The Best Referral & Affiliate Marketing Platform for Cannabis

How to Properly Incentivize

Our small customer base of 50~ quickly expanded into over 300 within a month of us launching our referral system and affiliate marketing program.

The referral system was the bread and butter, dead simple to use, all the customer had to do was select a contact on their phone or type in a phone number or email of a friend to send them an invitation.

We would give the referer $20 and the person they referred $20 in-store credit when they placed their first order. Just like Airbnb, the kings in our humble opinion of the referral game.

To make a referral program actually work for you requires a bit of effort.
You have to provide an incentive for the customer to take the effort to promote your service. There is a couple tips and tricks we have for making this easier but at the end of the day, a juicy discount, deal or money works the best.

Our referral system will automatically send the person being referred an SMS text message.

"Your friend Scott has just invited you to join Nuggets Delivery. We are the #1 cannabis same-day delivery service for the Durham Region and we have a free $20 welcoming gift for you at https://nuggetsdelivery.com/#/ref/laughing-zebra-23"

Using key words like 'invitation' and 'welcoming gift' will help boost referral conversation rates.

We also keep track if the referee has opened their link or placed an order to make the entire process seemless for us. We provide an option for our referer to resend invitations to his friends if they have yet to read it.

The Airbnb team spent 3 months with 5 engineers writing over 80,000 lines of code creating their first version of their referral system, it was one of the biggest factors pertaining to their rapid growth.

It's important to stress, it has to be easy. Make sure you have the message pre-typed for them. Have an API integration to pull up their contacts if they want. Give them easy ways to one-tap share their referral link to their friends.

Affiliate Marketing

We initially only had the Refer-a-Friend program running, it was doing wonders for us so why change anything?

Well, we noticed that a small subset of our customers that would refer us to their friends were doing a lot of referrals. I mean a lot. Turned out one of these customers had close to 25,000 followers on Instagram and was occasionally throwing out a small low quality post with his referral link. We quickly got in touch and set up a more enticing deal that would allow both of us to benefit.

This is when we started doing affiliate marketing with a primary focus on micro-influencers in our local region.

We would ask our customers with a large social media following to promote our service with tailored content and promotional media in exchance for an affiliate marketing link. This link would allow them to accrue customers on our behalf and earn a small percentage whenever they would place orders.

Affiliate marketing was vital in our scaling process to 1,000 customers. The growth we received would easily pay for the small payouts to the micro-influencers who barely had to put in any work either, they would simply post the image and collect rewards.

If you don't have any engaging content to post, I highly recommend checking out the website Canva. It easily allows you to create perfectly sized, engaging social media posts which you can quickly brand and send to local micro-influencers in your region.

A Professional Website

The most important aspect of growth hacking and online marketing is creativity and technology. You are going to use both in tandem in order to carefully monitor what works and what doesn't for your business.

We can help you out with both of these, don't worry. If you have a website, fantastic. You're ahead of the game. If you don't, well, you will 100% need one for growth hacking to work for you.

A website is critical for numerous reasons. You want to track nearly everything that happens on your website including customer events such as when they view a product. You want a place you own and control where you can guide customers to in order to build awareness for your delivery service, dispensary or business.

This data will become your bible for moving forward in the right direction with predictable, repeatable success. Otherwise, you're just shooting in the dark. One day you might have great results and the next, nothing. With analytics and a website, you'll have a greater understanding of when your customers place orders and what your customers are interested in.

A great example is promoting a deal on Weedmaps and your social media profiles. (if you aren't on every social media platform available already, get on it)

What product should you promote? What price point? What's the length of the offer? How are you going to create urgency for this deal?

Analytics will answer all of these questions and so many more you didn't even think would be relevant.

Imagine if you knew the largest cluster of your customer demographic, exactly where the best place is to have a driver on standby with your products at the ready. What could you do with that information? Tons.

For example, a flash sale. "For the next 2 hours we are offering buy one get THREE free edibles to everyone on John St"

And of course, with analytics you can send a email or SMS message to your clustered customer base only. Talk about targeted advertising.