The Essential Dispensary Marketing Tech Stack

Despite starting out as a taboo business idea surrounded by regulatory uncertainty, the cannabis industry has graduated to a mainstream market that’s ripe with opportunity.

Unfortunately, cannabis is still not federally legal in the United States, so you have to jump through some additional hoops to operate and advertise a dispensary compliantly. Plus, the  high demand and continued growth offered by the cannabis industry means more competition that you need to stand out against. That’s where your dispensary’s marketing tech stack comes in.

In the highly competitive and heavily regulated cannabis industry, building and maintaining a successful dispensary requires more than just quality products and great customer service. You need to create targeted, engaging, and effective marketing campaigns that attract new customers and incentivize existing customers to keep coming back–all while staying compliant with CASL, TCPA, and other regulations impacting cannabis marketing.

Fortunately, AIQ makes it easy to supercharge your marketing compliantly—and in this post, we’ll explain why AIQ is the ultimate tech stack for dispensaries.

As the cannabis industry continues to grow, so does the demand for high-performing, cannabis-focused software that ensures compliance without sacrificing effectiveness. But many of these specialized tools focus on a specific purpose, like loyalty programs or ecommerce platforms, while only offering surface-level functionality to other core elements like marketing and analytics. So, if you want a complete solution, you usually have to create a tech stack that integrates multiple tools.

But not AIQ.

AIQ brings cutting-edge dispensary management tools, revenue-boosting messaging and loyalty features, and smart analytics together to create the ultimate marketing tech stack. With it, you’ll have all the tools, data, and insights you need to find and retain customers, optimize your marketing ROI, and make smarter business decisions from marketing to fulfillment.

Here are all the core features your marketing tech stack needs, and how AIQ delivers them all in one platform.

Data is critical to the success of every dispensary–especially when it comes to building winning marketing campaigns. The more customer and sales data you have access to, the better you can:

• Keep in-demand products in stock
• Segment your customers for better targeting
• Tailor your messaging to them to boost engagement
• Personalize your product recommendations and promotions
• Identify customers to re-engage with win-back campaigns
• Optimize your marketing strategy based on campaign performance.

But AIQ does more than collect raw information; it turns that information into actionable insights that help you identify trends, measure campaign performance, and find ways to better meet your customers’ wants and needs.

Our robust analytics and reporting tools give you the power to leverage all of your customer and sales data to make smarter, data-backed decisions like rebalancing your inventory based on demand or spending more on top-performing marketing channels.

Here’s what makes AIQ perfect for dispensary analytics:

Unified Data Sources: Integrate AIQ with 40+ POS systems to centralize your sales, marketing, and ecommerce data for dispensary-wide insights.

Personalized Customer Insights: With full data visibility, you can track things like a customer’s purchase history or engagement data to forecast future purchases and send intelligently-timed special offers or trigger a win-back campaign at the right time.

Clean Data: Built-in data hygiene tools ensure the accuracy of your data, removing incomplete and duplicate records so you can trust the insights provided.

Granular Report Customization: Segment data by any metric, customize conversion criteria and attribution windows, and uncover insightful trends with customizable reports. They’ll tell you which marketing channels, campaign types, or product promotions are working best to help you optimize your campaigns.

Building great customer relationships is important for all businesses, but it’s especially true for dispensaries. For many, the cannabis industry is built on experiences. Whether that’s a seamless ordering process that makes it easy to get what they want or tailored recommendations from a budtender based on what they like, finding ways to build trust and personalize customers’ experiences can be the difference between less profitable one-time customers and loyal customers who drive repeat business (and tell their friends).

AIQ’s loyalty system makes it simple to build stronger connections with your customers while keeping things fun and rewarding. It lets you build a marketing-friendly loyalty program that personalizes offers, is easy to use online and in-store, and actually gives valuable rewards to keep customers coming back with features like:

Integrated Rewards Wallet: Customers can earn and redeem points online or in-store from any device.
Gamification: Use lotteries, contests, and other activities to engage customers, then reward them with points, rewards multipliers, exclusive badges, or perks sent directly to their wallet.

Automated Personalized Marketing: Automatically send customers birthday messages and rewards on their special day or an intelligently-timed, personalized product recommendation based on their past buying behavior to encourage another purchase.

Easy Enrollment: Online, in-person, and auto-enrollment upon purchase makes it easy to grow your rewards program

Effective communication is fundamental to your overall marketing strategy and success. You need to find a way to both convince potential customers to give you a try and remind previous customers that you exist–all while remaining compliant with marketing regulations like TCPA and CASL.

Email and SMS are cornerstones of most dispensary marketing strategies, but for different reasons. Email has fewer regulatory restrictions, allowing you to build informative and engaging promotions. Meanwhile, SMS has heavy regulations, but with a 98% open rate, there’s no better way to directly connect with your customers–you just have to get creative and use compliance-focused SMS tools.

AlQ’s email and SMS marketing tools make it easy for your dispensary to connect with customers through personalized, timely, and impactful messaging. We help you build, evaluate, and optimize your campaigns, target the right customers, streamline repetitive tasks, manage your lists compliantly, and more.

Here’s how AIQ makes the most of your marketing:

Complementary Marketing Across 6 Channels: Create consistent messaging across SMS, email, push notifications, voice drop, and direct mail with waterfall campaigns that reach customers via their preferred channels.

Smart Segmentation: Leverage your sales and customer data—such as purchase history, loyalty status, and spending habits—so you can segment your lists and create targeted campaigns that resonate with your audience.

Dynamic Personalization: Personalize product recommendations to each recipient using their purchase history and other sales data to increase conversions.

Automated Campaigns: Schedule or trigger automated campaigns based on timing or with key events like abandoned carts, successful purchases, or customer lifecycle changes tied to their specific behavior for effective win-back campaigns.

Built-In Compliance: We offer TCPA-compliant opt-in management tools, don’t charge additional fees for text landing pages that help bypass filtering, and continuously release updates as regulations change to ensure ongoing compliance.

An ecommerce solution is a no-brainer for dispensaries. Customers want a fast, easy, and convenient buying experience that they can control, including researching products, checking prices, and even placing orders from their PC or phones. If you make it hard for them to find you or your products and place an order, they’ll simply go to your competition instead.

AIQ Ecommerce helps you establish a web presence and streamline the online buying process so it’s easier to meet your customers’ needs. Our ecommerce platform is easy for both search engines and customers to navigate and highly customizable, enhancing search engine visibility and building a better branded customer experience that helps your business grow.

AIQ Ecommerce offers:
Customizable Menus Built for SEO: Make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for with visual and high-visibility SEO menus you can customize to fit your brand.

Pre-Built SEO-Friendly Product Templates: Quickly start offering online ordering with highly visible and high-ranking templates—just add your products.

Versatile Order Types: Support orders via kiosks or marketplaces for delivery or pickup in one place.

Order Management and Fulfillment: Prioritize orders, send orders to specific registers, enable check-ins, and send order updates to streamline pickups and deliveries, boosting customer satisfaction.

Seamless Integration with POS, Marketing, and Loyalty: Connect AIQ Ecommerce to other AIQ tools and your favorite POS systems to centralize all your data for personalized campaigns, dynamic discounts, cart abandonment recovery, and more.

Every dispensary needs a cannabis-focused POS system to manage inventory, process transactions, and help with compliance tasks seed-to-sale tracking. But, it also needs to integrate with the rest of your tech stack so you can use your customer and sales data to inform your marketing campaigns and loyalty program.

While AIQ doesn’t have its own point-of-sale system, it seamlessly integrates with over 40 of the most popular POS providers. That way, you can use customer and sales data plus AIQ’s analytics tools to empower your marketing, loyalty, and other customer engagement strategies with personalized recommendations, smart message timing, product-level attribution, and more.

Here are a few integrations AIQ works well with.

Dutchie
Dutchie’s POS system is designed to help streamline your front-of-store and backend operations, including helping you manage inventory, complete sales, generate receipts, and apply rewards points. It offers real-time stock management to avoid letting customers down and a personalizable discount system that helps you reward loyal customers to keep them coming back. It also has compliance tools like age verification and limitations on purchases, so you don’t have to worry about complying with regulations around cannabis.

Dutchie’s POS system integrates with its own suite of tools as well as many others, allowing you to customize your tech stack with your preferred tools. It’ll also unify your data across systems so your analytics tools can generate valuable insights with sales, customer, and marketing data.

Cova POS
Cova’s dispensary POS systems help you quickly and efficiently manage your inventory, sales, customers, loyalty sign-ups, and more. It also provides compliance features like automated traceability reporting and ID verification and continuously stays up to date with changing regulations to help streamline your legal obligations so you can focus on the rest of your business.

Cova offers analytics tools to help track sales trends and monitor product performance, but it’s best used with a complete cannabis dispensary solution like AIQ that lets you leverage its POS data in the rest of your operations.

Flowhub
Flowhub’s Maui is a cloud-based POS system designed to streamline dispensary operations with an emphasis on speed, compliance, and flexibility. It’s built for both single-location and multi-store dispensaries, offering fast transaction processing, real-time inventory management, and automated compliance reporting with integrations for state traceability systems.

Flowhub also lets you manage your loyalty program, create custom discounts, manage and fulfill orders, and integrate with over 50 other apps, like AIQ, to expand its capabilities. For example, Flowhub’s AIQ integration provides our app with all your POS data so you can run data-backed campaigns powered by our audience building tools to boost engagement and conversions.

Treez
Treez offers a multi-store-capable POS system that includes inventory tracking, product management and omnichannel sales tools to help you keep track of your operations. Its real-time inventory management tells you when products are running out or expiring and streamlines reordering while product management helps you build accurate product details that give customers confidence.

Treez helps you deliver a compliant shopping experience with built-in Metrc tracking, age verification, and limit tracking on a per-customer basis. It’s also easy to personalize experiences with customer management tools that tell you how to best serve each customer, shorten security processes, and lower wait times with saved user data. With this data, you can integrate Treez with AIQ to fuel your marketing campaigns, expand Treez’s loyalty program, and generate robust reports with advanced AIQ analytics.

Other POS systems we integrate with

Our support doesn’t stop at the most popular POS systems—we also support:

Flourish
Tymber
POSaBIT
Alleaves
Jane POS
Greenline
And over 30 more.

Don’t see yours? Check out our full list of POS integrations.

Successful marketing comes down to how well you can engage and meet the needs of your customers–and your marketing tech stack plays a critical role in how you do it. The wrong tools will make it harder to find, engage, and retain customers, so you need to pick a solution that puts customers at the center of everything. Enter AIQ.

AIQ is an Inc 5000 Award-winning platform that helps you grow your dispensary through robust marketing, loyalty, ecommerce, and data management solutions. It integrates with your POS and other systems to centralize customer and sales data, providing actionable insights that help you deliver personalized, compliant, and data-driven experiences to your customers through messaging, your online store, and your loyalty program.

Find out how AIQ can help you shrink your tech stack while adding more features that help you grow your business. Book a demo today.