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There's a version of cannabis retail marketing that looks fine on the surface. Campaigns are going out, and engagement is holding steady. The loyalty program is live. Members are joining and redeeming points. But underneath, customers are quietly slipping through the cracks, and by the time the data shows it, winning them back costs far more than keeping them would have.
Sandra Bergman, founder of ESBE Marketing, has spent her career on both sides of that problem. Before launching ESBE, she managed loyalty and communications at LivWell Enlightened Health, one of Colorado's largest cannabis retailers, before becoming retail marketing director at Schwazze (a regional MSO), where she helped grow from 19 to 35 stores across Colorado and New Mexico. She's seen what works, what doesn't, and more importantly, why most lifecycle marketing quietly underperforms even when it looks like it's running fine.
In the three years since launching ESBE, she’s worked with more than 100 dispensaries across 18 states — making her one of the most experienced cannabis retention specialists in the country.
"The number of potential customers who will come into a dispensary is finite due to federal illegality and stigma," Sandra says. "So retaining existing customers is critical, especially as a market matures. From a marketing strategy perspective, retention is the lowest hanging fruit and the most cost effective."
When Sandra starts working with a new retail client, she almost always finds the same thing: the basics aren't in place. No welcome series. No reward or milestone notifications. Win-back windows set to platform defaults that have nothing to do with how that specific customer actually shops. Promotional campaigns and lifecycle communications running in the same lane with no separation between them.
"The vast majority of dispensaries don't have even the most basic lifecycle campaigns — a welcome series, win-backs, reward notifications," she says. "Just getting those in place will help drive more visits. And since they send automatically in the background, it's not a big lift for staff once they're set up."
Timing, she's found, is where the biggest gaps live. Generic win-back windows — 30, 45, 60, 90 days — feel logical but miss the point entirely. A customer's win-back threshold should be calculated from their order value, shopping frequency, and purchase history. Get it wrong and you're either spending money too early or reaching out after they've already moved on.
ESBE's approach starts before any campaign gets touched. Every client goes through a monthly audit and quarterly reporting cycle, a process Sandra has refined over years of operator-side experience.
Monthly, she's reviewing campaign metrics against minimum benchmarks and client-specific targets: open rate, click-through rate, conversion, and redemption rate. That last one, she notes, is often a more honest signal than revenue attribution alone.
"Due to the attribution model that attributes revenue on the last campaign interacted with, redemption rate can be an even better indicator of campaign performance," she explains. "A win-back campaign might have brought a customer into the shop but if the last campaign they opened was a weekly promo, that purchase gets attributed to the promo, not the win-back."
Quarterly reports go deeper: member vs. non-member revenue, year-over-year changes in visit frequency, repurchase rate trends, redemption rates by lifecycle series, and more. The first-to-second visit drop-off gets particular attention — it's consistently the steepest part of the retention curve, and closing that gap is often where the biggest early wins come from.
The results of getting this right are significant. With targeted segmentation, Sandra has seen client open rates climb from 20% to 40%. In one case, a welcome email was generating a 12% unsubscribe rate, meaning one in eight first-time customers was immediately opting out of future communication. After a redesign, that number dropped to under 1%.
ESBE has been building automated lifecycle touchpoints for three years. What's changed is the infrastructure available to execute them.
AIQ Marketing Campaigns serve as the foundation — the always-on backbone of lifecycle communication. AIQ Flows are the layer Sandra adds on top to handle what campaigns alone can't: built-in delays, conditional logic, behavioral triggers, and multi-step sequences that used to require building and managing multiple individual campaigns.
"What used to take multiple individual campaigns and audiences can now be combined into one flow"
The campaign type she points to as most consistently impactful is the visit series, triggered by visit count, sent a few days after a customer's last visit, with a new offer calibrated to bring them back for the next one.
"With successive visit offers we are cementing the shopping habit so we become their go-to dispensary," Sandra explains. "We capture them at welcome and continue through around visit six with various offers."
The philosophy behind the offer structure matters too. Lighter, earlier nudges consistently outperform large discounts deployed late. A smaller incentive sent before a customer hits the 60-day churn window almost always outperforms a bigger offer sent after.
ESBE has applied this audit-to-execution model across multi-location retailers in multiple markets, helping clients redesign loyalty programs, rebuild lifecycle communications from scratch, refine promotional segmentation, and layer in Flows to add the precision that campaigns alone couldn't deliver.
The through line in every engagement is the same: strategy before optimization, lifecycle separate from promotions, and measurement that actually reflects what's driving behavior.
And her numbers back it up. ESBE’s lifecycle campaigns have delivered significant results for their clients, such as a +14% lift in retention year-over-year, a 36% increase in customers shopping twice or more in 30 days, and generating $371K in the first two months of launching lifecycle marketing.
"I remain committed to lifecycle marketing because it works. It’s all about sending the right message, at the right time, to the right people."
"There's a reason mainstream retail giants have been doing it for decades. Coming from the operator side, I'm passionate about cannabis retailers succeeding and I believe sustained growth comes from a strong lifecycle strategy," Sandra says.
Whether you're a cannabis operator looking to build a lifecycle strategy that actually moves retention numbers, or an agency or consultant ready to execute that strategy on a platform built for it, the tools are there.
