker to this entire strategy:
This is all done without adding a single new customer.
In full transparency, this model was created because I needed an offer to reach out to my prospective clients that would:
- Get results quickly
- Produce a no-brainer ROI
Now, it’s not a new concept to get new clients to trust you by getting them smaller results upfront so that they’ll trust you with bigger initiatives.
BUT, what makes the model I’m about to show you so powerful is that, when you implement it correctly, it will fund more marketing initiatives, in-store projects, inventory, increase enterprise value, or wherever you need a quick influx of cash.
So, let’s jump in.
Our client is in a very competitive market, and had two major problems:
The 10X Problem
First-time customers only accounted for 16% of monthly revenue.
Yet, our client was spending 10X more on acquiring new customers than maximizing existing ones.
Not great.
The 50% Problem
50%.
That’s the chance a new customer at any dispensary will come back again.
It’s called “First Time Churn Rate”.
In other words, it’s simply the amount of customers that do NOT purchase a second time.
They only come in once, and they vanish into the wind.
Our client was no exception with 46% of customers never making a second purchase.
They were essentially flipping a coin as to whether or not they’d see a new customer again.
Also, not great.
Our Challenge
Add new revenue without adding a single new customer or spending a single dollar on ads.
While we have key metrics that help us along the way (retention rate, reactivation rate, purchase frequency, etc.) our #1 KPI was revenue.
And by revenue, I mean only the revenue generated by our campaigns.
While it’s true that all marketing works together, we only take ownership of the revenue we can track as a direct result of our work.
Disclaimer: This entire strategy only works if you have proper tracking in place.
It may sound harsh, but nothing you do from this point forward will matter without it.
You’ve already lost.
TRACKING IS WHAT DRIVES EVERYTHING GOOD MARKETERS DO.
It is the only way we know what is working.
Would you buy a used car without looking at the mileage?
Would you blindly buy a stock without looking at the ticker?
Would you know you needed to lose weight without stepping on a scale?
Of course not.
We have to measure every marketing activity we do.
And based on collected data, we make decisions to make our campaigns better and better and better…
So, here’s what we did:
Step 1 – Segment Customers
Here is a HUGE problem I see over and over again.
First off, most dispensaries do not regularly communicate with their customers, whether it be via email or text messages.
For those that do, they deliver the same message regardless of the customer profile.
What do I mean by “customer profile?”
We’ve analyzed millions of cannabis retail transactions, and three clear cannabis customer profiles consistently emerge across the board:
Loyal Customers
- Customers who have purchased more than 5 times
- Shopped within the last 30 days
- Opted-in for email and/or SMS communications
Why they’re important: Loyal Customers are everything. They make up your solid base of revenue, they’re your most frequent customers, and they tend to stay active at your store as long as you continue to take care of and nurture them.
First-Timers
- Have only made one purchase
- ***For most dispensaries, 50% of customers will only visited once.***
Why they’re important: New customers drive revenue growth, offset customer attrition, and expand customer base.
Semi-Regulars
- Customers who have purchased more than once
- Shopped within the last 60 days
- May or may not have opted-in for email and/or SMS communications
Why they’re important: Semi-regulars make up the bulk of a dispensaries customer base as well as the biggest percentage of revenue.
Here is our client’s breakdown for one month before we launched our campaigns:
In a perfect world, we could ascend every First-Timer to a Semi-Regular, then to a Loyal Customer.
But, 100% of your customer base will never be made up of only Loyal Customers – it’s just not going to happen.
The good news…we can greatly increase the number of customers in our more profitable customer profiles.
Which, obviously increases overall revenue.
Step 2 – Identify “Lost Customers”
These are the customers who have not made a purchase in over 60 days.
They are no longer contributing to your store’s revenue.
They are not buying anything…
But, we can get some of them back.
You can easily find who the Lost Customers are in your CRM – Alpine IQ, SpringBig, etc. will usually spit out a report in a few clicks.
Now, up until this point, those Lost Customers were 99% unlikely to come back.
Meaning every month, only about 1% come back on their own.
So, it was our mission to bring back as many as we could.
Here’s what most stores will do:
Blast 30% discounts at everyone (including Lost Customers) regardless of how they shop.
Here’s the problem:
Your Loyal Customers already like and trust you – they don’t need a deal to come back.
Semi-Regulars want quick service and predictable menu offerings when they come back, not another promotion in their inbox.
First-timers likely just received a discount on their first purchase (hopefully not, but that is typically what we see), so they don’t need to be further conditioned to only buy with discounts.
Save the deep discounts for the Lost Customers on the products they actually want.
If you don’t properly follow Step #1 and segment your customers…
You’re giving discounts to people who aren’t asking for them.
In other words, you’re giving away revenue.
Now, understanding what each customer profile wants isn’t complicated – more on that below.
Nor is segmenting your customers into those three buckets (first-timers, semi-regulars, and loyal customers).
Do both, and you’ll be ahead of 95% of your competitors.
So, what do Lost Customers want?
They already told us.
They have a buying history with us.
Again, we segmented the customers.
Only this time, we did it by product category:
- Flower
- Edibles
- Concentrates
- Pre-rolls
- Vapes
- Topicals
- Tinctures
Here’s why this is so powerful…
I play a lot of golf, so over the years I’ve bought a lot of stuff from a lot of different stores.
Most send me an email here and there.
But, the one company’s emails that get me to buy more than any other is Vice Golf.
They make golf balls, clubs, and apparel.
I’ve never bought anything but balls from them, so guess what all their emails to me are about?
You guessed it.
Golf balls.
And that is exactly what I buy from them.
So, why send a blanket email about the latest and greatest flower to customers who have “told” us with their wallets that they prefer edibles or vapes?
Those customers don’t want to smoke.
Those customers aren’t as seasoned.
Those customers shop very differently.
The messages have to be different or they won’t land.
We knew that if we tried to talk to everybody the same way, we’d end up talking to nobody.
So, let’s talk to them…
Step 3 – Re-engage the “Lost Customers”
At this point, we had identified the Lost Customers, so we knew exactly who we were targeting.
And which product category each customer was buying most.
But, there was another challenge:
Our client had 112,076 Lost Customers, but only had contact information for 17,308 of them.
So, we could only direct our campaigns to 17,308 Lost Customers instead of well over 100k.
If you only get one thing from this case study, it’s this:
Get those emails!
Our next step was to reach out to the 17,308 Lost Customers with a simple email you can use:
The 98-Word Email That Converts:
If you decide to implement this, you’ll need to edit it slightly, so it makes sense for your brand.
Now, the email looks very simple (and it is), but there are actually a few psychological things going on here.
Three things that made this email successful:
- We personalized it with each customer’s name so it was immediately recognizable.
- We discounted a product each customer had previously bought so they were much more likely to make a repeat purchase.
- We put an expiration date on the offer to create scarcity.
Step 4 – Tracking, Testing & Optimizing
Good marketing is boring.
The branding, copy, and design are the sexy part of marketing.
BUT, the data is what steers the ship.
Here is what we tracked:
- Customer engagement
- Open Rate – the percent of customers who opened the email
- Click Thru Rate – the percent of customers who clicked on the link inside the email
- A/B Testing – we sent two versions of each email
- Which subject lines had a higher open rate?
- Which copy had a higher click thru rate?
- Customer purchases – how many customers made a purchase – by far, our most important metric.
Important: We used a 4-day attribution model to ensure our reporting was accurate.
In other words, sales were only be counted for an email if a customer makes a purchase within 4 days of receiving it.
Typically, when it comes to marketing, the first 30 days of any campaign are primarily for testing.
It doesn’t matter how many times we do this, every market is different.
And every store is different.
We were pleased that we were able to recover 482 Lost Customers and $25,248 in new revenue in Month 1, but the real momentum happens over time.
The Snowball Effect
As you can see from the graph below, each month we were able to significantly increase revenue month over month as we started rolling the snowball down the hill.
As we got our messaging dialed in and engagement grew, each email became more effective, creating a compounding cycle of revenue.
It’s very important to note that once a Lost Customer made a purchase, they were no longer a Lost Customer, so they stopped receiving emails from the recovery campaign.
Once recovered, those customers are put into our retention campaigns to ensure they keep coming back.
For the purposes of this case study, we’re only talking about Lost Customer Recovery.
The 3-5X Tipping Point
For all dispensaries, there is a tipping point for the number of visits required by a customer to become loyal to your store.
That is a very important number.
Depending on your market, that number is between 3 and 5 visits.
Our client had excellent budtenders, so their magic number was 3.
So, that is one more reason to get your Lost Customers back to your store.
The Results
As you saw, we did this with a relatively small group of targetable Lost Customers (17,308) that resulted in an additional $359,760 over a six-month period.
If you’re looking at this from an enterprise value increase, it looks like this:
Multiply $359,760 by 2 to stretch out the campaign to 12 months – $719,520
At just a 2X multiplier, the enterprise value increased to $1.4M and some change.
- And we did it without spending any $$$ on ads.
- Or posting on social media.
- Or putting up billboards.
- Or doing SEO.
- Or brand partnerships.
- Or blog posts.
The best part of this whole strategy?
We did it all by bringing back existing customers who hadn’t shopped in 60+ days – 99% of whom were never coming back.
It’s very much like finding free money.
DISCLAIMER: Results like this are not typical. We’ve been doing this online marketing stuff for 15+ years. We’ve tested a lot of email and text messages, so we know what works. When they do it on their own, most dispensaries are able to recover about 25% of the revenue we’re able to generate.
What You Should Do Now…
Now, if this looks overwhelming to you, or you don’t have the time to implement the strategy, then we may be able to do it for you.
Our agency only specializes in three things, and recovering lost revenue is one of them.
Here’s how it works:
- Give us temporary access to look under the hood (usually AlpineIQ, SpringBig, Dutchie) and we’ll do our in-depth audit.
- Based on our audit, we’ll give you a dollar amount of revenue we’ll be able to recover in the next six months.
- Give us the “GO” and we’re usually launched in 2-3 days.
We even have a performance guarantee that if we don’t hit our quoted revenue amount by six months, we’ll work for free until we do.
We have yet to work for free.
If you’re ready to get started or have any questions, please shoot me an email: ryan@zohrstohr.com
RYAN MCMULLEN
Founder & Owner of Zohr+Stohr Digital
ryan@zohrstohr.com
Contact: ryan@zohrstohr.com
Copyright © 2025 • McMullen Online Enterprises • All Rights Reserved
How We Recovered $436,181 In Lost Dispensary Revenue In 6 Months
(With $0 Ad Spend and
0 New Customers)
Last updated on February 11, 2025
We used the 4-part strategy in this post to generate $359,760 in revenue in 6 months without spending a penny on ads.
Before you read this full case study…
If you don’t have the bandwidth to write regular emails and/or send SMS messages to recover revenue from customers who haven’t shopped in 60+ days, but would like someone you can trust to do it for you…our team can create the type of campaigns shown in this case study.
Our service includes:
- Identifying your lost revenue
- Creating the campaigns for you
- Tracking and optimizing campaigns to maximize revenue
To be fair, this strategy doesn’t work for all dispensaries.
Our best results come from stores that:
- Average $300k+ monthly revenue
- Have a database of at least 3,000 customer email addresses
- Have been open at least six months
- Have a CRM w/ messaging (e.g. Alpine IQ, SpringBig)
The kicker to this entire strategy:
This is all done without adding a single new customer.
In full transparency, this model was created because I needed an offer to reach out to my prospective clients that would:
- Get results quickly
- Produce a no-brainer ROI
Now, it’s not a new concept to get new clients to trust you by getting them smaller results upfront so that they’ll trust you with bigger initiatives.
BUT, what makes the model I’m about to show you so powerful is that, when you implement it correctly, it will fund more marketing initiatives, in-store projects, inventory, increase enterprise value, or wherever you need a quick influx of cash.
So, let’s jump in.
Our client is in a very competitive market, and had two major problems:
The 10X Problem
First-time customers only accounted for 16% of monthly revenue.
Yet, our client was spending 10X more on acquiring new customers than maximizing existing ones.
Not great.
The 50% Problem
50%.
That’s the chance a new customer at any dispensary will come back again.
It’s called “First Time Churn Rate”.
In other words, it’s simply the amount of customers that do NOT purchase a second time.
They only come in once, and they vanish into the wind.
Our client was no exception with 46% of customers never making a second purchase.
They were essentially flipping a coin as to whether or not they’d see a new customer again.
Also, not great.
Our Challenge
Add new revenue without adding a single new customer or spending a single dollar on ads.
While we have key metrics that help us along the way (retention rate, reactivation rate, purchase frequency, etc.) our #1 KPI was revenue.
And by revenue, I mean only the revenue generated by our campaigns.
While it’s true that all marketing works together, we only take ownership of the revenue we can track as a direct result of our work.
Disclaimer: This entire strategy only works if you have proper tracking in place.
It may sound harsh, but nothing you do from this point forward will matter without it.
You’ve already lost.
TRACKING IS WHAT DRIVES EVERYTHING GOOD MARKETERS DO.
It is the only way we know what is working.
Would you buy a used car without looking at the mileage?
Would you blindly buy a stock without looking at the ticker?
Would you know you needed to lose weight without stepping on a scale?
Of course not.
We have to measure every marketing activity we do.
And based on collected data, we make decisions to make our campaigns better and better and better…
So, here’s what we did:
Step 1 – Segment Customers
Here is a HUGE problem I see over and over again.
First off, most dispensaries do not regularly communicate with their customers, whether it be via email or text messages.
For those that do, they deliver the same message regardless of the customer profile.
What do I mean by “customer profile?”
We’ve analyzed millions of cannabis retail transactions, and three clear cannabis customer profiles consistently emerge across the board:
Loyal Customers
- Customers who have purchased more than 5 times
- Shopped within the last 30 days
- Opted-in for email and/or SMS communications
Why they’re important: Loyal Customers are everything. They make up your solid base of revenue, they’re your most frequent customers, and they tend to stay active at your store as long as you continue to take care of and nurture them.
First-Timers
- Have only made one purchase
- ***For most dispensaries, 50% of customers will only visited once.***
Why they’re important: New customers drive revenue growth, offset customer attrition, and expand customer base.
Semi-Regulars
- Customers who have purchased more than once
- Shopped within the last 60 days
- May or may not have opted-in for email and/or SMS communications
Why they’re important: Semi-regulars make up the bulk of a dispensaries customer base as well as the biggest percentage of revenue.
Here is our client’s breakdown for one month before we launched our campaigns:
In a perfect world, we could ascend every First-Timer to a Semi-Regular, then to a Loyal Customer.
But, 100% of your customer base will never be made up of only Loyal Customers – it’s just not going to happen.
The good news…we can greatly increase the number of customers in our more profitable customer profiles.
Which, obviously increases overall revenue.
Step 2 – Identify “Lost Customers”
These are the customers who have not made a purchase in over 60 days.
They are no longer contributing to your store’s revenue.
They are not buying anything…
But, we can get some of them back.
You can easily find who the Lost Customers are in your CRM – Alpine IQ, SpringBig, etc. will usually spit out a report in a few clicks.
Now, up until this point, those Lost Customers were 99% unlikely to come back.
Meaning every month, only about 1% come back on their own.
So, it was our mission to bring back as many as we could.
Here’s what most stores will do:
Blast 30% discounts at everyone (including Lost Customers) regardless of how they shop.
Here’s the problem:
Your Loyal Customers already like and trust you – they don’t need a deal to come back.
Semi-Regulars want quick service and predictable menu offerings when they come back, not another promotion in their inbox.
First-timers likely just received a discount on their first purchase (hopefully not, but that is typically what we see), so they don’t need to be further conditioned to only buy with discounts.
Save the deep discounts for the Lost Customers on the products they actually want.
If you don’t properly follow Step #1 and segment your customers…
You’re giving discounts to people who aren’t asking for them.
In other words, you’re giving away revenue.
Now, understanding what each customer profile wants isn’t complicated – more on that below.
Nor is segmenting your customers into those three buckets (first-timers, semi-regulars, and loyal customers).
Do both, and you’ll be ahead of 95% of your competitors.
So, what do Lost Customers want?
They already told us.
They have a buying history with us.
Again, we segmented the customers.
Only this time, we did it by product category:
- Flower
- Edibles
- Concentrates
- Pre-rolls
- Vapes
- Topicals
- Tinctures
Here’s why this is so powerful…
I play a lot of golf, so over the years I’ve bought a lot of stuff from a lot of different stores.
Most send me an email here and there.
But, the one company’s emails that get me to buy more than any other is Vice Golf.
They make golf balls, clubs, and apparel.
I’ve never bought anything but balls from them, so guess what all their emails to me are about?
You guessed it.
Golf balls.
And that is exactly what I buy from them.
So, why send a blanket email about the latest and greatest flower to customers who have “told” us with their wallets that they prefer edibles or vapes?
Those customers don’t want to smoke.
Those customers aren’t as seasoned.
Those customers shop very differently.
The messages have to be different or they won’t land.
We knew that if we tried to talk to everybody the same way, we’d end up talking to nobody.
So, let’s talk to them…
Step 3 – Re-engage the “Lost Customers”
At this point, we had identified the Lost Customers, so we knew exactly who we were targeting.
And which product category each customer was buying most.
But, there was another challenge:
Our client had 112,076 Lost Customers, but only had contact information for 17,308 of them.
So, we could only direct our campaigns to 17,308 Lost Customers instead of well over 100k.
If you only get one thing from this case study, it’s this:
Get those emails!
Our next step was to reach out to the 17,308 Lost Customers with a simple email you can use:
The 98-Word Email That Converts:
If you decide to implement this, you’ll need to edit it slightly, so it makes sense for your brand.
Now, the email looks very simple (and it is), but there are actually a few psychological things going on here.
Three things that made this email successful:
- We personalized it with each customer’s name so it was immediately recognizable.
- We discounted a product each customer had previously bought so they were much more likely to make a repeat purchase.
- We put an expiration date on the offer to create scarcity.
Step 4 – Tracking, Testing & Optimizing
Good marketing is boring.
The branding, copy, and design are the sexy part of marketing.
BUT, the data is what steers the ship.
Here is what we tracked:
- Customer engagement
- Open Rate – the percent of customers who opened the email
- Click Thru Rate – the percent of customers who clicked on the link inside the email
- A/B Testing – we sent two versions of each email
- Which subject lines had a higher open rate?
- Which copy had a higher click thru rate?
- Customer purchases – how many customers made a purchase – by far, our most important metric.
Important: We used a 4-day attribution model to ensure our reporting was accurate.
In other words, sales were only be counted for an email if a customer makes a purchase within 4 days of receiving it.
Typically, when it comes to marketing, the first 30 days of any campaign are primarily for testing.
It doesn’t matter how many times we do this, every market is different.
And every store is different.
We were pleased that we were able to recover 482 Lost Customers and $25,248 in new revenue in Month 1, but the real momentum happens over time.
The Snowball Effect
As you can see from the graph below, each month we were able to significantly increase revenue month over month as we started rolling the snowball down the hill.
As we got our messaging dialed in and engagement grew, each email became more effective, creating a compounding cycle of revenue.
It’s very important to note that once a Lost Customer made a purchase, they were no longer a Lost Customer, so they stopped receiving emails from the recovery campaign.
Once recovered, those customers are put into our retention campaigns to ensure they keep coming back.
For the purposes of this case study, we’re only talking about Lost Customer Recovery.
The 3-5X Tipping Point
For all dispensaries, there is a tipping point for the number of visits required by a customer to become loyal to your store.
That is a very important number.
Depending on your market, that number is between 3 and 5 visits.
Our client had excellent budtenders, so their magic number was 3.
So, that is one more reason to get your Lost Customers back to your store.
The Results
As you saw, we did this with a relatively small group of targetable Lost Customers (17,308) that resulted in an additional $359,760 over a six-month period.
If you’re looking at this from an enterprise value increase, it looks like this:
Multiply $359,760 by 2 to stretch out the campaign to 12 months – $719,520
At just a 2X multiplier, the enterprise value increased to $1.4M and some change.
- And we did it without spending any $$$ on ads.
- Or posting on social media.
- Or putting up billboards.
- Or doing SEO.
- Or brand partnerships.
- Or blog posts.
The best part of this whole strategy?
We did it all by bringing back existing customers who hadn’t shopped in 60+ days – 99% of whom were never coming back.
It’s very much like finding free money.
DISCLAIMER: Results like this are not typical. We’ve been doing this online marketing stuff for 15+ years. We’ve tested a lot of email and text messages, so we know what works. When they do it on their own, most dispensaries are able to recover about 25% of the revenue we’re able to generate.
What You Should Do Now…
Now, if this looks overwhelming to you, or you don’t have the time to implement the strategy, then we may be able to do it for you.
Our agency only specializes in three things, and recovering lost revenue is one of them.
Here’s how it works:
- Give us temporary access to look under the hood (usually AlpineIQ, SpringBig, Dutchie) and we’ll do our in-depth audit.
- Based on our audit, we’ll give you a dollar amount of revenue we’ll be able to recover in the next six months.
- Give us the “GO” and we’re usually launched in 2-3 days.
We even have a performance guarantee that if we don’t hit our quoted revenue amount by six months, we’ll work for free until we do.
We have yet to work for free.
If you’re ready to get started or have any questions, please shoot me an email: ryan@zohrstohr.com
RYAN MCMULLEN
Founder & Owner of Zohr+Stohr Digital
ryan@zohrstohr.com
Contact: ryan@zohrstohr.com
Copyright © 2025 • McMullen Online Enterprises • All Rights Reserved